Recently in Computing Category

It's time for yet another massively-discounted bundle of Mac apps - this time it's the VoteBundle. For $39 (about £25), you get 10 applications, including Speed Download (which I reviewed here) and CrossOver Mac Games which lets you play Windows games on your Mac. Separately, they're worth around $360 - so it's a good deal.

You can also get an additional app - DreamCatcher - for free by posting about the bundle on Facebook.

The promotion will run for another 4 days, and you can download trial versions of some of the apps if you remain to be convinced.

First of all, good news everyone! App of the Week will be returning this Wednesday, since I have a couple of apps to review.

Second of all, one of the apps I was intending to review was iPlayer Downloader, which is a program allowing you to download programmes from BBC iPlayer without DRM. The main reason for mentioning it was less its DRM-busting abilities and more down to the fact it actually works. I've had problems getting BBC's iPlayer Desktop application to run on my system - it would start, with the icon appearing on the dock and its menu appearing in the menu bar, but the window wouldn't load and it wouldn't download anything. Other times it would work perfectly. Even after re-installing the iPlayer Desktop application, Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash, getting it to run was still a hit-and-miss affair.

Turns out the BBC have a re-installation instructions on their site, including a handy video. However, you needn't follow all of their instructions each time - I've found that if iPlayer Desktop refuses to launch properly, simply deleting the following folder gets everything working again:

/Users/[your user name]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/ELS/BBCiPlayerDesktop.61DB7A798358575D6A969CCD73DDBBD723A6DA9D.1/

Obviously, [your user name] is the username you use on OS X.

Unfortunately I now have to delete this folder regularly to get the program running and should probably create an Automator script so that I don't have to drill down each time.

Also, deleting this folder won't affect any programmes you have downloaded, so you shouldn't end up accidentally deleting that episode of Top Gear that you've not yet got around to watching yet.

Back in May, us Brits 'elected' a new government (in so far as the party with the most votes and the party that came third formed a coalition government). Despite it not being led by the party previously in power, it appears at least part of their IT strategy hasn't changed.

Under the previous government, an official petitions site was set up and any petition which gained 500 or more signatures would gain a government response. The site is presently closed, with a vague promise of something similar being introduced later this year.

I signed a petition to phase out the use of Internet Explorer 6 on government computers. IE6, as you may recall, was first released in 2001 and has not seen any changes, bar security fixes, since 2004. It was superseded by IE7 in late 2006 and again by IE8 last year - both of which are available as upgrades for those still on Windows XP, which I assume the government is using. Of course, Windows Vista and 7 ship with IE7 and IE8 respectively.

Anyhow, the reason for signing the petition was two-fold:

1. It is becoming increasingly difficult to design web pages for IE6. Its support for web standards wasn't great even in 2001, and it has not been updated to take into account any innovations in that area since. IE7 and IE8 are much more compliant. As long as a significant number of people use IE6, it rules out the use of more advanced JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5.
2. Newer versions of Internet Explorer have better security, especially on Windows Vista and Windows 7 where the IE processes are sandboxed; should a security vulnerability be exploited, its impact on the rest of the system should be reduced. While a fully-patched IE6 will be more secure than an un-patched IE7, I have no doubt that IE7 with all security patches will be less prone to exploitation.

Unfortunately, the government seem to be unwilling to move from their support for IE6. In their response, they say there is 'no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure'. This is at odds with the reports from just about any security research organisation.

IE6 will still be supported by Microsoft until 2014, when Windows XP also reaches the end of its life. Sooner or later any government system will have to be updated. While the government may say that there is a high cost to the taxpayer involved in upgrading its systems, they are only postponing the inevitable. And there's no guarantee that leaving any upgrades until 2-3 years time will make them any cheaper.

(Note: I work for a public sector organisation where IE7 has been the standard web browser since 2008, if not before)

This isn't a prediction for a tomorrow's World Cup game but about the number of mobile networks in the UK and US that will be offering the iPhone 4 when it launches in a couple of weeks.

In the UK, the iPhone originally launched exclusively on O2, an arrangement that was in place for a couple of years. After the iPhone 3GS was released, that deal ended, and the iPhone was made available on Vodafone and Orange, as well as Tesco Mobile, an MVNO which uses O2's network and who my current package is with.

With the iPhone 4, the 2 remaining networks, T-Mobile and 3, have also announced that they will offer it, meaning all five networks (with their own infrastructure) will carry it, although in the UK Orange and T-Mobile now have the same parent company and plan to share infrastructure in future. None have announced pricing for the iPhone 4 but hopefully there will be some healthy competition, with a wide range of packages.

This, unfortunately, is not the same situation in the US. AT&T have had an exclusivity deal with Apple since launch and so none of the iPhone models have been available on any other network. Hence the uproar about the quality of AT&T's network when compared to Verizon Wireless (it's big competitor) and the changes in its pricing which brings the end of unlimited mobile data.

Unfortunately, things aren't so simple in the US as with the UK. All of the UK networks use the GSM and UMTS mobile systems, which is what all of the various iPhone models use. AT&T uses this, but Verizon Wireless doesn't - it uses CDMA and EV-DO, which isn't compatible with GSM/UMTS. For an iPhone to work on Verizon, Apple would either have to add CDMA/EV-DO support into the handset, probably making it bigger, or make a separate CDMA model. It seems they're unwilling to do either.

The only other big GSM/UMTS network in the US is T-Mobile, however, T-Mobile's UMTS network runs on the 1700 and 2100 MHz frequencies. This is different to most other UMTS networks worldwide and the iPhone does not support the 1700 MHz band. So again, Apple would need to modify the iPhone to work with it.

I may come across as trying to defend Apple here and I'm not - the iPhone really should be made available to more networks in the US. It's a shame that one of the world's most popular smartphones is tied down to one carrier - especially as that's not the case in other countries, like the UK. While I know only a little about how GSM and UMTS work (Slotted ALOHA, anyone?), adding support for the 1700MHz band to work with T-Mobile USA surely can't be a big task.

There is some good news on the horizon, as it looks like most mobile networks. including Verizon, will standardise on LTE in future. This is still some way off but we may finally have a truly global system for mobile phones that works on every carrier, and whatever iPhone is around then may well be available on most networks. Of course, that's assuming they don't just stick with another long exclusivity agreement with AT&T.

I've come across KernelEx - it's an open source compatibility layer for Windows 98 and Me which allows programs designed for Windows 2000 and XP to run on the older operating systems. I came by it on the VLC forums, where there are screenshots of VLC 1.0.1 and Firefox 3.5.2 running even though these programs normally wouldn't run on such an old copy of Windows.

I can't test it because I don't have a copy of Windows 98 or Me to hand. In any case, both operating systems have been long abandoned by Microsoft and are probably full of unpatched security holes now. But if you're feeling nostalgic, or just like the geeky satisfaction of getting something to work that shouldn't normally work, give it a shot.

A lot has been said since Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on Flash open letter, and while there is a lot of Apple spin in it, there are some truths. Adobe responded with a letter from their founders but I still feel that Apple do have a point.

There are two main issues here:

1. The Flash plugin has bugs - it crashes, and, according to Microsoft, a security flaw in it was the most common exploit last year.
2. There is no viable alternative plugin that plays Flash files

The first issue is a big one, and I get the impression that Adobe's quality assurance processes aren't up to scratch. Adobe boasts about Flash being installed on most of the world's computers, but to me it doesn't seem as if they take the responsibility that this creates. If your software is ubiquitous, then people are going to find ways of exploiting it for ill-gain - this is why people write viruses for Windows more than Mac OS X. The Flash Crash site will crash the Flash plugin - and yet the owner of the site reported this to Adobe in September 2008.

