Apple US’s corporate gifting and rewards program lets you get 50 or more iPods engraved with your corporate logo or message. You can also buy 50 packs of iTunes store gift cards in US$10,US$15,US$25 or US$50 each. It also mentions MacBooks, MacBook Pros and iMacs. I wonder if they’re available in 50 packs too?
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 
The iMac line has been speed bumped with
Some great folklore about Steve Jobs (and people telling him Apple’s doomed) and Adam Osborne over at folklore.org.
In addition to the instructions on how to clean a MacBook’s MagSafe Connector, there’s also a KnowledgeBase article on how to unstick pins in a MagSafe Connector.
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.
Picked up a 500Gb Time Capsule. Got home and was somewhat in a hurry. Power cable was a bit hard to get pushed in properly, although there was no visible evidence of why this would have been the case in either the plug or the socket.
Ignored the “Install this first” CDs, as usual, and fired up Airport Admin utility under Leopard on the wired LAN and it found the existing Airport Express. Did a “Save As…” to save the config of the existing Airport Express (including passwords). Then unplugged the Airport Express and plugged in the Time Capsule, attached to the network cable that used to be plugged into the airport express. Interestingly the assistant offered me the chance to use the Time Capsule to replace an existing wireless access point, but it wanted me to find it (and I’d just unplugged it :). So I plugged it back in to power and the LAN, but the Assistant couldn’t seem to find it. I gave up at this point, hit the Manual button and just imported the settings from the Airport Express (seemed like a safe bet) into the Time Capsule’s settings. This seemed to work. Changed security to WPA Personal and restarted the Time Capsule.
So, now turn on Time Machine on the Leopard box and get it started. That was at 18:30, and it’s now done 47.3 of 69.44Gb (1,396,130 items from my 80Gb drive) after some 5.75hrs (over Gigabit).
Meanwhile, every other machine had to have its Airport connection changed to WPA Personal, and even though I’m pretty sure I typed the password in several times, it took a while to register and stick (at least I hope it’s stuck now!).
Are network speeds faster? Hard to tell. I haven’t maxed out the speed as currently we need backward compatibility with 802.11g until the next round of upgrades. It offers 802.11n on 2.4 or 5GHz, and 802.11a compatibility as well as 802.11n/b/g.
Other noteworthy things are that the Airport Admin utility displays a set of warnings about the current Time Capsule configuration (ie no DNS, multiple DHCP, etc.).
The Time Capsule also offers to sync with a timeserver, and also flash its light if there’s a software update available. This is much less useful as it’s going to be stuck in a separate room where I’m unlikely to see its flashing light.
There’s also support to “Advertise configuration globally” via Bonjour, or so it seems to make it available globally over the internet. I don’t enable this.
I’d heard rumours of it running hot. Sure, it’s warm, but not really any warmer than my ADSL router, and it’s been doing a lot more work for the past 5 hours. Plus it’s got an internal power supply, so it’ll be warmer from that alone.
The other thing is now there’s an extra shared volume appearing in the Finder. Logging into it reveals a shared disk onto which I can put stuff. Cool. Checking in the Airport Admin shows it’s a guest read-writable volume, which is probably not good by default. Now locked down
So far, it seems to be behaving pretty much as expected. I could do setup in a hurry without too much pain. It claims to be backing up at a reasonable speed.
Now I just need to test recovery
Apple has released a third iPhone SDK. Probably because the previous one had just expired after only some 11 days.
From Apple’s java mailing list:
We are looking for a talented, passionate and motivated engineer to join the Java team. Java expertise, of course, is important, but C and Objective-C (Cocoa) are also essential since you will be working on the frameworks underneath AWT and Swing. If you or anyone you know is interested, please do apply. This is an opportunity to have a serious impact on the Mac OS X Java implementation, and start a career at Apple.You can find out more by clicking this link, or by searching apple.com/jobs for Requisition ID 3489430.
If you have a MacBook Air you might want to make sure that you don’t accidentally throw it out like Steven Levy did (or at least he thinks his wife did).
