theducks spotted that someone is manufacturing clones of Apple’s power supplies and some have made their way onto eBay. They’ve got spelling errors and lower quality mouldings.
Archive for January, 2007
Fake Apple iBook power supplies on eBay
Wednesday, January 17th, 2007Sleep your Mac
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007I was reading a random post form someone on Macintouch and discovered that you can sleep your Mac by typing command-option-eject (Eject is the button on the top right of most Mac keyboards these days that ejects the CD).
International mail forwarders
Monday, January 15th, 2007So you want to buy that cool piece of Mac hardware like a Blu-Ray DVD burner or something and all the stores you’re dealing with are stupid and won’t ship to international addresses (or some of them won’t accept international credit cards?)
Some mail forwarding options are
- Access USA (also has a personal shopper service for sites that don’t accept non-US credit cards). Use code SO-STS to get a sign-up discount
- MailForwarding.biz Use code “Shop the States” to get a sign-up discount.
- USAbox.com Also has a personal shopper service for sites that don’t accept non-US cards.
Shop the States is apparently no longer in business.
Note that I haven’t actually used any of these people (yet), so I have no idea how good they are.
Mac OS X File system goodness
Sunday, January 14th, 2007Uber Mac OS X explorer Amit Singh (author of “Mac OS X Internals”) is employed by Google as their Mac Engineering Manager. As part of his 20% spare time (yay Google!), he’s ported the Filesystem in User Space (FUSE) code to the Mac, allowing developers to write filesystems support without having to mess around writing your own kernel extensions.
Also, (obviously), there’s a blog by the Google Mac developers.
Capture iSight image from the commandline
Saturday, January 13th, 2007If you’d like to capture an image from an iSight to the commandline (document your working day? Discover who’s stolen your laptop?), there’s a program called isightcapture available here.
notMac project
Friday, January 12th, 2007Want a free replacement for Apple’s .Mac service? The notMac project is (currently) offering US$5816 (x2?) for someone to develop one.
iChat .Mac certificate update
Thursday, January 11th, 2007According to Apple’s Software Update it looks like there’s an iChat update out which updates the .Mac certificate iChat uses to encrypt text, audio and video. The release notes don’t say much more than that.
Bug 8 in the Month of Apple Bugs
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007Amusingly today’s bug in the Month of Apple Bugs is a local privilege escalation in the Unsanity Application Enhancer (APE), that was used to provide fixes for some of the previous bugs this month.
Apple releases new Airport Extreme
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007Apple quietly released a new Airport Extreme Base Station which supports the 802.11n draft standard, dual band 2.4 or 5GHz, 50 users (Apple claims it is 5x faster), and allows for sharing a USB hard drive (Airport Disk) plugged into the base station, as well as printers.
Cost is US$179 (AU$259) with estimated shipping in February.
MacWorld SF 2007 Keynote - Widescreen multitouch iPhone, Apple changes its name
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007- Over 2 billion iTunes sold, 5 million songs/day, 58 songs/s
- iTunes is now the 5th largest music reseller (after Walmart, Best Buy, Target and ???)
- Paramount is now a partner, over 250 movies now on offer (to US users at least
- Zune has 2% marketshare v iPod’s 62% in November
- New iPod ads
- AppleTV, buy content on iTunes and send it to your TV. 40Gb HD, 802.11b,g,n, Intel processor, 720p HD video, component RCA usb2, ethernet, HDMI. Auto sync content from 1 PC and stream from up to 5.
- displays TV episode summary plus episode navigation
- Move or stream photos to AppleTV
- AppleTV US$299 (AU$449) shipping in February, order now
- Widescreen iPod!
- Mobile phone!
- Internet Communicator!
- Crowd goes wild
- All in one device, the iPhone
- Has a (patented) multitouch interface to allow multifinger gestures on the touch screen
- Runs Mac OS X! and syncs media (music, movies, podcasts, tv, photos, contacts, e-mail, notes, calendars) with iTunes
- 3.5 inch screen at 160 pixels per inch! (highest res screen ever shipped)
- 11.6mm thin, has an iPod connector
- 2 megapixel camera
- Speaker, mic, proximity sensor (turns off display and music when brought to your ear)
- Ambient light sensor
- accelerometer to detect portrait v landscape orientation
- Cover flow, find your music faster
- Displays clock and battery levels plus signal strength (and Cingular logo), translucently over the background picture
- GSM+EDGE phone, quad band, wifi, bluetooth
- Big red/green onscreen buttons to hangup/make a call (still using red/green. Sigh)
- Touch multiple contacts to add them to a conference call
- Visual voicemail, displays all voicemailers and you can click to listen in any order
- Multisession SMS messaging with iChat like speech bubbles and sounds
- Photo viewing can switch based on orientation of device (landscape or portrait)
- “Pinch” to zoom in
- Supports rich html email (as sent by Jaguar’s Mail.app, no doubt
- imap or POP, Safari as the phone’s web browser, Google Maps, Widgets, EDGE and wifi connection (automatically switches!)
- Free Yahoo! imap e-mail to all iPhone customers
- Push imap, ala the Blackberry
- Pinch zooming supported on Google Maps satellite photos
- Google are very happy
- Playing music is muted, caller is added to address book. Add a photo from existing Photos. E-mail photo whilst still on the phone to recipient.
- Use on speakerphone whilst web browsing, music fades back in when call finished.
- 5 hours of battery life, 16 for just audio
- Slimline mic on iPod headset, or Bluetooth headset like iPod earphone on a stick
- Over 200 patents in the one device, it advances the state of the art
- 4Gb model is US$499
- 8Gb model is US$599
- Price includes 2 year Cingular contract
- Not shipping until June (FCC approval takes 2 months)
- Europe by 4th Quarter this year, Asia by 2008. Cingular is the exclusive US partner
- “Innovation on the phone and the network” indicates that some network support is necessary for some of the features (ie visual voicemail).
- Too many features mean Steve’s clicker is broken
- In 2006, 26 million game consoles, 94m cameras, 135m mp3 players, 209m PC’s, 957m mobile phones sold worldwide. 1% of that market is 10 million phones, which is what Apple is going for.
- Apple Computer, Inc. is now officially Apple, Inc.!
- “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been” - Wayne Gretzky
- Standing ovation
- Steve thanks Apple developers and their families
- John Mayer (nominated for 5 Grammys) rounds out the keynote set
