Newton’s Lore

Mikey Sklar lists some software tools available via the fink packaging system for hardware developers using Macs .

If you want to trade in your mobile number (and no doubt some privacy) for a chance to win a 24 carat gold plated iPhone you can do so here.

The LA Times reports that as a result of a class action suit filed in 2006 Apple will pay US$25 to US$79 to customers who bought a power adaptor to replace a faulty one. This affects adaptors for PowerBooks and iBooks. Presumably some variant of the refund will be available in Australia, without having to ship the things to the US by the suitcase-full

If you want to use your Nintendo Wii remote (Wiimote) with your Mac (via Bluetooth) (perhaps because you liked Tony Stark’s movie UI and a Wii is a cheaper way to get accelerometer gear check out

• DarwiinRemote
• The Wiinstrument for use with MIDI and/or Garageband.
• Remote Buddy

For the more programmatically inclined there’s

• WiiremoteJ
• Wiimote Simple (an open source Java library)
• WiiJuce

It seems that it an effort to cash in on Mac fans there’s now a “Macheads” movie. Filming the extreme mac fans so that the Mac fans will comment about how extreme they are, and the non-Mac fans will comment about how all Mac users are obsessed nutters.

If you’ve got the latest Apple Developer tools installed, you’ll notice that attempting to ./configure the clamav-0.93 package doesn’t work because of a gcc compiler bug. The way I found around this is to “fink install gcc43″, then retry the configure command after having set the CC to be /sw/bin/gcc-4 and then you can make and make install as per usual.

 Don’t use periods in your iMovie ‘08 project names otherwise they may not display anything after the period, or may display as a folder. I thought the reason we used Macs was to get away from this sort of thing?

MacDailyNews reports that Apple’s market value is now four times as big as Dell’s. Perhaps it’s time for Michael Dell to sell up and give the money back to the shareholders?

A very cool article over at Macworld shows how to enabled hidden features in Leopard’s built in Screen Sharing to give Apple-Remote-Desktop-like features such as 

• Drop colour resolution to improve performance on low bandwidth connections
• Switch between controlling and observing the remote Mac
• Locking out the remote Mac’s keyboard and mouse, or hiding on-screen activity
• Taking screenshots

Since Apple’s announcement of movies being available on the iTunes Store on the same day as the DVD release, MacRumors reports that the AppleTV can now be used to download music directly, without requiring a computer to purchase and upload the movie.