Newton’s Lore

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?

The Apple University Consortium has announced innovation Seeding Grants, primarily aimed at students. Participants are provided with a mentor, equipment and resources to complete the project and must share progress via a blog with the ultimate outcome being licensed via open source, creative commons or similar licensing.

Worried about the little green light on your MacBook, MacBook Pro or iMac turning on (Or rather, not turning on at an inopportune moment? Maybe you need an iPatch.

Apple have posted a Leopard Guided Tour Video available in iPod and full resolution formats.

I was looking for the little green light that tells you you’re “on air” on the new MacBook Pro’s inbuilt iSight camera. Whilst the MacBooks and iMacs have a little black spot for the LED there’s no such LED obvious on the MacBook Pros. So I fire up iChat and sure enough, a green spot appears, apparently through the aluminium.. Sure enough, turn off the camera and there’s no sign of the LED at all, just brushed aluminium. There are photos on Nobilog. Insanely great engineering.

It started with this script to use the Mac’s inbuilt camera to grab an image when an incorrect password was used during login (presumably because someone’s stolen your Mac). But that was a bit hard for most people to install, so now there’s MacLoJack which does that, and more. Includes code for the server so you can run your own for your Mac to dial home to.

Today I stumbled across Apple’s iSight Programming guide, which has some interesting tidbits about the standalone external iSight camera (such as, it has a microphone at front and back whose signals are combined inside the Mac using “beam forming” to produce a single audio signal, and sends either audio or video packets (or neither, but not both) during each 1/8000s Firewire cycle).

If 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.

If you’ve got a few moments and an Intel Mac with a built-in camera, you could try downloading Apple’s HackTV (some demo code for video grabbing). Then run it, Monitor menu, Video Settings… then click the Video Source tab and see if HackTV falls over, like it did for me.

The Australian Apple Store is currently listing iSight availability as 1-2 months. So either there’s a big run on iSights from people with built in cameras who want to be able to take photos without waving their laptops around, or there’s a new release in the pipeline.