And in all but the most modern browsers, if Flash crashes, so does the browser. I have little doubt in my mind that one of the main reasons that browser vendors like Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft have been moving to 'Out of process plugins' is driven by Flash's flaws - in the out of process model, a crash in the Flash plugin will only kill its parent process and not the whole browser.

The second issue is that if you want to watch a Flash file, in most cases you must use the Flash plugin. Attempts at an open source alternative, such as Gnash, do exist, but they're not up to parity with the current Flash plugin - Gnash for example is only equivalent to Flash version 7 (with some version 8 and 9 features), whereas the official client is at version 10. Compare this to viewing PDF files where there are viable alternatives to Adobe Reader, such as FoxIt or Apple's built-in Preview application on OS X.

Ed Bott states the Flash is the new Vista - it's a poor quality product and computer users are increasing having a poor perception of it. But because so many web sites use Flash, it's a necessary evil.

Or at least, it is currently a necessary evil.

HTML5 will make the situation better. It avoids the second issue that I mentioned - each browser vendor will implement it themselves, rather than relying on a third-party plugin, and this is especially important on mobile devices as the HTML5 code be written in a way that fully utilises the hardware of the device. Adobe is only now introducing hardware-accelerated H.264 video in its Mac Flash plugin, whereas on the iPhone, H.264 video has been hardware accelerated from the start when used through HTML. Using hardware acceleration where possible on mobile devices is important for performance and battery life reasons.

Once Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 are released, we should find that all the main web browsers have sufficient HTML5 support for Flash to be no longer necessary in many cases. Of course, IE9 isn't available for Windows XP which is still the world's most used operating system, and it will take time for people to upgrade.

Ed Bott makes a good conclusion - he sees Flash still being around in 5 years, but its dominance will have diminished. By how much so will depend on what Adobe does next. If it can pull its finger out and make the Flash plugin more secure, with less bugs and better hardware acceleration (not just for H.264 but also 2D graphics, using Direct2D for example), then it may have a brighter future. If they remain complacent, they could be in trouble in a few years time.

Two big things happened yesterday:

• Steam, the PC gaming client, was officially made available for Mac OS X
• Portal was made available for free for a limited time

As Portal uses Steam, it means that you can install it on Macs as well as Windows PCs. If you've never played it, I'd suggest giving it a try - it's a very original game (your gun creates portals on walls rather than firing bullets) and it has a very dry sense of humour. It has so far won 70 game awards. And there's a cake at the end, allegedly.

You only have until the 24th May 2010 to get Portal for free, so get it now while you can.

As for Steam, while not all the games on it are Mac-compatible yet, there are around 60 titles that are, with more on the way. And if you buy them for the Mac, you'll also be entitled to download them for Windows as well.

Note that if you want to take advantage of Portal, first you have to download the Steam Installer (about 2.7 MB), which then downloads the full Steam client (about 33 MB), and then you can download Portal itself (about 4 GB). If you have any problems, just keep on trying until you run out of cake.

Now that it's available on the Mac, I bought and downloaded The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. It's only $10.

The game is a re-make of the 1990 game The Secret of Monkey Island, which has spawned 4 sequels (the latest, Tales of Monkey Island, was released at the same time as this re-release). It retains the original gameplay, but adds new artwork, re-mastered music and sound effects, and full voiceovers from the same voice cast as subsequent games. A new hint system has been added as well. It's also the first time the game has been officially playable on a Mac - the original can be played through ScummVM however.

Because it keeps the same gameplay as the original, the re-make feels a bit weird; essentially you have high-quality sound and full-colour backdrops with 1990s-era animation. The characters move around in the same way as the original, making the game seem both modern and dated at the same time. This is especially noticeable when compared to Tales of Monkey Island, released last year, which is in 3D and has all of the characters fully animated.

If I'd paid £30 for this I'd be miffed. As it was, it only cost $10, which is a bargain in my book. The game is still very funny almost 20 years on and worth playing, even if I was a bit disappointed by the animation.

I thought I'd do a quick follow-up post about the Apple Magic Mouse. I bought it 6 weeks ago, and at the time was a little unsure whether spending £50 on a mouse was really worth it.

The main thing that prompted me to write this was that the batteries that came with the mouse are about to run out. Mac OS X gives you visual warnings at 20% and 10% (although it was at 20% yesterday, and is now at 7%...), so with a medium amount of usage it seems the batteries last about 6 weeks. I have Ni-MH rechargeable batteries to replace them with.

The fact that it's a Bluetooth mouse means that it has more range than some other wireless mice. I can use it across the room with no problems - great for using it for watching TV channels or DVDs. And it'll work on almost any surface - it doesn't have to be flat or hard, like with other optical mice. Just remember to hold it the right way up.

I really like the inertia scrolling. It can get a little annoying if you're after precision but it makes scrolling long documents much easier (and can be turned off if you need accuracy).

I'm still not completely used to its flatter profile, when compared to other mice - especially as I use a 'regular' mouse at work. While Apple excel at squeezing electronics into small, attractive packages, it would fit better in my hand if it was a little larger.

Overall, I'm satisfied with it. It's not the most amazing mouse ever, mainly due to its flatness, but it has useful features which set it apart from others. I'm not going to be taking it back to the shop anytime soon, that's for sure.

Yesterday Adobe released a new beta version of Flash 10.1 for Mac OS X. There's some interesting new features, so if you want to try them all out, here's what to do:

1. What's new?

• Private browsing support - if your browser has a 'Private Browsing' mode (also known as 'porn mode'), Flash will detect this and not save any data for any sites while the mode is active.
• Out-of-Process plugin support - some browsers, like Firefox and Chrome, can run some plugins in a separate process to the main web browser process. That means that if Flash crashes, it only kills its own process and not the whole browser. So rather than having Firefox crash on you completely, you'll see a greyed-out panel with a sad brick in place of the guilty Flash animation.
• Hardware-accelerated H.264 video - any H.264 video on sites like YouTube or Vimeo will be decoded using your graphics card and not your CPU. This reduces the amount of CPU power needed, and, if you're on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, should increase the battery life.

2. Requirements

While the Private Browsing support is available to all users, some features require specific hardware and software before they will work. For Out of process plugins, you will need:

• Mac OS X Snow Leopard - older versions won't work
• A Mac with an Intel processor - for the above reason, Snow Leopard isn't available for PowerPC Macs
• A browser which supports this feature - Google Chrome and Safari support this now; for Firefox you will need Developer Preview 4. Firefox 3.6.4 will bring this feature to Windows and Linux but more testing needs to be done on OS X.

To get H.264 support working, you will also need, in addition:

• A relatively new Mac with nVidia graphics (such as the 9400M). If your Mac is up to a year old, you're probably fine.

Note that during the beta any videos where hardware acceleration is enabled will have a small white square in the top-left corner, to show it's working.

To see it in action, go to YouTube and watch any video in HD (720p or 1080p). If you have a compatible graphics card, you should find the playback much smoother, especially when viewing full screen on a high-resolution screen.

The lack of hardware-accelerated H.264 support was one of the things Steve Jobs mentioned in his Thoughts on Flash open letter. It's good to see that Adobe has already made some ground; while the likelihood of Flash support being added to the iPhone is somewhere between highly unlikely and never, at least performance on OS X has improved somewhat.

I first mentioned ScummVM on this blog 6 years ago, back when it could only really play LucasArts games and not a lot else. Thankfully a lot has happened in those 6 years and the range of games supported has increased hugely - I've recently been playing on Christine's copies of Simon the Sorcerer, The Feeble Files and Discworld 2.

