I bought an Apple TV after Apple’s promised rental changes. Ok, so it is a toy, really I mean come on, $230 just to pay Apple more money to rent movies, but i love tech and wanted to check this out.

I’ve always wanted a 1080p Apple TV and while this is still 720p, my TV does a great upconverting job.

I rented “SuperBad” in SD via iTunes earlier in the month. Once the update installed, I tried to find the movie via streaming, but it could not be found.

I then realized you have to sync to watch movies rented on your computer. So I set up a custom sync and moved the movie over to the Apple TV.

This process, about 1.6gb of data, took 30 minutes. You can’t play a rented movie that is syncing, you have to wait.

The audio was prologic, and the colors a bit dull and dark, but the quality was very acceptable.

After that movie, I decided to rent The Simpsons movie in HD. After about 14 seconds, my movie was ready to go.

WOW, the colors are fantastic. The audio is 5.1 and sounds great.

This could get expensive. Even though we have Netflix for Blu Ray, renting HD movies via the Apple TV is fast and fairly affordable.

Oh yes, we’re watching Simpsons while iTunes is doing a new “automatic” sync, which will keep as much data on the Apple TV and let me stream everything else, in theory at least

Unconfirmed reports state that Apple Engineer (QuickTime, iTunes and others) “suddenly” passed away. More information is not available at this time.

According to Tom’s page he wrote the popular Darkside of the Mac screensaver.

Tom worked for Apple for 17 years as of the last update of his page, more like 21 now.

Update:Microsoft has reposted the instructions

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In my RSS was a Mac Mojo post from Eric Schwiebert about the 502 error in the Office 2008 Installer. I went to read the rest of the post but it has been removed, and seemingly not replaced yet. Here is what my RSS reader cached:

You may have seen recent reports on the web of a security issue in the installer for Mac Office 2008. The issue is that our installer is incorrectly granting ownership of the files to a particular local user as it installs them, so that if your Mac actually has a second local user and that user is not an administrator on your Mac, they could modify your Office 2008 install. The issue does not expose the Office 2008 install to modifications by any networked user account or to any local account other than the second one created on your Mac.

Microsoft and the MacBU take all security issues seriously, and we intend to fix this situation in several ways. First of all, if you have already installed Office 2008, you can run a command in the Terminal to fix the file ownership and remove the security concern (see instructions below). Second, the MacBU is working on an update to Office 2008 that will automatically fix the file ownership for you… …

Hopefully this saves someone else an hour.

If I stuck one of the IR buds directly to the IR “eye” on the Apple TV, the Apple TV would not recognize any IR.

I had to stick it below the IR “eye” in order for IR codes to be received.

I’ve been in touch with AppleCare ever since I got this router. They have continued to “look into” our VPN issues with SonicWall. They even swapped my router for a new one (before the gigabits came out)

The last email I from Apple was today:

It appears we still do not have a solution or a workaround for this particular issue. Again, I would like to apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you and hope we will correct this issue sometime in the future.

Sigh.

Sigh, Microsoft. I can confirm the report at bruned that the Microsoft Office 2008 installer sets the owner to user 502, which is the second user on your machine.

In this case, my test user. Nice. What a security hole.

This installer also mucks with other user ids, so be careful.

I ran repair permissions in Disk Utility and it didn’t fix anything.

So I fixed them in the Terminal, which is a pain:

• sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/Fonts/Microsoft
• sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/
• sudo chown -R root:admin /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008/

The Finder doesn’t make it possible to change the owner of a file in Leopard, at least I have not figured it out.

Really, this is useful. Thanks, now I get to sort out which of the 50 items I am administer for I don’t have permissions on.

It really is too bad the computer doesn’t know which items I don’t have permissions to replace, because if the computer knew, it could give me a list, that I could copy and email to the admin. That would be nice.

</sarcasm>

Alright, I know the bru-ha-ha over MacHeist, but seeing one of the chaching guys push the bundle made me at least feel that due to the success of MH1, the developers are getting a better deal this time around.

Why did I buy it?

Because I loathe Intuit. I am tired of their Mac apps being behind Windows, I am tired of paying for nothing more than bug fixes, and while chaching falls short of what I need, I want to support them somehow.

If the midnightapps guys add splits, I’d be set.

Now for what I was using QuickBooks for. Not accounting, just invoicing. I found a much, much better solution:

Billings2 is a nice Mac app that tracks jobs by time, by task, expenses, prints nice invoices, can auto save to disk with a filename of your liking, can auto email, integrates with address book, etc, etc. Very nice and for around $60, affordable.

I love where the Mac is these days. With indies giving huge corporations like Intuit a run for their, well, money, I am a very happy Macintosh user.

In response to John’s Keynote Roundup about Apple’s new Time Capsule, I wrote to him:

Hi John,

I saw your glowing review of Time Capsule and wanted to point out a few things.

1) Backups should be reliable.

