Friday, June 11, 2004

Apple Remote Desktop 2 w/ VNC

Think Secret - Apple Remote Desktop 2 nearing completion: "Remote Desktop 2 will boast standards-based reporting, task scheduling, VNC support,"

All uninteresting, except the VNC support. Is Apple going to anoint a VNC solution for remote access? That would bring OS X up closer to XP's Microsoft Remote Desktop.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

OS X "System Migration" assistant -- new feature

MacFixIt - New Power Mac G5 models include "System Migration" feature
Introduced with the newest G5s. In the old, old days moving between a Mac took only a few minutes. Moving between DOS machines was about as hard. Moving between Win 3.1 machines became interesting, moving from an XP machine is an ordeal. If anything, an OS X machine migration may be worse.

This is way overdue.

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

iPod 3G - disable calendar alarms to increase battery life?

Mainctouch iPod (Part 26)
I had the same problem as Nicolas, regarding my 3G iPod being almost completely discharged after just sitting for maybe 2 days. After hunting through several web pages, the unlikely suggestion of making sure ALL the iPod alarms were set to off greatly restored my battery life.

I can't remember what alarm it was, but it was nothing I was using (or hearing). Apparently, it defaults to on.

The only thing I can see that looks like this is the calendar alerm which defaults to "beep" and can be changed to "off".

Schneier: Witty worm was pretty bad

The Witty worm: A new chapter in malware - Computerworld
Witty was the first worm to target a particular set of security products -- in this case Internet Security System's BlackICE and RealSecure. It infected and destroyed only computers that had particular versions of this software running.

A few things we learned from this worm:

Witty was wildly successful. Twelve thousand machines was the entire vulnerable and exposed population, and Witty infected them all -- worldwide -- in 45 minutes. It's the first worm that quickly corrupted a small population. Previous worms targeting small populations such as Scalper and Slapper were glacially slow.

Close all your firewall ports. Don't buy firewalls from companies that have let backdoors be inserted (NetGear, Linksys, others?). Use a Mac.

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

gPhotoShow - simple and elegant

gPhotoShow - Slide Show Maker and Photo Screen Saver Creator

My longtime favorite, I prefer the free version.

Alcohol software: put kid's CDs on server

Alcohol Software is DVD / CD burning software. CD & DVD burner, recorder and ripper
Presumably the main use is illegal duplication of CDs, but I'd just like our kids to access their CDs from the file server, rather than messing with the discs. I don't know if the CD images include unused space, if they don't it may be possible to put all the kids CDs on a single 160GB drive and access them over the net.

David Shayer on OS X disk editors

TidBITS#732/07-Jun-04
... Some people put several partitions on a hard disk. The partition map tracks the various partitions. I damaged the partition map. As with the bad sectors, I performed this test on a real hard disk, since disk images don't have partition maps. Tech Tool Pro didn't detect the problem. Of the other utilities, only Norton Disk Doctor even noticed this problem, although it couldn't fix it....

... Of the 15 damaged disk images, Tech Tool Pro repaired 9 of them perfectly or well enough, and did pretty well on the last disk. That stacks up against DiskWarrior with 12 fixes, Norton Utilities with 11, Drive 10 with 9, Disk Guardian with 5 and Disk Utility with 4...

... I stick with my earlier recommendation for dealing with damaged disks. Try Apple's Disk Utility first (since it's free and isn't likely to create any additional problems), and if Disk Utility fails, hand the damage over to DiskWarrior, which has the best chance of fixing whatever ails your hard disk. And please, keep good backups!
DiskWarrior is $80. At that price I'm tempted to rely on backups and Disk Utility first, then buy it on need.

More startling to me was that nothing can repair partition defects on an OS X disk. I'd gotten the feeling that OS X and Apple doesn't really test multi-partition configurations that heavily ... I'd avoid partitions ...