One 'problem' with ScummVM is that you need the original discs to play the games it supports; otherwise it would be infringing copyright. So until now, if you haven't owned any of the supported games, it's not been very useful.

The latest release, ScummVM 1.1.0, adds support for 2 free games, however - Dragon History and Teen Agent. This means that these 2 games are now playable on any platform which ScummVM runs on, which includes Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, Windows Mobile, IRIX, AmigaOS, various mobile phones and some games consoles.

Of course, if you don't mind paying for some of the supported games, you can still buy some of them at GOG.com, including the aforementioned Simon the Sorcerer.

In October last year I uninstalled RealPlayer from my computer. Almost exactly 6 months on and I've not encountered any audio or video which refused to play as a result. The ubiquity and ease of Flash video has basically killed off its rivals, and many sites which relied on Real technologies now offer alternatives.

This has started a new trend for me: plugin minimalism. I've disabled, or uninstalled, as many of my browser's plugins as possible to see how easy it is to do without them. Having lots of plugins potentially opens you up to a wider range of security flaws; no matter how secure your browser is, if Flash, or QuickTIme, or Silverlight has a security flaw then you're still at risk.

I've uninstalled Adobe Shockwave - this was essentially the pre-cursor to Flash and although Adobe are still supporting it almost no-one uses it anymore.

QuickTime is disabled, for similar reasons to RealPlayer above. Of course, as I use a Mac, uninstalling QuickTime is not an option, and even on Windows I wouldn't recommend it. iTunes uses it, as does some third-party software like Trillian. The DivX plugin has suffered a similar fate; I would uninstall it completely but I do have a DivX license. Not that I really use it...

The iPhotoPhotocast and Picasa plugins are disabled on account of me not having a clue what they actually do. I don't use iPhoto or Picasa Web Albums. And Microsoft's Silverlight is disabled until I find more sites which use it - right now, few sites other than microsoft.com feature it.

Firefox's Addons Manager lets you disable and enable plugins without a restart, so re-enabling them is straightforward if I do find them useful. Of course, uninstalling is a little more permanent but so far I haven't regretted removing Shockwave or RealPlayer.

So, what's actually enabled? Java, for sites like Facebook and ThinkBroadband's speed checker; and Flash, for reasons I've discussed. That's it. Just those two.

Maybe in future the average web user won't even need those 2 plugins - provided HTML5 takes off. Having all interactive content support built into the browser will make system administration so much easier - just one product to keep up to date instead of a variety of packages.

I'm sure the day will come when we can have our desktop, applications and data stored in 'the cloud' - accessible from anywhere and safely backed up by a subscription service. While some systems do exist, we'll need much better broadband access, amongst other things, before it can become ubiquitous.

In the meantime, there are services which will synchronise files and settings between multiple desktop computers. The two I've started using are Dropbox and Mozilla Weave.

Dropbox initially provides you with 2 GB of free storage, but you can get up to 3 GB by referring friends (here's my referral link) or pay for more - 50 GB costs $10/month and 100 GB costs $20/month. It provides desktop clients for Windows (XP, Vista and 7), Mac OS X (10.4+) and Linux (binaries for Ubuntu 7.1+ and Fedora Core 9+, source code for other distros), and there's also a web interface, an iPhone app and an Android app is in the works.

It works by creating a folder called 'Dropbox' in your home folder. Any files you put in the Dropbox folder are automagically synchronised with Dropbox's servers. It will even save previous copies of files, as well as deleted files, for up to 30 days - and even longer with the paid-for packages. Then, when you log in on another machine with the Dropbox client, it will update the Dropbox folder on that machine with the files on the server. It works really well - files you put in your dropbox on one computer appear on another the next time you log on. There's no manual uploading or 'do you want to overwrite' messages. The clients for Mac OS X and Windows are both very unobtrusive and just work quietly in the background.

Dropbox is great for ensuring important files are always accessible, and is easier than sending files to yourself by email. It also serves as a useful off-site backup.

Mozilla Weave is a little more specific in that it just keeps settings and personal information in Firefox synchronised between multiple machines. It'll copy passwords, history, bookmarks and browser settings. There's no web interface (so you can't view saved passwords on another machine without Weave for example) but it will work with Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox. Again, once set-up, it will run quietly in the background.

Thanks to these two applications, I have consistent browsing experience and access to the most recent copies of my key files, whether I'm on a Windows machine or Mac. Best of all, they're free to use.

Last week I mentioned the MacHeist nanoBundle 2, which I bought due to the inclusion of Tales of Monkey Island - the whole bundle cost less than buying the game on its own. I was also interested in RapidWeaver and CoverScout, but, in all honesty, most of the other applications weren't of much interest to me (and I had just bought Tweetie the previous week).

This isn't the first time I've bought a MacHeist bundle - about 2 years ago one was offered which included the formidable Pixelmator, again, for less than the cost of Pixelmator on its own. And, like with the more recent bundle, I received license codes for a whole load of applications which don't really interest me.

I keep all of my license codes in 1Password, which I got as part of the same bundle as Pixelmator, and I've installed less than half of the applications I own licenses for. These include programs like iStopMotion, which looks like a great tool for making stop-motion animations. Unfortunately, I don't really have the time or inclination to do that sort of thing.

On the other hand, 1Password is a good example of a program which I wouldn't have bought based on its own merits, but have come to like as a result of it being bundled. It's useful for web designers who use several browsers, since it allows you to have a central password store that Firefox, Safari and (soon) Google Chrome can all share. I also like its wallet function, for automatically filling out credit card details, and the aforementioned software license store. I feel like an 'app of the week' entry coming along...

It's a shame that I have all of these license codes for software that I'm never going to use. On the plus side, I didn't pay much for them and should I ever decide to make the next Wallace & Gromit I'll at least have the software to do it.

My £7 wireless mouse from Tesco decided to stop syncing last week, and after spending a few days surviving with a wired mouse that no longer right-clicked I decided to get a new mouse.

Having looked at what PC World had to offer (and the prices), I ended up settling for the new Apple Magic Mouse. At £56 it was pricey, but then Apple tends to have good build quality so hopefully it'll last a while, and I was impressed with the demonstration mouse in the shop.

Design-wise it looks very good - side-on it looks symmetrical, and if it weren't for the Apple logo at the bottom it would be possible to use it the wrong way up. It's also very flat, which takes getting used to. Despite the fact it takes two AA batteries (supplied), it's also quite light.

Scrolling is achieved by essentially stroking the mouse with your finger - there's no physical scroll wheel. You can also scroll left and right as well as up and down, as with the older Mighty Mouse - though as yet I haven't found much of a need for this.

The mouse connects via Bluetooth, and thankfully transmits its battery status to the computer so you know when to recharge it - this is a problem with cheaper wireless mice as there's nothing worse than playing World of Warcraft with 24 other people and having your mouse run out of battery in the middle of a raid. Especially if you don't have any others charged up.

Criticisms? I'm used to a mouse that fits in my hand better, and the right-click ability isn't as sensitive as I'd like, but this review is based on all of around 30 minutes use. I'll see how I feel after a week. And if it turns out to be rubbish then I can always take it back...

Christine was with me when I bought it (after I ummed and arred about it for a good half hour, due to the price). Her main comment was that it didn't come in pink.