Sure, a “server grade” hard disk that supports the proper buffer flush commands is great, but you are wedding a router and a backup. What happens when:

1a) The router dies, and you lose the backup while the router is fixed. 1b) You find out the router does not pass the new VPN your fiancé’s company uses (like I am stuck with in the current router), and now you have a very expensive WAP, just to have a backup 1c) Your hard drive dies, and you lose your router while the hard disk is replaced.

2) Backups should be movable

Again, being stuck inside of the router makes it impossible to move this backup offsite for any reason. You need another backup, or a second time capsule. You should be able to take a full time machine and archive it if you like. You cannot with the Time Capsule. You have to allow files to be deleted, or stop using it altogether.

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What Apple should have done:

A) Made the USB port on existing extremes work. AirDisk works very poorly now.

B) Supplied this disk as a USB/FW drive, with the proper flush commands.

C) Sold Time Capsule as a Airport Extreme N router with firewire, and the drive from B.

Ca) Or even better, had a drive sit below the router on a eSata bus connector, so you can buy/swap more capsules.

Summary

This is an awful product because it ties people’s sense of backup security in with another piece of hardware, a router, which can fail, or need to be replaced, thus putting either component of the capsule at risk. It is similar to using two drives striped Raid 0 for a backup, thus doubling your chance of backup failure.

Steve

I have a large amount of respect for John and his body of work. I just don’t want to see customers use this product expecting to have a reliable backup system.

It seems that the Office 2008 installer leaves several copies of their fonts in /Library/Fonts/

The older versions are named such as “Courier New” while the newer versions are named “Courier New.ttf”

Sadly, Font Book as disabled the new fonts and offers to delete them over the old fonts. Yuck.

I am not sure what caused this, but I am guessing it is due to the migration of Tiger to Leopard, copying the old MS fonts, but since i had never reinstalled Office, the office 2008 installer found nothing to uninstall, including the older fonts. Sigh.

I cleaned this up very simply:

• Use Font Book to look for duplicates
• Scroll through your font list and look for a black dot next to a font name
• Turn down the disclosure triangle for the font
• Select a font and press CMD-I to show the info pane
• Select two of the same faces (say bold) and compare. One of the info fields is location, look for the font name with .ttf and delete the other (So if you have Andale bold and Andale bold, select each bold, compare versions and names, then delete the non .ttf file)
• You can easily remove a font by right clicking the font and choosing remove font.

You’ll find you have something like:

• Andale ** bold ** bold ** italic ** italic

etc. Once you delete the non-ttf file, all duplicates for Andale will disappear.

Move on to the next black dotted duplicate font.

As pointed out in the EULA by John Gruber, HD rentals can only be done on the Apple TV and are not transferable to a computer, iPod, etc.

ok fine, maybe they did this for licensing reasons, or maybe because an iPhone doesn’t want nor can play an HD version.

There is a solution.

Make the HD rental give the rentee a license to the SD version as well. If I need it, I can go to iTunes, download the SD version and put it on my phone.

The same key would be used, so if i was 12 hours into my rental, I’d only have 12 hours left.

Fair and works for everyone.

Ok this product is a joke. Apple has a bad enough record with routers as it is (My 10 month old router still does not allow Elizabeth’s VPN to connect, wheres linksys and d-link do) but check this scenario out:

• Back up to Time Capsule, oh laptop kernel panics. Reboot. Wait 9 hours while it scans disk and backup over wifi.

• Hard disk fails for some reason. Oh explain to the wife/etc that you have no network for days now while hard drive is replaced in router.

ROFL What were they thinking? Don’t buy this. Wait for them to fix the external port on the current base station, or support Macs as time machines over wifi.

Summary - DUD

Yahoo!

If you read RSS on the Macintosh then you likely know that Brent Simmon’s NetNewsWire has been the best app around. Vienna is very nice and gave NNW competition, especially in the price category.

Well now, Newsgator has announced that NNW is free! Yes, free! You have no excuses now:

Download NetNewsWire For Free!

If you don’t read your news via RSS, you might want to consider it!

I created a file titled Foobar 3.0 in TextMate with the words “hello world” in it.

I did a spotlight search for Hello World but my file did not show in the list. I clicked Show All and it was not in the full list either.

With the full list open, I renamed my file from Foobar 3.0 to Foobar 3.0.txt and immediately, my file showed in the spotlight list.

So, Spotlight does filter files based on extension, and really does not like .0 extensions

I leave a hard disk on the floor next to the couch backing up with time machine. Today I was installing a new copy of vBulletin, but they use an awful disk structure of code+resources in one folder, so when I replaced my forums folder with theirs, I inadvertently wiped out the images that my forums user interface uses.

Well, time machine to the rescue!:

• Navigate to my images folder
• Click Time Machine on the dock
• Click back arrow
• See the missing “a2″ folder, select it
• Click restore
• Upload files to server

Done!

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Ok so we need a WEP hex key for my mom’s airport. I fire up my Intel laptop, no dice, Airport UTILITY won’t open an older Extreme, only Airport ADMIN UTILITY.

Can I download this app? No, An hour searching on apple.com, nothing. I find 4.0.2 for 10.3.3, but that won’t install.

