MacOSXPhiles

For European Mac users, or anybody outside of the U.S. for that matter, who use different time, date, and currency formats than us Yanks do, there is a glitch in 10.4 that causes custom settings created in the Formats tab of the International Preference Pane to be reset whenever you change selections. If you choose a standard group of settings for a certain locale, such as the U.S., or the U.K., they will stick just fine, but if you need to customize them, you’re pretty well hosed, because the changes will not stick. This causes big problems in Excel spreadsheets where columns that are formatted to reflect numbers or currency, and in FileMaker Pro databases as well, because those macros use the system preferences for date, time, currency, and number formatting. Users are finding that after migrating to 10.4, their databases and spreadsheets have all been changed, and there is no way to get around this problem.

There is actually a very simple way to resolve this. (more…)

Filed under: Mac OS X Tips
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Looking for an easy way to browse the files on your iPod? Of course, there are a lot of ways to browse the music on your iPod, but this one allows you to do it using Firefox, and you don’t have to worry about the fact that the files are hidden. It doesn’t work with Safari, and I haven’t tried it with any other browsers, but I suspect that it will work with Mozilla as well.

Basically, it’s as simple as opening a new, blank Firefox window and just drag your iPod into that window. All of your music is located in the /ipod_control/Music/ folder, and filed into subfolders /F00, /F01, /F02 etc. Because the iPod doesn’t use the same directory structure as your iTunes library, finding a specific song won’t be easy, but it is one way to recover a song that you accidently deleted, or just move songs to another computer. In fact, there are plenty of other utilities available to do this, but this is just one very easy way to browse the files on your iPod that you couldn’t otherwise see using Finder.

Filed under: Mac OS X Tips, iPod Stuff
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Last October, Maui X-Stream Inc. burst onto the scene, a completely unknown company in the Mac sphere, and claimed to have developed, from scratch, a PowerPC emulator called CherryOS that would allow people to run Mac OS X on x86 architecture at up to 80% of the x86 machines’ capabilities. They were also claiming that it was just days away from release, that a trial version would be available for download, and that it would be available for purchase at the blue-lite special price of just $49. But nothing came except for excuses as to why it wasn’t available, and the ability to order CherryOS from their website quickly became the option to pre-order it.

I’ll admit that when I first heard about CherryOS, I was not familiar with the technical challenges of emulating PowerPC architecture, and was definitely interested in buying it, should their claims be true. At the time, I was playing around with some different flavors of Linux designed for PowerPC, and thought it would be great to be able to do the same with OS X on the Athlon64 system that I had built to run Linux.

Well, as it turns out, the claims being made by MXS appear to be completely false. (more…)

Filed under: Reviews, Software, Rants
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As Napster prepares to launch their new Napster-To-Go service, I’m not sure whether to laugh, or to feel sorry for them. As published yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle and by Reuters, Napster is planning to launch a $30 million dollar ad campaign promoting their new music-to-rent service by attacking Apple, and the iTunes Music Store, who currently dominate the online music and hard-drive-based music player market.

Napsters’ claim in their upcoming ad blitz is that paying a monthly fee of $14.95 to download all the music you want is a better deal than actually buying your music for $.99 per song from the iTunes Music Store. They try to justify this by claiming that filling an iPod, which could hold 10,000 songs depending on the model, would cost $10,000 to fill with music from the iTunes Music Store. But with a music player that plays music in the Windows Media format, you could download all the music you want from Napster-To-Go for just $14.95 per month to fill your music player.

First of all, I don’t think that many iPod users are filling their iPods with music purchased exclusively from the iTunes Music Store. Sure, there may be some people out there doing this, but most people already own music prior to buying a portable music player, and start by filling their players with an existing digital music library, or start building their library by ripping their CD’s to their computer. And second, to suggest that people out there aren’t downloading music from P2P networks, or otherwise obtaining music without paying for it, would be ridiculous. Right?

The real question here isn’t how you obtain your music, but rather a question of ownership, and fair-use rights. (more…)

Filed under: iPod Stuff, Rants
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