I'm a bit late in posting this, but there are 3 days left to get the MacHeist nanoBundle 2. From time to time MacHeist will offer a bundle of applications for a knock-down price - right now, for USD $19.95, you get fully licensed copies of:

• MacJournal - a journal tool that can also be used for blogging (normally $39.95)
• RipIt - DVD ripping software (normally $19.95)
• Clips - clipboard managing software (normally €19.95)
• CoverScout - finds missing cover art for your iTunes music collection (normally €29.95)
• Flow - an advanced FTP/SFTP client (normally $25)

If you post a Tweet about your purchase straight afterwards, you also get:

• Tracks - lets you browse and playback your iTunes library from a notification area icon (normally $11)
• Airbust Extreme - strategy game (normally $20)
• Burning Monkey Solitaire - the infamous card game (normally $25)

At the time of writing, you'll also get all 5 episodes of Tales of Monkey Island, the latest 5th game in the Monkey Island series which is now available on the Mac as well as Windows. That's worth $34.95.

Finally the critically acclaimed RapidWeaver will also become unlocked at some point as well, which retails for $79.95.

And, not only are you getting several hundred dollars worth of software for $19.95, but some of the money raised will be donated to up to 11 charities, including Save the Children and the Haiti appeal.

It's a fantastic deal, and if you're a Mac user you would be wise to take advantage of it. In past bundles I've picked up software such as Pixelmator and AppZapper for significantly less than they would cost to buy otherwise, and both tools have been very useful.

Some of you may be familiar with, or even own, a phone which uses Google's Android operating system - a smartphone OS which is forked from Linux. Google commissioned a family of fonts called Droid from Ascender Corporation, which were released under the Apache License. They're quite attractive fonts designed for user interfaces - there's a serif, sans serif and fixed-width (monospace) variant.

As they're open source, it's possible to get these for free. Some web sites sell them, but if you visit Android's source code repository, you can download them in TrueType format for free.

The fonts are located here. You'll need to click on the 'raw' links next to the TTF files and then save them somewhere. Once they're all downloaded, copy them to your system's font folder, and enjoy!

If you're using Ubuntu, here's a slightly easier way - as you'll see from the screenshots on the page, the Droid fonts are much more readable and use less horizontal width than the system fonts.

You can also get a handful of free fonts from here, some of which are open source.

During the host move I mentioned that I had purchased a new Mac Mini. I currently own an original PowerPC Mac Mini, which as well as not being able to run Snow Leopard is also feeling very lacklustre performance-wise, and a MacBook, which is starting to die a slow death due to overuse and abuse (it really wasn't designed for long World of Warcraft sessions).

I settled for the Mac Mini as it provided the best compromise between power and price. As much as I'd love a Mac Pro, I'm not at a stage where I can spare over a grand for a computer. The iMacs are nice but I already have a relatively new 23" screen (the LG Flatron I wrote about in September), and don't have the desk space for a second monitor.

The model I picked was the 2.53Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo model, with 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB hard drive. Like all Mac Minis it packs a nVidia GeForce 9400M graphics chip, which isn't amazing but is significantly better than the Intel GMA 950 chip in my MacBook. All in all, it made a £600 dent on my credit card.

Thanks to Time Machine, setting the machine was so easy it almost felt disappointing - it took all the fun out of playing with new settings as everything was copied over from my MacBook. But it did mean I could use it as I'd used my MacBook straightaway, with only a few programs needing re-installing for 64-bit compatibility. World of Warcraft is a much nicer experience - rather than struggling with every performance setting to minimum, I can set it to 'Fair' and have a smooth 30fps almost everywhere in the game. It's nice to be able to see further into the distance and have spells at a higher level of detail.

Compared to the older Mac Mini model, this is an improvement - 5 USB ports rather than 2, thus negating the need for a USB hub, and the use of mini-DVI (with an included DVI adaptor) means there's also room for a Mini DisplayPort as well, which presumably means dual monitors is a possibility when I get more money and a bigger desk.

I'll keep the old Mac Mini for, um, something, but the MacBook will be finding itself a new home once I've bought a netbook to replace it. Or an iPad, I haven't decided yet.

I'm spending the weekend at my parents' house in York and so my duties as the person who knows about computers come into play. This usually involves ensuring that all the software on my parents' computers (a shared desktop and my dad's laptop) are up-to-date, and fixing any problems that have arisen since my last visit.

This time, my dad has a new laptop.

I helped him buy it from Amazon. A Mac laptop was ruled out early on, since Apple don't do an affordable MacBook with a reasonably large screen (this is something Microsoft touched on in a recent TV advertising campaign). He wanted something bigger than the 13" screen that the MacBook comes without paying £1299 for the 15" MacBook Pro, which would also have been overkill for what he needs it for.

So we were looking for something running Windows. I suggested waiting until Windows 7 had come out, so we did. I also suggested going for a computer with a 64-bit processor and the 64-bit edition of Windows 7. While it may result in some incompatibilities with very old software, I believe that we're now at the tipping point where 32-bit computers and software will go out of fashion and only serve the low end of the market, with 64-bit machines taking over the mid-range. It also means that the computer would be upgradable beyond the 3 GB of RAM that it ships with.

Ultimately, he settled for a HP laptop from Amazon, costing £450. It has an AMD Turion II dual-core processor, 320 GB hard drive, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, DVD Rewriter drive and a few other bells and whistles like a remote control for Windows Media Centre, an HDMI port and an eSATA port which also doubles up as a fourth USB port. In terms of 'crapware' it wasn't too badly inflicted - an AOL toolbar and 60-day trials of Norton and Office 2007 - all swiftly removed.

For the anti-virus I gave Microsoft Security Essentials a go, and it seems to work well as a simple, unobtrusive anti-virus program. It may not have the fancy features that Norton and McAfee offer, or even some of the features of the likes of AVG and Avast!, but it seems to do the basics very well, without monopolising a significant amount of computer resources.

Buying a computer with Windows 7 pre-installed ensured that we avoided most of the potential driver faults, though it still seemed remarkably stable (so far). The refinements over Windows Vista are subtle, but welcome, and it's definitely a leap forward over Windows XP. Installing a printer connected to another machine running Windows XP was as painless as it is on a Mac - all you have to do is tell Windows you want to add a printer, say it's on the network and it'll present it to you in a few seconds - and then it'll download and install the drivers for you automatically. That's how easy it should be.

Speed-wise it's very fast. Obviously it's fresh out of the box so no doubt it'll slow down over time, but installing software and indexing photos have all been very quick, even when running 32-bit programs. I've not noticed any incompatibilities when running 32-bit software on it either.

I have to say I'm quite impressed at how good the machine is, considering the price, and Windows 7 is living up to some of the more glowing reviews I've seen of it. Still.... I think my next computer will be a Mac. As much as I like this laptop and Windows 7, I'll stick with Apple build quality and design, which is still ahead of HP and Microsoft in my view. Not by as much, but still ahead.

1. Reset the SMC controller
2. Reset the PRAM and NVRAM
3. Repaired disk permissions
4. Deleted Bluetooth preference files from my Home and System Library folders

And none of them have worked. Looks like my MacBook's Bluetooth controller is dead. Great.

Update: It's working again. Apparently all I needed to do was turn the computer off (at the plug), leave it overnight and turn it on again the following morning. How bizarre.

In light of the news that the BBC is abandoning RealMedia for its live streaming and listen again services, I've decided to uninstall RealPlayer from my Mac. Because, as far as I can remember, the only web site that I visit that still uses RealMedia was the BBC's site and all of the streams that I used to listen to or watch have been replaced with Flash or Windows Media.

I'm therefore going to see how long I can survive without RealPlayer. Hopefully, it'll be 50 MB of program files which I'll never need to re-install. While the Mac version is far less annoying than its Windows counterpart, it feels strangely liberating to be rid of it.

So by now you will know that I now own a LG Flatron W2353V TFT screen, and have reviewed it. Now, I have another one to give away!

