No Aperture at the Apple Store?

Odd. I'm at the Mall of America Apple Store -- and they don't have Aperture anywhere. It's as though it never existed. Clearly it's not a big seller here, but the machines have the rest of the pro suite. I wonder if Apple wants to wait for version 1.51 to install.

Another odd thing. I appear to be one of the few people that care that Aperture does not allow users to edit date metadata associated with an image.

Selective apps from Apple's restore disks

From Apple's kb: Using Restore discs with computers that ship with Mac OS X 10.3.7 or later. You can "Reinstall some (but not all) bundled applications without erasing the Mac OS X volume". I didn't know that. Handy.

Google has a Mac Blog

Official Google Mac Blog. Note Google Calendar now supports Safari. That surprised me. If Google adds Safari support to other products (Gmail perhaps?) I'll have to retract my Safari execution request.

The real suprise would be if Google Calendar were to support iSync.

Media-Convert: Web-based converter for most everything - Download Squad

Good resource: Media-Convert: Web-based converter for most everything - Download Squad

Carbonite (XP only): Online backup goes mainstream

I came across this via The Atlantic's print edition, not via any of the many blogs I track. Odd.

Carbonite Online Backup is XP only, but the price is right. $50 a year for "unlimited" (really?) backup.

If it were OS X as well I'd have signed up by now, but no matter -- the $50 price point is the key. At long last, online backup is going mainstream. It's the only way to go, but expect restores to be unbelievably slow and tedious for sometime. It can't be the only backup solution, but it's a good companion to backup to an onsite external hard drive.

iMac G5: fans running more often

My 20" iMac fans run often nowadays - a load that was tolerated before drives fans up. No idea why. In the past Canon's crummy printer drivers caused this kind of problem with a bad print job (printing is an OS X weakness), but Activity Monitor (show all) has no bad news.

CPU temp is about 168 by Thermograph measures. High, but unfortunately not too high by the low standards of the "30% failure rate" 20" G5 iMac.

iMac G5 constant fan noise - Mac Forums has some hints. I'll try those and update here. Cleaning out the air ducts sounds harmless enough.

I wonder too if Apple, knowing the problems with the design of this machine, has tweaked the temperature response curve to lower the threshold for high speed fans.

PS. I'm posting this using Firefox 2 RC-2. I love the inline spelling check!

Update 10/8/06: Seems better. Here's what I did:

1. Checked Activity Monitor for any hung processes (none found, be sure to view ALL processes)
   
2. Reset the SMU (System Management Unit)
3. Opened up the iMac and blew out clouds of dust from vents, etc.
4. Changed performance to Highest (this is odd, but it came from MacOS X Hints).
   

I'll see it it stays better. Hard to say what worked, I didn't have time to mess with this so I did everything that seemed reasonable.

Update 1/24/2010: Four years later I noticed this again. I reset the SMU and it improved. Thanks to Google custom search I found this old post and new what to do.

Camino: Command-click to select table cells

In Camino, my current OS X Gecko web browser, you can command click to select table cells and copy and paste them. Surprisingly useful. I think this is probably true of Firefox too.