Blip.tv vs. YouTube

I use Google Video for our family videos, but DI suggests I should check out blip.tv: 10 Reasons Why Blip.tv is Better Than Youtube for Uploading & Sharing Videos on the Web - Digital Inspiration - Amit Agarwal.

Cooler Master NOTEPAL Aluminum Laptop Cooler

Cooler Master NOTEPAL Aluminum Laptop Cooler -Silver

Read about this on Macintouch, apparently it's a good fit for a MacBook. There's a widescreen version too. Reviews, as always, are helpful.

iPod shuffle 1st gen: wipe and reset

Apple - Support - Downloads - iPod shuffle Reset Utility 1.0.1 for Mac

I suspect it might be worth doing this for all 1st gen shuffles. Apple wouldn't have bothered releasing this unless there were some significantly hard to fix firmware problems.

Macintouch reviews online backup for Mac

Backup: Online Backup Services: Backjack is a favorite. Great review. Online backup is the way of the future, but obsessives like me won't rely on it yet. For now I see online backup as an alternative to rotating a hard drive offsite.

So I'd recommend local backup to a big hard drive (or NAS), use an online photo service that will mail a DVD (SmugMug for example), burn photos periodically to DVDs and consider using an online backup service as an alternative to rotating the onsite drive backup offsite.

The cost of backup is very large. Backjack will charge around $1000 a year for a large backup store (!), but that cost may be exceeded by the hassle of dealing with flaky backup software, etc. It's not a good situation now, and everyone is waiting to see if Google will help us out.

Yugma: free web-conferencing for Mac and PC -

DS likes Yugma web conferencing...

Go Yugma yourself, or a colleague - Download Squad:

... It is extremely painless to setup, use, and it is free to do it. Yugma is a web-conferencing tool that has excellent annotation tools, easy controls, and a simple sign-up process. ... Yugma uses a fast-loading Java interface that looks great, responds without me clicking a million times on it, and operates much like a regular desktop app. The tools it sports include a colored highlighter (changeable colors), a nicely done colored pen, and some other gadgets to help you get your point across. I

...Yugma is currently available for Windows and Mac, and will be available soon for Linux.

All very well, but my real interest is remote maintenance of my mother's Mac Mini. You see, Yugma includes "remote support and troubleshooting". Ahh, yes. There's nothing like this for the Mac. I expect it won't be free forever, but if it will do remote support I'd be glad to pay.

I'll give the remote support featuers a test and update this post with my results.

Retrospect Professional's occult configuration files

I'm migrating to a new machine after a disk crash, and thanks to good backups I've got the data I need. Except what happened to that painful configuration data that drives my backup software? Well, as of version 6.5, Retrospect Pro's help file documentation didn't address that minor little issue.

The configuration data is stored in the hidden folder - "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Retrospect" which renders on restore as "Documents and Settings\All Users.WINDOWS\Application Data\Retrospect". Restore that folder, find a file named config65.dat and copy it into the appropriate folder on your new drive. If all the paths are the same, this might work for you.

Dumb.

OS X backup: good review discussion

FreeRideCoding releases SmartBackup - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Nice summary, including the comments.