First of all, the rules:

• This competition is only open to residents of mainland United Kingdom.
• There is 1 prize of a LG Flatron W2353V TFT screen for the winner. There is no cash alternative.
• The winner will be drawn by me from the correct entries.
• Closing date is 17:00 BST on Tuesday 6th October.
• The winner consents for their name and address to be passed to LG so that the screen can be sent to them.

Here's the question you need to answer:

What is the contrast ratio of the LG Flatron W2353V screen?

To enter, email lgcompetition@neilturner.me.uk with your answer, your name and your postal address. Please also state in your email if you do not want your name to be made public if you win.

Good luck!

This is the second of 3 entries about the LG Flatron W2353V, a 23" flat screen TFT monitor that LG have asked me to review. In this entry, I'll go into a little more detail about the screen and what it is like to use.

Compared to my previous monitor, a 17"ViewSonic VX715 which I bought in 2005, the Flatron comes in a relatively small box. This is partly due to the detachable base and less polystyrene, so there's less waste. In the box is the monitor (obviously...), the base, power lead, DVI cable, VGA cable, quick start guide and a CD-ROM. The CD-ROM disc presumably contains the manual and drivers but oddly my MacBook couldn't read it.

This post is coming to you via my new LG Flatron W2353V TFT monitor!

I'll be posting one or two entries about this screen as LG have asked me to review it for them. There will also be a chance to win your very own monitor as well, details of which will be posted in the coming days.

Since I know may of you are techie people, here are the technical details:

• Features LG's SMART technology, which automatically adjusts the screen brightness depending on how much light is around the monitor - this is to help reduce eye strain, and also reduces power consumption by up to 25% in well-lit rooms.
• Cinema mode, designed for sites like YouTube - when activated, the non-movie part of the screen is dimmed, so that you can focus on the movie.
• 2 millisecond response time and no afterimage
• 50:000 to 1 dynamic contrast ratio, to ensure that images are still bright and detailed even in high-light conditions.
• Has VGA, DVI and HDMI ports, so you can connect your XBox 360, PlayStation 3 or a Sky+ HD box to it without needing any special adaptors. Comes with VGA and DVI cables in the box.
• Native 1920x1080 resolution.
• And it's a whopping 23 inches across!

I'm really pleased with it so far, even it is rather large, but that's because I'm mostly used to a 13-inch MacBook screen - this is almost twice the size. The resolution is also mind-blowing - you can have many more windows open on the same desktop.

Part 2 of my review, where I go a little beyond my initial observations, will follow tomorrow.

Last week, I found that the Magsafe adaptor for my MacBook had melted. As you can see from the pictures, the plastic insulation on the wire at each end had melted away to reveal the bare wire.

I've managed to replace it, but a new adaptor costs £30, and that's from a store on Amazon - to buy from Apple direct would cost closer to £50. Because the unit is 3 years old, it is well outside its warranty period and I didn't pay for AppleCare so I can't get it replaced free of charge. While it was still usable in its partially-melted state, having bare wire showing, even with only DC current passing through, isn't very safe.

Next on my shopping list will be a new battery for the MacBook, as this one is down to about 25% of its original capacity at new (according to coconutBattery) and Mac OS X's battery indicator suggests that it needs servicing. This will be another £60 or so. But, it's cheaper than a new machine and this should have at least another couple of years of life left in it.

I hope.

Snow Leopard now seems to be running fine, with only a few minor exceptions, which I'm listing below for the benefit of those who are considering upgrading:

1. Missing Sync for Windows Mobile. This doesn't work, even with the latest beta that is supposedly Snow Leopard -compatible. Connecting over USB simply does nothing - I plug my device in and nothing happens. Over Bluetooth, when I ask the device to connect to my Mac, Missing Sync acknowledges the device and tries to establish a connection, but it times out. Mark/Space's web site is also currently down, it seems, so I can't check their knowledge base. The latest beta, downloaded after this entry was written, now works correctly on Snow Leopard.
2. iPod syncing. When I first plugged my iPod in, iTunes decided it was synced to a different computer. This was probably more due to the way I upgraded, using a wipe, install and then copy data from backup, rather than a straight upgrade. It soon decided that actually it was the right computer. It also needed re-authorising with the iTunes store, but again, decided it was already authorised afterwards. The main issue was that it also refused to sync my Address Book and iCal events, saying I had no contacts or events - even though I did. I found that manually opening iSync seemed to fix this, and now everything works fine.
3. Plaxo. Plaxo doesn't work in Snow Leopard - Sync does nothing. There doesn't appear to be a new version, so I uninstalled it. Address Book now natively supports syncing to Google, so I'm using that instead - this means that my contacts are also available in Gmail. Zindus supports syncing between Thunderbird and Gmail, and on Windows OggSync supports syncing between Outlook and Gmail, so between all of those I don't really need Plaxo anymore anyway.

While it took longer than expected, my MacBook is now running Snow Leopard with no obvious issues. It's noticeably zippier - Finder is especially quicker, which is very welcome.

After the Snow Leopard installer had finished copying data from my Time Machine backup, and had phoned home to Apple to register itself, I was taken back to a very familiar-looking desktop - it had successfully copied all of my applications and settings over.

But not my documents.

For some reason, my Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures and Movies folders were all empty. I think it may have encountered a permissions issue and decided to give up, but apart from the files in my home root folder there were just a series of empty folders.

Thankfully I was able to drag and drop the missing files off the backup drive in Finder, and so now everything is present and correct. It just seems weird that it copied all of the things I'd have forgotten to backup manually but left out the really obvious stuff.

Other than the speed increases there's not a whole lot new. QuickTime X is much improved, and now includes all of the features of QuickTime Pro. So you're getting a complete OS upgrade for around the same price that QuickTime Pro used to sell for. Scrolling Stacks are a welcome feature, especially for large folders.

Having acquired an external hard drive (borrowed for free from a very kind housemate), I was able to do a full Time Machine backup, which I left running overnight.

Then, this morning I started up the Snow Leopard installer, used Disk Utility to wipe the hard disk and set it to use the GUID partition table, and then installed Snow Leopard. If you're interested, I opted to install Rosetta but unticked the extra printers, languages and QuickTime 7, saving me around 2 GB of disk space. The install took around 25 minutes, which isn't bad.

After a reboot, and the flashy welcome animation, the installer asked me if I wanted to transfer files and settings from my Time Machine backup. This is where I am up to as it's around 30 minutes into copying the data back, and I'm now off to work. Apart from the faff with wiping the disk, the whole process has been very painless and I'm impressed that it was able to pull my documents, settings and applications out of the Time Machine backup without needing to restore everything.

Obviously the proof of the pudding will be when the installation is finished later on.

My copy of Snow Leopard arrived this morning, but as yet I haven't been able to install it, as it's failing at the first hurdle.

The problem is the partition table used on my hard disk (which isn't the original disk that came with my Mac - I upgraded last year), which is of the MBR (Master Boot Record) variety. This is great for compatibility but Snow Leopard doesn't like it, and insists that I only use the GUID partition table. And changing the table requires reformatting the hard disk.

While I do have Time Machine backing up my personal data and the core operating system, I don't have enough space on the backup drive to fit everything on it - it doesn't take a genius to work out that 140 GB of data won't fit on a 60 GB hard drive. And while most things of sentimental value, like my photos and music, are safely backed up, things like World of Warcraft which is a 16 GB behemoth are not - and I don't fancy spending a whole day re-installing it from 10 discs and then downloading a further gigabyte of content patches.

