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Win a copy of Things for Mac
Filed under: Software, Productivity
The productivity wars are heating up on the Mac, aren't they? iGTD is no more, but Cultured Code acquired some brains from that operation and now there's a shiny new version of Things (and another update today). If you've never tried Things, there's never been a better time. Plus, we're giving away two copies of the Mac desktop version to two lucky winners! Just leave us a comment about how you currently stay productive (and meet the other criteria, below).
- Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, and residents of Canada (excluding Quebec), who are 18 and older.
- To enter leave a comment telling us how you stay productive on your Mac.
- The comment must be left before Friday, September 4, 2009, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
- You may enter only once.
- Two winners will be selected in a random drawing.
- Prize: One copy of Things for Mac (Value: US$49.95)
- Click Here for complete Official Rules.
TUAW Win a copy of Things for Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: TUAW - Apple - Eastern Time Zone - Canada - Washington D.C.
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Need a few petabytes of Mac storage? Build your own BackBlaze Storage Pod
Filed under: Enterprise, Hardware, Odds and ends, Open Source, Xserve, Rig of the Week, Mac OS X Server
One of the largest personal iTunes libraries I've ever seen belongs to a client of mine. This client, who was a DJ in the 50's and 60's, has a huge collection of vinyl albums and singles that he painstakingly digitized, cleaned up, and catalogued in iTunes. Needless to say, opening iTunes on his Mac Pro is an exercise in patience.

Thinking about his music storage needs, and the huge amount of digital photos and video that my wife are accumulating, got me musing about other ways to do mass storage inexpensively. At this point, I'm probably OK with a DroboPro, but what if I needed petabytes (1 petabyte = 1,024 terabytes = 1,048,576 gigabytes) of storage? Most solutions at this point in time are quite expensive.

As of 6 AM PDT this morning, off-site backup vendor BackBlaze has put their solution to mass storage needs, the BackBlaze Storage Pod, out to the world as an open source project. Their solution is a relatively inexpensive box (US$7,867 for 67 TB of storage) made up of off-the-shelf components that can be reproduced and/or improved upon by others who also need huge amounts of cheap storage. See those red boxes in the picture to the right? Each one of those contains 67 TB of RAID 6 storage in a 4U box. For a petabyte of storage, you're going to need to spend about $117,000 on about fifteen of the boxes.

Continue reading Need a few petabytes of Mac storage? Build your own BackBlaze Storage Pod
TUAW Need a few petabytes of Mac storage? Build your own BackBlaze Storage Pod originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Mac OS X - Apple - Open Source - TUAW - Operating system
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Hands on: Connecting my mini to a TV
Filed under: Multimedia, Wireless, Mac mini, Apple TV, Music

We bought our Olevia 47" on Black Friday, 2007. It wasn't a particularly well rated TV. But it was a Black Friday deal that we could afford and it gave us far more screen space than we'd thought we'd be able to purchase. It has served us well through the years, hosting any number of gadgets with its generous ports. The thing supports HDMI, composite and component, with multiple attachments for each. The back of the TV looks like a sea of cables and connectors.

Its VGA connector has not seen much use over the years and I've been dying to give it a go. A lack of spare computers was our problem. When my Mac mini died this past winter, I replaced it with a fresh new current-generation mini, which we all love. The dead mini languished until I realized that I needed a Snow Leopard machine for testing during the SL beta. I ended up doing some home brew fix-it with an absolutely minimal 80GB disk bought from Newegg and a few tweaks. And for the last few months, Rome (as in the baking apple) has been my primary 10.6 beta desktop system.

That all changed on Friday. Snow Leopard debuted. And I was finally free to re-purpose this system. Read on to see how.
Continue reading Hands on: Connecting my mini to a TV
TUAW Hands on: Connecting my mini to a TV originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Apple - MacMini - Snow Leopard - TUAW - Newegg
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Snow Leopard: Get your Logitech mouse & keyboard working again
Filed under: Accessories, Snow Leopard

Alan over with iPhoneXpert.com sent us in a tip on getting your Logitech mouse to work again after installing Snow Leopard. I didn't get a chance to try this out until my copy of Snow Leopard arrived last night. My keyboard/mouse combo of choice is the Logitech Wave Cordless Desktop (a fantastic combo that is well-suited for Mac users), and the OS upgrade did break the specialized configuration set up for them.

