Newton’s Lore

Apple’s iPod shuffle is now available in orange, green, pink, blue as well as the original silver.

I was randomly searching for some software when I came across this page of Mac game demos. Games are divided into Action, Adventure, Cards, Kids, Puzzle, RPG, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, and Tools (amongst other things, SDK’s for writing your own games).

If you’re looking for some free Mac astronomy software, download and try out Stellarium. As well as being able to overlay the constellation line diagrams, it can also overlay constellation artwork, switch to a red mode to help preserve your night vision, add or remove the ground, display nebulae, and more. Your Windows and Linux using friends (you do have some, right?) can use it too.

The /etc/authorization file allows you to grant rights to some users to do more than they’d otherwise be allowed. For example, here’s Apple’s article about how to allow non-admin users to change the timezone (If for example you have a mobile workforce who need to change time zones but you don’t want them to mess with anything else on their laptops).

Video of one woman’s creepily touching love song about Macs. She seems to be pining for more than her 12″ PowerBook can give her.

Thanks to Andrew for the link.

If you’re developing software that might get run on an Intel Xserve with Dual Xeons it might be useful to get one to test with. This Apple page about Intel build numbers show’s it’s using build 8N1215 of Mac OS X, which is (unsurprisingly) newer than all other builds.

Just to make things easier for those using Java, it uses build 1.5.0_06-113 and JVM build 1.5.0_06-68 (which is a JVM I don’t think ships on any other MacIntel boxes, and I’ve managed to crash :).

According to this Apple technote you need to specify /usr/sbin/systemsetup specifically if you are running systemsetup via Apple Remote Desktop 2.x, otherwise ARD winds up using its own version which doesn’t work for the -setwaitforstartupafterpowerfailure argument.

According to The Register, EMC are not going to complete the much awaited Retrospect 8.0 backup software. Many people have pointed out that The Register is a highly reliable source of information, of course

Sadly whilst there are a few alternatives such as BRU, they don’t seem to be as easy to use as Retrospect, despite the many annoyances of Retro 7 (my copy always seems to backup up files I’ve told it to exclude).

[Edit - Finally got around to linking to this official statement about Retrospect from EMC via bynkii.com]

The Madison IceCube Neutrino Observatory has installed a couple of Xserve RAIDs at the South Pole (via an LC-130 Hercules aircraft).

• Penny Arcade had an amusing cartoon about the iPhone (note the title
• Steve Jobs appears on Saturday Night Live to reveal more about the iPhone (video now pulled by GooTube)
• PvP welcomes the Jesus Phone
• Daring Fireball points out that the iPhone runs OS X (not Mac OS X), and it will probably use an ARM processor, as seen in Apple’s Newton. Perhaps someone could port NewtOS to the iPhone and mod it for the colour multitouch display, phone and wireless. Still not sure if anything will be able to get at the GPS info the phone is meant to contain to support e911

Personally I think it’s interesting that Apple Developer Connection is plugging its Dashcode beta now. Perhaps Dashcode widgets will run on the iPhone?