TextEdit can contain mutiple PDF documents

macosxhints.com - Embed multiple PDFs in one TextEdit document. TextEdit is a bit of a playground for Apple's OS X developers. There are quite a surprises in it.

If you have several PDFs you'd like to organize, dropping them all into a single TextEdit document is one way to do it.

How FairPlay Works

Schneier pointed to this very well done description of Apple's FairPlay, including a nice discussion of AAC:

How FairPlay Works: Apple's iTunes DRM Dilemma

Protected, purchased content is locked within iTunes; songs are not scrambled on Apple's server. This speeds and simplifies the transaction by delegating that work to iTunes on the local computer.

The result is an authorization system that does not require iTunes to verify each song with Apple as it plays. Instead, iTunes maintains a collection of user keys for all the purchased tracks in its library.

To play a protected AAC song, iTunes uses the matching user key to unlock the master key stored within the song file, when is then used to unscramble the song data.

Every time a new track is purchased, a new user key may be created; those keys are all encrypted and stored on the authorized iTunes computer, as well as being copied to Apple's servers.

When a new computer is authorized, it also generates a globally unique ID number for itself and sends it to Apple, which stores it as one of the five authorizations in the user account.

Apple's server sends the newly authorized machine the entire set of user keys for all the tracks purchased under the account, so all authorized systems will be able to play all purchased songs.

I didn't realize AAC was used by satellite radio. The essay also explains why Job wrote his anti-DRM post. The writing is really on the wall for DRM.

How to escape your mobile phone contract

You can die, move out of the coverage zone, make lots of calls from a location that's costly to your carrier, find a hole in the contract, or use a contract trading service.

A very handy referece: Getting Out of a 2-Year Cellphone Contract Alive - New York Times.

Apple messed up the DST switch.

[Update 3/12/07: I think this was probably a transient glitch early Sunday am, perhaps due to a very heavy load on Apple's time server. My other machines had the right time. A commenter had no problem with 40 different machines!]

So, it wasn't so straightforward after all.

My fully up-to-date iMac says it's 8:54AM CDT in the twin cities now.

It's actually 7:54AM CDT.

Blogger things it's 5:53AM, but that's because I'd never switched this blog from PST. Google has DST right, but Blogger makes me make the CST/DST choice myself.

Apple should be very red right now. Humiliating I'd say. (Ok, so I was a bit harsh. Sorry.)

Update 8:00AM: I switched off the automatic time setting and it reset itself to the right time, then I switched it back on. So some kind of bug in how the system clock was supposed to reset. I wonder if the Intel machines did better. (yes, they did)

Shutterfly provides print services for Picasa

I've used both Picasa Web Albums and SmugMug for photo services. I've favored SmugMug for several reasons, including that they're much more serious about color profiles, password protection, backup services, unlimited uploads, and they're less expensive [1]. On the other hand Picasa has much better iPhoto integration. (I use PictureSync with SmugMug.) Most of all, however, Picasa hasn't offered print services.

Tonight SmugMug was very buggy. Not just one repeated bug, but several nasty time consuming bugs. I became seriously annoyed, and went back to Picasa. They offer print services, now, and one of my very first photo vendors, Shutterfly, is a featured provider. (I probably still have old albums on Shutterfly.)

So now Picasa offers reasonable print services, even if they may not be the equal of SmugMug's. On the other hand, Picasa has never been as buggy as SmugMug was tonight...

I'm still moving back and forth, but I'm going to use Picasa for a while. Sure SmugMug wins on big by the feature count, but time-eating bugs are intolerable. Also, they're incredibly late with good iPhoto integration.

[1] In fact an old blog posting of mine still generates sufficient SmugMug referalls that the service is free for me. If I really do switch I'll have to turn that link off, but maybe SmugMug will fix its bugs.

Windows Live OneCare: quarantined TightVNC and blocked Microsoft's Advantage update

I was unable to update Microsoft's finkware tool "Windows genuine advantage". I disabled Windows Live OneCare's active scanning and the update finished.

So Live OneCare was blocking Microsoft's update?!

I decided to see what else it was doing. Turns out it had "quarantined" the installer files I had for two VNC products because:

"This program has potentially unwanted behavior ... Remote Control Software ..."

Wow. Anything to do with VNC will evidently be quarantined by OneCare. It's just too risky for regular folk to have.

I'm so glad I mostly use OS X.

Retrospect error -556

My creaky old copy of Retrospect Professional for Windows was returning "error -556": Can't access volume Users on iMacG5, error -556 (backup client: network interface unavailable). Retrospect couldn't find its Clients from the Configure menu either.

I figured it was something to do with "Windows Live One Care". I disabled scanning and firewall, quite Retrospect (necessary), restarted Retrospect, and it found the clients. I then re-enabled everything, but Retrospect could still find the clients. (I did incidentally enable "Network Discovery" in Live One Care -- it had been disabled, but I didn't expect that to make much difference).

So I don't know what's wrong. I'm hoping it's not some odd effect of my relatively new gigabit switch.