Logitech has not updated its drivers -- usually bundled with its Logitech Control Center application -- for Snow Leopard yet, and an upgrade to the software will take some time, Alan reports. In the meantime, you can work around this issue by doing the following:
1. Re-download Logitech Control Center 3.0 if you do not still have the installation package on your machine.
2. Unzip the download, then right-click on the installer package. Select "Show All Contents."
3. Navigate through the package to the Contents folder, then the Resources folder. There, you'll find the Logitech Control Center.mkpg. Double-click on it and install it.
Once your system has rebooted, you'll find that you regain full access to customizing your Logitech mouse (and it works for keyboards as well.) It even carried over all of my customized keyboard button settings from Leopard, so you shouldn't have to go through much hassle to reconfigure your equipment. The only thing I had to readjust was the scroll speed on my mouse.

If you have Exposé as one of your mouse/keyboard button settings, copy (do not move) the Expose.app file from /Applications/Utilities to the /Applications folder. Then Exposé will work properly again.

Thanks for the tip, Alan!
TUAW Snow Leopard: Get your Logitech mouse & keyboard working again originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Snow Leopard - Operating system - Apple - TUAW - Mac
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Yojimbo 2.0 brings new features, improved syncing, and joy
Filed under: Software, First Look
Yojimbo fans, rejoice! 2.0 is finally here!

Waiting for Yojimbo 2.0 has been a bit like being Linus van Pelt waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive, but today the patient and faithful have been rewarded.

Yojimbo is a "digital junk drawer" to put all kinds of information: pictures, bookmarks, web archives, regular text, or (its crown jewel for me) that seemingly endless pile of registration codes for software. My favorite feature is the Quick Input Panel which lets me quickly and easily throw things into the "junk drawer" which means that I use it almost without thinking about it. See the Yojimbo Tour for an overview or checkout the introductory movie (QuickTime) if you haven't seen Yojimbo in action.

The 2.0 version brings several new features and improvements, most notably a new "Tag Explorer" which lets you drill down into items you have saved with various tags. (Yojimbo users will also be glad to know that tag management has been improved too.) The Quick Input Panel, Save to Yojimbo, and Drop Dock have also been improved. (See What's new in Yojimbo 2.0 for more.)

Yojimbo used to be one of my favorite and most-often used applications; however, trouble with syncing via .Mac (which neither the Bare Bones excellent support folks nor the .Mac support folks could solve) eventually led me to abandon it. So my first step today was looking at the detailed release notes. I had to read all the way to the bottom to see: "Miscellaneous changes to improve reliability of MobileMe syncing." And there was much rejoicing!

Current users (individual, family, or educational) can upgrade for $20. New licenses are available for $29 (educational), $39 (individual), or $69 (family) through the Bare Bones online store.

UPDATE: Yojimbo 1.5.2 was also released today. If you are using a 1.5.x version of Yojimbo, use the "Check For Updates" feature to download the update.
TUAW Yojimbo 2.0 brings new features, improved syncing, and joy originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Apple - MobileMe - Bare Bones - QuickTime - Great Pumpkin
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Potion Factory seeking beta testers for The Hit List iPhone
Filed under: Software, Productivity, iPhone
Andy Kim with Potion Factory contacted us a few minutes ago to reveal that he is seeking testers for the upcoming closed beta of the iPhone version of The Hit List.

Those wanting to be in the program are asked to submit how they best use The Hit List in their daily routine. From those entries, 10 people will be selected for the beta. Full rules are disclosed on Potion Factory's Web site. All entries must be received before September 21.