Thankfully I live with someone who works at an electronics store and so a 250 GB external drive will hopefully be here later tonight. This means I'll be able to do a full backup and then do a fresh install of Snow Leopard, rather than an upgrade - in the 3 years I have had this machine I've never done a full re-install, even when upgrading from Tiger to Leopard 2 years ago. And then I can restore my applications and data from the Time Machine backup.

It's a faff, and one that's cost me - while large hard drives are cheap these days it's an expense that I didn't expect.

On Friday evening, I posted the following to Twitter:

Okay, so I'm running Windows XP in VMWare through Sun Secure Global Desktop on Windows 7 in VirtualBox in Mac OS X. Phew!

Some of the responses quite rightly questioned my sanity, what with this being Friday night, but others were confused as to why I was going so much effort to run Windows XP. The key is that the Windows XP environment was not on my own computer - it was at work.

At work we use Sun Ray thin clients, namely the Sun Ray 270 units which integrate a 17" TFT screen. These then connect to a central server running VMWare, which houses a series of Windows XP virtual machines. This means that we can hotdesk - any Sun Ray terminal will let us access our virtual machine on the Sun Ray server and let us use it as if it the computer was on our desk in front of us, and not in another part of the site,

We also have access to the Sun Secure Global Desktop (SSGP) which extends this access to the web. Theoretically any computer in the world with Java can be used as a terminal, so it's possible to access our work desktop, and all of our applications, from home or an internet cafe.

Unfortunately the SSGP client applet doesn't work reliably on Macs, which instead of using Sun's official Java Runtime Environment, use a customised version co-developed with Apple (this means we get prettier Java applications at the expense of slower security updates and slightly reduced compatibility). So to allow me to access my desktop at work, I had to load up my copy of the Windows 7 release candidate in VirtualBox (queue a stream of tweets moaning about Windows Update choking on a package for around an hour).

So while my machine was running Mac OS X, I had VirtualBox open with Windows 7 in it. That then ran the SSGP client which connected to the Sun Ray server at work, which then opened up my Windows XP desktop running on VMWare.

If you understood that, then congratulations, you're a computer geek.

If you're at all interested in all things Apple you'll know that Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, was released yesterday. I haven't got my copy yet but it is on order from Amazon, so hopefully I'll have my paws on it next week. I've only ordered the single license copy this time and not the Family Pack, as Apple have decided that my 4-year-old PowerPC Mac Mini is too decrepit to run Snow Leopard. A shame, but that's the price of progress I suppose.

It will, however, run on my 3-year-old MacBook, as it has an Intel processor. I won't be able to take advantage of some of the new features, such as OpenCL or H.264 hardware acceleration in QuickTime X. And the processor is 32-bit so none of the 64-bit code will be used. But it does have a dual-core processor so Grand Central Dispatch will be able to make both cores work harder, and based on various first-hand reviews I should expect faster startup and shutdown.

In terms of new features, full support for my HP DeskJet F2100 series printer is provided out of the box (partly due to a new version of CUPS) so I won't need HP's drivers - this includes scanning and copying support built-in to the OS. Mac OS X will also now remove printer drivers for any printers that I don't use, freeing up a few gigabytes of space.

Support for Exchange 2007 doesn't really affect me as I don't use Apple Mail or Exchange for my email, nor do the iChat changes since I use Adium. The improvement to Services are welcome - until now they've been a useful but misaligned feature of the OS.

There are some pitfalls for early adopters, however, as some programs won't work straight off the bat. The release of Snow Leopard was brought forward with little warning and so some programs are not yet fully compatible - there are issues with Growl, for example, and while a new version is on the way it's not ready yet. I've also heard there's problems with third-party screensavers. I'd therefore recommend you install AppFresh which is great for notifying you of available software updates for third-party programs. And obviously do a full backup of your system before you upgrade in case you have a power cut while it's installing, or encounter some other issues.

I may or may not give my own first impressions of Snow Leopard next week, depending on how I'm feeling. Today was my first day off work in 13 days and so I haven't really had the time or the inclination to think about things to blog about.

Do you have an HP printer with an LCD display that is network addressable? Want to have a bit of fun with it? Follow these instructions to get something like this:

Emo printer has feelings too by Joe Attardi, used under license

There's more on the 'hpinsertcoin' tag on Flickr.

All the printers we use at work are HP, but if the office was evacuated because I'd made a printer say it had a radiation leak I probably wouldn't have a job for much longer. Besides, I don't know their IP addresses.

[Via Utterly Boring]

I'm a bit slow on posting about this since it happened in June, but Shareaza, one of the best peer-to-peer clients for Windows has had to change its official web site again due to it being sabotaged by outside forces.

Originally the site was at shareaza.com, with some material hosted on SourceForge (the program has been open source since 2004). The owner of the domain eventually gave it up after a legal challenge and it was bought out by iMesh, a company which used to release an eponymous peer-to-peer client of their own but now sells a 'legitimate' music download application. They then released a program known as 'ShareazaV4', which was actually just a rebranded version of their own iMesh program. As well as stealing the Shareaza name, it used the Shareaza branding as well, and apparently came bundled with spyware. As such, I won't link to shareaza.com and it's notable that searching for 'shareaza' on Google or Yahoo! will not show shareaza.com anymore.

Upon the loss of shareaza.com, the project moved completely to SourceForge, but was later offered hosting at the pantheraproject.net domain and this was adopted as the 'new' home of the official client Shareaza. The owners of shareaza.com, which had now passed to a company called Discordia (which appears to be an international shell company for iMesh) applied to register Shareaza as a trademark at the US Patent and Trademark Office. The official Shareaza project started a legal defence fund; the trademark application has now been published for opposition so hopefully the case will be heard now.

But last month the pantheraproject.net domain was also sabotaged, by a chap named William Shields Erwin, who had gained rank in the project by donating money to the legal defence fund. All of the content on the site was lost and it too ended up pointing at shareaza.com, which offers iMesh's fake Shareaza client. So Shareaza has again ended up back at SourceForge and has had to establish a new wiki and forum with as much content from the old domain as was possible to retrieve.

If Shareaza was an illegal piece of software, this kind of action may be proportionate, but it isn't. While it can be used to facilitate copyright infringement, which generally is illegal, the application can also be used solely for legal means, such as downloading content from sites like LegalTorrents. The company which is allegedly responsible for the sabotage, iMesh, claims to be a legal download service, but it is seemingly engaging in activities which disregard intellectual property, rather than protect it. It just so happens that the intellectual property it appears to want to sabotage belongs to the Shareaza project and not entertainment industry rights-holders.

Shareaza's open source nature means it's unlikely that it will ever disappear - provided there are enough copies of the source code spread about and people willing to keep it going, it'll keep coming back. But to come under such a sustained attack for making something that isn't breaking any laws is morally wrong.

It's Monday, so it's time for part three of the Mac Mini Media Centre project entries - the software, or what makes the user interface look different to a normal computer. Remember that I'm currently in France and that this entry was written a few weeks ago.

There are several media centre applications available for Macs under a variety of licenses: open source, free and commercial. All of them have various advantages and disadvantages, but my aim is to choose one that fulfils most or all of the requirements that I set out in week 1.

Plex and Boxee

I'm mentioning these 2 because they're both quite popular, but unfortunately neither are available for older PowerPC-based Macs; only the newer Intel ones. One of my aims is to reuse my existing Mac Mini so these are out of the question.

Front Row

Front Row is Apple's own media centre application, which shipped on all new Macs from 2006 onwards and was made available to all Macs with Leopard; my Mac Mini falls into the latter category. It used to be quite basic but can now play content from iTunes, photos from iPhoto and DVDs. It can also play content from other machines that share their libraries using iTunes' protocol across a network. It doesn't support TV adaptors and can't be tuned to internet TV channels, although it does support podcasts.

