Month: October 2009

New Macs imminent

It seems that Daring Fireball and Fake Steve Jobs are expecting new product announcements in the next 3 hours, probably a new Macbook, Mac Minis with Snow Leopard Server, iMacs, and probably not a tablet. Reports from Apple’s financial update indicate the channel is being filled with some product, but they won’t say what. Macjournals opines that any updates would need to be announced within the next 21 days to be sufficiently available before the festive season.

Things Snow Leopard doesn’t tell you

When you plug in an external hard drive that hasn’t been unmounted properly, Snow Leopard actually starts running fsck on it:

/System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/Contents/Resources/../../../../../../sbin/fsck_hfs -y /dev/disk1s2

Of course, nowhere does it actually inform you it’s doing this, unless you hunt down the fsck process.

So what probably happens is you decide it’s not going to mount and yank the cable a couple of times to see if it’s something wrong, of course this just disconnects the drive in the process of the fsck, which is something I’d rather not do.

NSW Computer Crime Unit expert recommends not using Windows for internet banking

Computer expert Detective Inspector Bruce vad der Graaf from the Computer Crime Investigation Unit told NSW MPs to boot Linux off CD or use an iPhone for internet banking rather than using Windows. Interestingly he quotes the iPhone’s single-application-at-a-time as a plus, on the grounds it can’t be running any other dodgy applications at the same time as you’re banking (although I’m sure someone smart enough could probably get around those restrictions using some unofficial APIs…, given that the phone still runs Apple’s tasks at the same time as 3rd party apps).