Gordon's Tech

Friday, July 22, 2005

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner - Importer

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner

This free OS X utility will transform Eudora files to either Thunderbird or Mail files. There's no precise equivalent for Windows; the thunderbird FAQ references a lesser windows app.

Update 7/2005: The latest version will do the import for Eudora PC as well.

iVideo in September?

PBS | I, Cringely . July 21, 2005 - When Elephants Dance

Cringely is obsessed with Apple lately. It's easy to see why. If you're a computer geek, Apple has all the excitement. Here he predicts iVideo:

... like Intel's partnering in the new Apple movie download service, which someone told me this week will be called iVideo.

If iVideo is the correct name, it implies that the new application will become part of Apple's iLife suite along with iMove, iTunes and other applications. This makes good sense even for Intel. Why? Because at this point it is more important to Intel for iVideo to be a success than it is for iVideo to use lots of Intel chips. The population of broadband-equipped OS X computers in the U.S. is around 10 million, and that's a good number for launching a new service and avoiding problems should it be literally TOO popular. The point is to make iVideo a hit, first with Mac users and with impatent Windows users who'll go out and buy a Mac Mini just to be able to run the app (that's the old model for upgrading, right?). Mac Minis quietly appeared last weekend at Best Buy and Target, for sale alongside the iPods. This is in preparation for the iVideo launch, which will presumably come in September or October, certainly before the xBox November launch.

Just as there was with iTunes, there will eventually be an iVideo for Windows, probably in February.

Sounds good to me, I just bought a G5 iMac that would work well with this. Last week he predicted new video iPods with retinal displays -- that I find harder to credit. I do note though that the current iPod lineup is weird -- 20BG is too small, and 60GB is too big.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

dealram: 1GBx2 Apple iMac G5 PC3200 Computer Memory (PC3200 DDR SDRAM (400MHz))

dealram: 1GBx2 Apple iMac G5 PC3200 Computer Memory (PC3200 DDR SDRAM (400MHz))

How to shop for memory for a new G5 iMac. Paired RAM costs about $240 for 2GB. I might buy a single 512MB set for $40 and wait for the paired prices to fall to about $140 or so.

XP Concurrent users -- this was promised for XP SP2?

I don't know why this kind of thing doesn't get more attention. Concurrent user support is huge. I wish we had it in OS X!! Apparently it was almost in XP SP2. That would have made SP2 a huge upgrade for our family.

Techlog: Microsoft related news and issues: "What happened to the concurrent sessions feature in XP SP2?

14 October '04 - 16:08, kenneth
Coming from Paul Thurrot's Supersite for Windows:

It's gone. In February 2003, internal Microsoft documentation described a feature planned for XP SP2 called 'concurrent sessions.' This would have enabled XP Professional Edition systems with Fast User Switching (FUS) enabled (i.e., non-domain systems) to support two concurrent interactive users. The current XP version is limited to one interactive user at a time; this user can be sitting at the XP machine locally or connecting to it remotely through Remote Desktop Connection (RDC), Microsoft's desktop version of Windows Terminal Services.

Under the original plan for XP SP2, XP Pro would have supported two users, one local and one remote. This capability would have accomplished two goals. First, it would further differentiate XP Pro from XP Home Edition (an ongoing concern in Redmond) and make the more expensive XP Pro more enticing to users. Second, this feature would make Smart Displays more functional; under the current scheme, when a user accesses his or her XP Pro desktop from a Smart Display, the local system is logged out. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, responding to complaints about Smart Displays, had promised that the company would add concurrent sessions functionality to the product in the future; XP SP2 was one way to accomplish this goal. But things change. Microsoft removed the concurrent sessions feature from XP SP2.

However, concurrent sessions will soon pop-up in an unexpected place. The next XP Media Center update, named Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, will include concurrent sessions in order to support up to 5 Media Center Extender devices. To my knowledge, this is the only XP version that will get this feature.

So we will have to wait for someone finding out what is different in Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 making this possible (maybe another Termsrv.dll)and see if it can be installed under Windows XP SP2 to enable concurrent sessions.

But there's also a bookmarks feature that's new in Preview 3.0.1 (shipping with Tiger) that allows you to add a bookmark to any PDF, or intriguingly any image, or your computer and reopen it from Preview.

You could think of it almost like a browser bookmarks menu. If you're halfway through a huge text document and need a break, you can hit Command+D to add a bookmark. The same applies for images you might want to use often.

Command-D? Weird.

Preview's keywords are not viewable in iPhoto. Maybe an AppleScript will fix that?