Burn , Disco and Toast: extending OS X built-in CD burning

CD burning works reasonably well in OS X 10.4, albeit with a bit of an obscure UI. It doesn't, however, support multi-sessions CDs (which I never use anyway, CDs are cheap). A TUAW post and comments list 3 alternatives, Toast ($80), Burn (free, open source) and Disco (not yet out, expected to be inexpensive, from the AppZapper team).

Disco sounds just like it will be right for me, but if I need something before it comes out I'd try Burn.

OS X save as dialogs

I'm shamed to note I'd not noticed the spotlight feature, but the rest of this hint is noteworthy and new: Show full file paths in Save As... dialogs. It really annoys me that Spotlight hides hierarchies and enclosing folders from its lists. Dumb. Hierarchy is a valuable piece of information.

iTunes 7: smart playlists not updating

OUCH. MacOSXHints has discvoered that Smart Playlist in iTunes 7 don't auto-update. This is the first iTunes 7 bug that would likely impact me (I'm still on iTunes 6). I won't be updating until this is fixed.

The VGA connector: Dan's history

Dan's Data reviews the 52 year history of the VGA connector, and incidentally says some very interesting things about analog signals and bandwidth. Only the most serious of geeks (often radio people) can say anything about analog signaling. I wonder if a digital connector could handle the bandwidth scaling the VGA connector experienced ...

CamStudio: open source (free) video screen capture

The Download squad was very enthusiastic about the open source (and free) CamStudio screen video capture utility for XP.

Why you shouldn't use XHTML

It's unusual for anyone to handwrite web docs any more. So decisions on using XHTML or HTML4 are out of most users hands. All the same, it's interesting to read while we're likely to stick with HTML4 for a long, long, time.

Vox: Video sharing with privacy controls

I was impressed and a bit surprised to find my mother's Win98 box could show a video I uploaded to Google Video in Firefox.

Better than expected. Problem is, Google Video has no privacy controls, so anyone can see our family videos. Nothing there that should interest any evil men, but it's a nasty world. I assume Google omits privacy controls because their business is about exposure/search, and also lack of privacy means really nasty stuff will be seen and they'll remove it.

Vox's claim to fame is privacy controls. These can be used for good (protect family) or evil. I'll take a look.

Update 10/11/06: They were closed when I first tried, but they're open now and I have a Vox blog. Vox is really all about access control and small communities. I'll be playing with it more.