The iPhone version of The Hit List comes not a moment too soon. As indicated by the software's Google Group, users who adopted the program over the past year were migrating back to other GTD applications, such as Things, due to the lack of an iPhone app. As a fan of The Hit List, I was doing my best to hold out and see if an iPhone app would come along. I'm very happy not to be disappointed.
TUAW Potion Factory seeking beta testers for The Hit List iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: IPhone - Hit List - Apple - TUAW - Smartphone
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World's dumbest crooks: the saga continues
Filed under: Odds and ends, MobileMe
Yesterday we told you about some crooks that broke into a house and made off with a couple of Macs and a PC. We recounted how the victim used his replacement MacBook Pro to screen share with the stolen device, and even watch as someone filled out an online form to find a job, displaying an address, social security number and phone number.

Well, the crooks are still at it, and seemingly oblivious to the consequences. Last night, I heard from 'Jim' the victim, and he said he was connected again to his laptop, but no one appeared to be home. He saw an unfamiliar jpeg image on the desktop, and you guessed it, the alleged perp had proudly taken a picture of himself with the built in iSight camera. 'Jim' grabbed the pic, and has now forwarded it to his local police department.

It's kind of amazing that the crooks would know enough to grab a pic from the camera, but not realize they have left the Mac wide open to the features of Back to My Mac.

Hopefully, the police will get in gear, and rescue the stolen computers, and grab the perps. Meanwhile, 'Jim' is cautiously considering getting back into his Mac and erasing any files with personal info on them. He just doesn't want to get caught and spook the thieves.

We'll keep you posted.
TUAW World's dumbest crooks: the saga continues originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Apple - Back to My Mac - MobileMe - TUAW - Police
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Opera 10 released, for your speedy web browsing pleasure
Filed under: First Look

A funny thing happened on the way to search Twitter this morning: I saw that Opera 10 was a "Trending Topic" and a smile came across my face. While I don't use Opera as my default browser, I always keep it around (in fact I'm working on a report about how to harness Opera's features for tracking live events online).

In the interval between the time that my last OpenStep-capable computer died and the time I bought my first OS X-capable Mac (a period I refer to as "the Dark Ages") I was using that other operating system... which came with Internet Explorer. Like most of you, I found this unacceptable. But what were my options? "Firefox," you say. It didn't even exist yet. "Safari"? Years away, even for Mac users.

Enter Opera. Opera was my salvation during that time. It was fast, it was powerful, and it did all sorts of really advanced "power user" features. Once, many years ago, I even wrote a series called "30 Days to Becoming an Opera Lover" designed to teach folks all the things Opera had to offer.

If you tried Opera 10 in the past but didn't like how it looked on the Mac, it is time to take another look. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the browser itself looked so good, even before any pages were loaded.

When you go to download it, you will be met with the words "Opera 10 with Turbo." Turbo is Opera's server-side compression technology which is designed to speed up web browsing by compressing text and images on Opera's servers before sending it to your browser. If this sounds a little bit like what AOL, etc used to offer for customers on dialup, it is. The difference is that you can easily toggle this on or off (or set it to "Automatic" and let Opera adjust based on your web connection).

This may not mean much to you if you are sitting on a FiOS or other super-fast connection, but Opera recognizes that more and more people are using mobile 3G cards for laptops (or even, dare one say: netbooks) or sharing a Wi-Fi connection at the local coffeehouse with dozens of your closest bandwidth-hogging friends. As for myself, I spend a great deal of time behind something called "Satellite Internet." If you don't know what that is, consider yourself fortunate. I look forward to testing this feature. If nothing else you owe it to yourself to watch this fun YouTube video on compression that Opera created.

Talking about web browsers is a little like talking about religion, politics, or the best text editor. Everyone has their own take on them and you are more likely to get into a fight than actually change anyone's opinion. That said, Opera 10 is worth a look. It has a lot of excellent features built-in (tabs on the left or right being one of my favorite, especially in these days of "widescreen" laptops).

