Saturday, January 19, 2008

The Apple Blog (3 сообщения)

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The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
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  • My Experience with Renting a Movie on iTunes

    iTunes Movie Rental We received three inches of snow last Thursday, but I wasn’t worried. We had plenty of white supplies (bread, milk, toilet paper) stocked up, so we didn’t have to venture to the grocery store. NetFlix said two DVDs would be delivered that afternoon. So before dinner, I ventured down to the mailbox to retrieve my treasure, when I learned of the tragedy. I only received one DVD from NetFlix. Gasp! When was the last time the shipping estimate was wrong? I stagger through the swirling wind to my home, comforted in the knowledge that I would soon be laughing at the antics of the gang at Cheers (Season 6, Disc 2).

    That is, until I opened the red envelope and removed the disc from the white envelope. The DVD was split in half. Sigh. Whatever would I do? How could I watch a movie without having to drive down to the local video store? I know, I’ll rent a movie using iTunes! Steve Jobs, you’ve saved the day! In the past I’ve purchased episodes of Survivor that the VCR missed, and watched them by hooking my PowerBook to my VCR through my S-video port. It’s awkward, but it works.

    This article details the problems I encountered with renting movies from the iTunes store, and how I attempted to work around the ridiculous DRM restrictions on rented movies (DRM = Digitally Ruined Media).
    (more…)





  • Reader Feedback: Any suggestions for an app that manages PDF files?

    My collection of books in PDF form has grown exponentially over the past 6 months or so. The flexibility that PDF offers (especially when it comes to search functionality) just overpowers my desire for a physical copy of a book.

    Unfortunately using a myriad of folders to organize all of these books is just getting out of control.

    So, I was curious if anyone has any suggestions for a way to manage all of these PDFs/books? Any organizational method you’ve found that you like? Or many an application that does the trick?





  • NetBoot and the Air
    apple-macbook-air.jpg

    Since I heard that the MacBook Air didn’t come with an onboard optical drive, but did come, instead, with this magic virtual disk feature, I’ve been having a very interesting wonder - does this also mean that NetBoot now works - at least for the Air - over wireless?

    And, fresh off the show floor today hot from MacFixIt, is confirmation that this is in fact true. On these machines, at least, NetBoot will work over a wireless network.

    Before I start talking about the implications of this, some quick background on NetBoot, especially for those who’ve never used this. NetBoot is a nifty little tool that lets you create an image of your boot disc, and then mount it remotely on client machines to install it. This requires four things to work: a Mac running some flavor of OS X Server and three processes - NetBoot, afp, and DHCP, a separate network-compatibly Mac, a network cable, and a bit of patience. (The cable is now evidently superfluous.)

    Drop the install DVD into the Server machine, fire up Image Utility, and create your NetBoot image. (This is cake; like many Apple utilities, it fairly well walks you through using it.) Set up your server to host the image, and you’re done with it. Now go to the client machine. Hold down N during boot to cause the client to look for network images, and you’re good to go.

    Because of the need for Server, and because creating an image and installing it takes longer than simply installing it on the client machine directly, you mostly see multi-machine administrator types doing this. The really nifty thing about NetBoot is, in creating this image, you can customize the settings in your image - and then allow access to this install disk to all the machines you want to use it.

    Network capable machines can also run as normal off these disks; and you can also set your client machines to always preferentially boot from the NetBoot server, so that every time they reboot, they use the same clean image. (This is very useful in the context of large public or semi-public groups of computers - think campus computer labs - where you’d rather users not be meddling with settings.) Each individual copy of Server can manage up to 25 different NetBoot images, so you could even theoretically install specific setups on groups of machines. I’ve also seen it used to install Tiger from DVD’s on non-DV-bearing computers.

    So that’s NetBoot. Provided your NetBoot image host doesn’t go splort - and believe me, if you have machines booting every day over the network, you live in terror of that - it’s a very, very shiny little trick. But back to the MacBook Air, and doing it wirelessly.

    Remote Disc evidently contains a NetBoot server, which is in itself interesting. But even more so is that it can be done wirelessly, which must have involved some major changes to EFI, especially in regards to how EFI handles wireless networks. Scuttlebutt is that this will even work on secured wireless networks. That is really interesting. (Working enterprise Mac support has taught me that if there is one thing you can’t depend on with Intel Macs, it’s their ability to find or connect to a given wireless network, especially an exncrypted one.)

    Smoothing those issues out would help all of us - maybe there’s another EFI update in the works for Intel Macs?


    Комментарии к сообщению:
    http://theappleblog.com/2008/01/18/netboot-and-the-air/#comments





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