MediaCentral

MediaCentral is a commercial media centre for Macs by the same people as the TubeStick, and as I was one of the early buyers of the TubeStick I got a free license for this. It's more customisable than Front Row, and does most of the things Front Row can do except the network support. It does support internet TV but doesn't appear to integrate with the BBC iPlayer, which is a shame. You can use it to watch stuff on YouTube, however. Naturally it integrates with the TubeStick so it can be used for watching TV and it also has support for internet radio, something that can be done with iTunes and Front Row but not very gracefully in my experience. If it provided network support, this would probably be perfect, but it's not quite there.

XBMC

XBMC stands for XBox Media Centre, as it was originally developed for Microsoft's XBox but can be run other platforms too. It supports a wide range of media and can play back DVDs, but has poor iTunes integration meaning having to maintain a separate music library. The Mac version also can't stream from other computers very well. There's no integration with TV adaptors either.

MythTV

I had a look at creating a MythTV system but it looks rather too complicated - it's mostly available in source code form only and I'd prefer something pre-packaged. While I could probably tailor a MythTV system to achieve everything I want, I don't think I have the time or the know-how to do it.

Based on this, it's likely that I will go with MediaCentral as the software but I may give Front Row a fair shot too, especially if I decide not to go with digital TV integration.

One of the 'duties' you acquire as the member of the family who knows something about computers is that you end up trying to keep your parents' computer updated with software patches etc.

Adobe Reader is not so good in this regard. The machine had version 4.1.2, and the latest version is 4.1.6. Now rather than offering to update from 4.1.2 directly, it would download and install 4.1.3, 4.1.4 and 4.1.5, before finally downloading and installing 4.1.6. Admittedly it did install partial patches, rather than downloading full versions of each, but it still meant having to repeatedly check for updates. I don't think many users would know to do it more than once.

Firefox, on the other hand, has a much better update process - it will always download the latest stable version, even if there have been less recent updates that haven't been installed. Co-incidentally, Firefox 3.5 was released today, so regardless of what version you are running now, you should be able to check for updates and get the very latest edition.

It's Monday, so it's time for part two of the Mac Mini Media Centre project entries - the hardware, as in what I have to work with at the moment and what I need to buy. I actually have most of the hardware already, at the time of writing this - the only thing I don't yet have is a remote control, which I'll write about in more detail in 2 weeks time.

Mac Mini

I wouldn't be calling this if I didn't have a Mac Mini to base it on, so the main brains of the project is, of course, an Apple Mac Mini. Specifically it's a 2005-era 1.42 GHz PowerPC-based Mac Mini, with 1 GB of RAM, 80 GB hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, Airport, Bluetooth, 56k internal modem, 2 USB ports, a FireWire port, a 100 MBit Ethernet port and a DVI port. The OS is Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). It was my main desktop PC but became rather sidelined from late 2006 when I bought a more powerful and more versatile MacBook, so it has spent much of the past 2-3 years being rather underused. It still works perfectly okay so there's no point in getting rid of it, hence why I want to give it some kind of purpose again.

Apple DVI -> S-Video/Composite adaptor

I bought this back in January. It converts the DVI output from the Mac Mini to S-Video Composite video (the yellow RCA plug, which can be converted to SCART if needed). It's possible that the Mac Mini will in fact be connected to a DVI-capable computer monitor after all, but if not this adaptor will enable it to connect to all but the newest TV screens; for those I can buy a separate DVI -> HDMI adaptor.

Griffin iMic

The iMic is a USB sound device for Macs and PCs - like an external sound card. I bought this back in September 2005 as it provides better sound quality than the rather poor onboard sound that the Mac Mini comes with, and also provides a microphone/line-in socket which the Mac Mini lacks altogether. This isn't really core to the media centre but it will form part of the finished project.

Equinux Tube Stick

The TubeStick is a DVB-T adaptor for your Mac (and Windows PC too although you need extra software). In other words, it lets you watch digital TV received through your aerial on your Mac. Like the Mac Mini it's also rather under-used, owing to the very poor terrestrial TV signal in Bradford. Though I'd like this to be incorporated into the media centre I have a feeling that the main obstacle is going to be local geography more than anything else.

Remote control

As I have an older Mac Mini, it didn't ship with the Apple Remote which comes with all new Macs. Though my MacBook has one, there's no IR receiver on the Mac Mini so it's not of any use. I'll therefore need to procure a separate remote control system, or one that lets me use the existing Apple Remote.

Next week: software

It's Monday, so it's time for part one of the Mac Mini Media Centre project entries - the requirements. In other words, what I actually want the thing to do.

Essentially I am converting a desktop computer for use as a set-top box plugged into a TV. So, instead of using a keyboard and mouse to control it, I'll be using a remote control and instead of a computer monitor I'll be using a TV. But the Mac Mini was designed as a desktop computer so some adaptations are necessary.

The core requirements, i.e. the ones that the media centre must absolutely be capable of are as follows:

1. Can be connected to a TV rather than a computer monitor
2. Can be controlled by a remote control
3. Can be operated effectively from a distance

The last one is a software requirement - user interfaces on computers are designed on the basis that the user is probably no more than 1-2 feet away. Whereas I'm likely to be 2-3 metres away from a TV screen, so naturally the interface has to be readable from a distance. A standard computer user interface, especially one designed around a mouse and keyboard, is no use here.

The next set of requirements is the 'important' set - features I want the box to be able to do. It should be able to do most if not all of these:

1. Play DVDs
2. Play music from CDs and iTunes
3. Play media stored on the hard drive
4. Receive digital television broadcasts

And finally the 'nice to haves':

1. Play media from other computers on a network
2. Play podcasts (audio and video)
3. Play media from sites like BBC iPlayer
4. Be able to record television broadcasts and then be able to play them back

The purpose of the media centre is that it will be a box in my room which handles the majority of my media, whether I want to listen to music, watch something on TV or a DVD, or watch something I've previously downloaded. It'll be connected to a TV screen and my stereo system, and can be controlled using a remote control.

So that's what I want it to do. Now I just have to make it work.

Next week: hardware

2 years ago I had grand plans for turning my Mac Mini into a media centre. As it happened, I never really got the project off the ground - my last 'update' was in March last year. And to be honest, although I had the machine up and running as a media centre I didn't actually use it much at all.

Anyhow, I've decided to resurrect the plan, due to my imminent move to a more permanent shared house in Bradford, rather than slumming it in people's spare rooms as has been the case for the past 6 weeks. I'll be sharing with 2 other lads and while there will be a big shared TV in the living room I'd also like something in my room. I also donated my old DVD player to a friend so I no longer have a standalone device for playing DVDs, apart from my MacBook and the Mac Mini.

(I also no longer own a TV but I'll work something out...)

Unlike last time, when I promised to write several entries about the project and then forgot about it, I'm going to write them ahead of time, to be published once a week on Mondays - you could call it Mac Mini Media Monday if you wanted. This will also mean that entries may appear while I'm out of the country in early July.

My plan is as follows:

1. Detail the requirements - like any good project, I'll list what the device needs to be able to do, and what would be nice
2. Hardware - what I've got and what I want to add to it
3. Software - what software there is available and what I will be using
4. Remote control - how I intend to control the media centre while curled up in bed
5. Further work - little extras that I am considering beyond the basics
6. Evaluation - how it all ended up. This will obviously be written after I have the whole thing working.

That's 6 weeks of content that I'm promising you, which should get you through to the end of July. Plus not-so-regularly scheduled blogging about other stuff in between. Right, better get writing...