I try 4.0.2 for windows under vmware, nope, can’t see the basestation.

My mom’s new imac doesn’t have it either.

What a freaking joke. Whomever at Apple decided that two utilities, similarly named, and then abandoning the old one, was a good idea:

You should be fired.

This is not Apple quality. This is crap.

Step it up Apple and resolve this asap.

John implemented saving a preview of the first page of a Sophie Book into the document bundle and I wrote my first QuickLook plugin:

Watch

I think it is clear that Time Machine is a hit - Easy to set up, works invisibly in the background to keep you up to date - Excellent!

Where can Time Machine go in the future?

Maybe Time Machine will replace .Mac’s Backup application. You could choose some plans to run and have time machine back up just those plans to your iDisk. Instead of Backup’s horrible excuse for versioning, you could have the great Time Machine methodology.

What do you think?

Every now and then Apple releases a major upgrade to their operating system. The last major release was 10.4, code named “Tiger.” Last Friday Apple released 10.5, code named “Leopard”

Apple releases major operating systems for several reasons:

• Money - Operating system updates make money and sell Macintoshes. Each major OS release pushes the envelope of what the hardware can do and for some people, these features are the tipping point to upgrading their machines.
• Software Advancement - It is with the major releases that Apple can make large, sweeping changes to the internals, which may break compatibility with some hardware and software, but it is done infrequently enough that it is not as much of a pain as a “dot” release, such as 10.4.11.
• Keeping a lead on Microsoft - Apple jumped over Microsoft with OS X and has been slowly gaining market share. This is good for Apple - See Money

Apple’s latest cat is a very nice upgrade. Not only are there very visible features, such as Coverflow and QuickLook, but there are nice updates to Spotlight, the Finder is nicer, and there are many new low level upgrades that users will never see but will surely benefit from.

Applications written for Leopard can take advantage of garbage collection, which simply means it is easier to write applications that have few if none common memory bugs.

Apple has connected syncing with their built in database, Core Data, which means that we should see more applications using Core Data and gaining benefits of backup via Time Machine.

Speaking of Time Machine, Apple has made it so incredibly easy to back up your Mac that you’ll wonder why this wasn’t done before. The answer is simple - In order to have something so simple and integrated as Time Machine, Apple needed to add features to the core operating system, such as FSEvents, which lets the operating system track when files are updated.

On top of that, QuickLook, which is the technology that lets you peek at documents without launching the document’s application, had to be invented so you could look at very old documents that might not have their application installed anymore.

Apple changed the dock, taking away the ability to put simple folders on the Dock and folders now become “Stacks,” which let you peek into a folder, such as your recent downloads folder.

Another thing that changed under the hood is networking. Leopard will fine tune itself for the network you are currently on, which is a boon for those of us fortunate enough to have Verizon’s fiber optic network, FIOS. No longer do we need to run tuners - Leopard does it for us. Nice.

For security, Leopard supports signed applications. While there are reports this functionality is wreaking havoc for some applications, which Apple will fix, this is great news for us Mac users. We’ve been blessed to not have any viruses nor trojan horses for our platform, but that could change. Apple is trying to head hackers off at the pass by allowing developers to put a “seal” on their applications. If a hacker edits any part of the application, the “seal” is broken and the operating system can alert the user.

Apple tweaked the UI by making the menu bar translucent, which some like, some hate. They changed the default folders look, such as Movies and Music, and most hate them.

Spotlight is much faster and even supports boolean searches, as long as you use AND, NOR or OR. Capitalization is required. You can even use parenthesis to group search expressions. For example, you can search for:

dog AND (cat OR bird)

to find any document that contains the word dog AND at least cat or bird. Simple, eh?

If you’re a scriptor, Automator has received a large overhaul and makes it much easier to write some very sophisticated scripts with just some dragging and dropping.

The new Help system has search right from the menu and can find menu items matching your search. This is great for finding hidden menus that deal with “size” or “image” in large applications. The only thing I hate is that the help system uses a floating palette which sits on top of all windows. Who thought this was a good idea?

Launching application is faster and the general feel of Leopard is faster than Tiger was.

iChat received a lot of updates - New visual effects, tabbed chatting and integrated file sharing is fantastic. Toss in screen sharing with audio and I can now support my mom’s computer from hundreds of miles away.

Some users are having awful upgrading experiences, but since Apple sold 2 million copies in a few days, I don’t think the overall experience has been poor. My install went fine and I even restored from Time Machine.

If you plan to upgrade to Leopard, be sure to see my Moving to Leopard article for tips that might make your migration to this new cat smoother.

If your windows simply disappear into thin air, it might be Spaces at work.

But in order for this bug to occur, you need to have had:

• Enabled Spaces
• Assigned applications to a space other than space 1
• Disabled Spaces

With spaces off, it seems something triggers the window manager to still move the windows to the now offscreen spaces and thus, windows are gone.

If this happens, use the Spaces dock icon to open up Spaces preferences, enable spaces and you’ll find your windows.