Opera may not have a giant marketshare, but Mac users in particular ought to be used to the fact that biggest marketshare isn't always best!
TUAW Opera 10 released, for your speedy web browsing pleasure originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Opera - Internet Explorer - YouTube - AOL - Apple
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Help cure diabetes, win great Mac software
Filed under: Software, Cult of Mac, Odds and ends, Deals
Developer Jim Whimpey is riding a bike to cure diabetes, and he's asking for your help (and promising a chance at some great Mac software). For every $10 you donate to his upcoming ride in southern Australia, he'll throw your name in a raffle to win one of two big Mac software bundles, both worth almost $190 each and both including Things, MarsEdit, Tweetie, and Wii Transfer. Any one of those apps is worth the donation, not to mention that your money will go to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, one of the biggest organizations around committed to fighting type 1 diabetes.

You get a raffle entry for every $10 you donate, so put in $20 and you'll get two entries, and so on. He's asking for all the donations by September 14th, so you've got about two weeks to get over there and put some money in. Great cause and great way to pick up some sweet new apps for your brand new Snow Leopard install to run.
TUAW Help cure diabetes, win great Mac software originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Snow Leopard - Cult of Mac - Health - Diabetes mellitus type 1 - Conditions and Diseases
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MLB At Bat adds in-app purchases
Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Store
It's no secret that one of my favorite iPhone apps is Major League Baseball's At Bat [iTunes link]. Last season it provided real-time statistics and video clips from games across the league. This season, it added live video streaming of full games as well as Game Day audio. At first the video streams were free, then MLB switched the model to feature one free game of the day, and the others were available to MLB.TV subscribers.

Frankly I thought that was a bummer, as I don't want to pay a monthly fee for baseball. They must have read my mind, because version 1.4 was released this week with in-app purchasing. Users can buy any live video stream for $0.99US. Hooray! No more MLB.TV.

I've gushed over this app before, so I'll keep it short this time. Not only is it a great experience for fans, the developers seem on top of what we want. Each update is significantly better than the last.

Now if only the NFL and the PGA would create something as good.
TUAW MLB At Bat adds in-app purchases originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: iPhone - AppStore - Apple - TUAW - Streaming media
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An incredible stolen Mac story without a final chapter
Filed under: Odds and ends, MobileMe
Update 2:30p ET 9/1: We've heard more from the theft victim; see the latest news on this crime story here.

We're getting our share of crime stories lately, and today's is really a jaw dropper. I'm going to be sketchy on details and locations because there is an investigation underway.

Here's what we have so far. An East Coast man had his house broken into with 2 Macs and one PC stolen, along with some other household items of value.

One of the Macs was a laptop, and our victim bought a new MacBook Pro to replace it, and used a Time Machine backup to restore all his files. The crime was reported to police, who said they had no leads, but there had been a string of similar burglaries in the area for quite some time.

When our victim (we'll call him Jim) sat down at his replacement laptop last night, he saw one of his missing computers come up as a share via the Back to My Mac feature of MobileMe. He clicked on the share, and explored the files of his stolen machine. You can guess what comes next. Taking a chance, he clicked on screen sharing, and saw that someone was using his Mac, checking lottery numbers on a web page.

Jim didn't want to take control of the Mac, so he just watched, fascinated. Later, when activity on his missing computer stopped, he went to the network panel and grabbed an IP address, and took a screen shot of it.

This morning, he saw someone applying for a job online using the stolen laptop, and Jim now has the Social Security number, address and phone number used on the job application. Jim speculates it is possible the machine has been sold to someone and that is who was applying for the job. Or it could still be with the crooks.

He's contacted the police, and we don't know how this saga ends yet, but we'll let you know how it all works out. So far we've got a pretty smart victim and some really dumb crooks. Jim says he is sure he'll be renewing MobileMe when it's time.

Details at 11.

[Thanks to 'Jim' for sharing his experience with all of us]
TUAW An incredible stolen Mac story without a final chapter originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Apple - Time Machine - Back to My Mac - TUAW - MobileMe
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