2009 is set to bring both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard (aka 10.6) - both of which are evolutions, rather than revolutions, from their predecessors. Rather than bringing big new features, the focus on both has been to improve performance and refine clunky aspects of the operating systems.

Apple released details of Snow Leopard yesterday at the WWDC - you can view full details here. As it's not a significant upgrade over Leopard (aka 10.5), the upgrade price will be much cheaper than normal, at only $29. Quite how that will translate into pounds remains to be seen but I'd estimate £20-25, which is very reasonable.

Some of the changes in Snow Leopard that most impress me are as follows:

• The 'Services' menu has been re-designed, and is now context-sensitive. Right now you can highlight a word in, say, Safari, and then when you open the Services menu you'll be overwhelmed by a huge list of services provided by other applications, with about 80% greyed out. In Snow Leopard, you will be able to right-click and just see the services which are relevant, such as being able to look the word up in a dictionary.
• Grand Central Dispatch - a new core technology which makes better use of multi-core processors. This means that applications that haven't been specifically designed to use multiple cores can now do so. Almost all Macs from the past 3 years have Intel processors with 2 or more cores so this should be a welcome performance boost.
• Smaller installed size - OS X will require around 6 GB less disk space. Apple have announced that Snow Leopard will be Intel-only (sorry PowerPC users) so this will probably be because the applications will just have Intel code and not be universal binaries.
• Re-write of Finder - though it will look almost exactly the same as it does now, Apple have re-written Finder to better support 64-bit processors (which all new Macs have). It will also be able to eject volumes more reliably, and if it can't eject, it will be able to tell the user what application is using it. This will solve one of my annoyances at present - trying to eject an SD card and being told it's in use, but with no indication as to what is using it.
• Speed improvements - Time Machine will now back up more quickly, and OS X should be able to wake up and go to sleep more quickly. Furthermore, joining a wireless network should be snappier too.

There's a few more changes to iChat, as well as Microsoft Exchange support, but they're not apps that I regularly use. On the whole it's not ground-breaking stuff but I can see it making a difference in terms of the system feeling faster and less clunky.

In April 2005, I wrote this in an entry:

This is my new toy: a Dell Axim X50v. Actually it isn't mine - it belongs to the university - but I've been given a couple of weeks to play with it, basically.

4 years on and the Axim is still in my possession. I've upgraded it to Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) - an upgrade to WM6 is possible but at best it's unsupported and is almost certainly illegal - and now have it syncing with my Mac courtesy of The Missing Sync.

And now I have a decent web browser, in the form of The Iris Browser. Iris is based on WebKit, the open-source rendering engine which powers Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome web browsers, as well as Mobile Safari on the iPhone and the web browser on the various Android smartphones. WM5 comes with a cut-down version of Internet Explorer 4, which struggles to cope with modern web pages - whereas WebKit follows the various web standards closely and can do a good job at rendering most web pages. It also identifies itself in a very similar way to the iPhone so you will often get web pages which are optimised for a small screen; but if not, you can zoom out and view the page as it would appear on a desktop.

Best of all, Iris is free for personal and non-commercial use, unlike Opera who charge for their mobile version.

I'm considering taking the Axim to France with me in July as a way of using the internet without the need for a full-blown laptop, so that we're not reliant on finding an internet cafe - all we need is somewhere with free or cheap Wifi.

I went ahead and downloaded Windows 7 (overnight) and installed it at the weekend. Rather than upgrade my existing Windows Vista installation, which is a little 'dirty' from a somewhat botched conversion from a Parallels VM to a VirtualBox VM (the guide I wrote recommends a better way), I created a fresh VM.

Performance seems to be much better compared with Vista - it's noticeably quicker at booting and more responsive while using it. Visually there's not a massive change overall from Vista - it feels more like an evolution of the Vista interface rather than a revolution. But there are some nice changes.

Having been a Mac user for some time, I'm liking the new taskbar, which combines the quick launch icons with the window buttons and more closely resembles the Dock on OS X. Specifically I appreciate that applications appear on the taskbar, or change colour, when launched - so there's no more double-clicking an icon and then wondering if it's actually doing anything because the taskbar button hasn't appeared or because no window has popped up. This is something that Mac have done for several years - icons subtly bounce when the app is loading so you know the computer is doing something. Other differences are more subtle - Windows Security Center is now the Action Center, for example.

I haven't had much chance to play with it but the performance improvements alone will make it nicer to use on a day-to-day basis. Though I almost exclusively use OS X at home, my work machine runs on Windows so day-to-day improvements are good.

(Actually, technically my work computer doesn't run Windows but that's another blog entry for later this week...)

Yesterday Microsoft released Windows 7 RC, which will probably form one of the final test copies of Windows 7 before its full release, expected to be later this year. It's free for the public to download, and will work until June 2010, so you essentially get Windows free for a year.

That being said, it's still a test version - while it's likely to be more stable than a beta release I would not recommend upgrading your main computer to use it - instead, use something like VirtualBox to run it in a virtual machine, or consider dual-booting. And remember that you can't upgrade directly from Windows XP to Windows 7 - you'll need to use the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard if you want to copy across your documents and preferences. I'll be running it inside VirtualBox but that's mostly because I'm a Mac user

The download is large - around 2.4 GB - but a ActiveX control (or Java applet if you're not using IE) is available so that you can pause and restart the download.

As well as being completely free, reports from friends who have tried it say that it's faster than Windows Vista on the same hardware, which is always welcome. If I have the opportunity, I'll let you know how I get on with it.

One of the great things about virtual machine software like VirtualBox is that it lets you try a whole range of different operating systems without worrying about damaging your computer, since each OS sits in its own little sandbox. As well as allowing you to run old operating systems such as IBM OS/2 Warp, you can also run under-development operating systems which maybe aren't quite ready for prime-time.

One of these is ReactOS, which, at time of writing, is at version 0.3.9 - some way off a 1.0 release, then. It's free and open source, but while this may make you think of Linux the similarities end there. ReactOS is not based on Unix, nor does it aspire to be.

ReactOS is designed to be an alternative to Windows, going as far as replicating the Windows NT architecture. The aim is to allow all Windows programs, utilities and even drivers to work on ReactOS - in other words, you would be able to completely swap out a copy of Windows for a copy of ReactOS and expect everything to work. Well, that's the aim, anyway.

Unfortunately, it's not quite the reality. I used my copy of VirtualBox to install and run ReactOS, and while I was able to get it booting, I've already crashed it a couple of times. (Some notes on running ReactOS in VirtualBox are here). That being said, I was able to get the Windows version of Firefox 3.0.0.10 running and browsing web pages within ReactOS, as well as being able to install a number of Windows utilities.

Apart from stability, there are also other areas where work needs to be done. Browsing computers on a network hasn't been implemented yet, although I understand that it's possible to set up Samba in ReactOS. There were also serious font rendering issues in Firefox that made all web pages look bad. But, the fact that it's even able to install and run Windows programs with as much ease as Windows itself shows that this project has already come a long way.

It will probably be some years before ReactOS reaches the level of polish that Windows has. But once it does, Microsoft may face some serious competition - after all, ReactOS is completely free, and if it can totally replace Windows while maintaining compatibility with existing Windows programs, then some may find the case to switch compelling.

Here's a tip for those of you running World of Warcraft in Windows (sorry Mac folks), which may improve your gameplay performance.

Every time you install an expansion or patch (and as patches are released approximately monthly this can be quite often), the updater patches data into the existing data files on your hard disk. Over time, especially on hard disks which are almost full, this can lead to data fragmentation, where the data in each file is located in positions right across your disk, rather than altogether in one big contiguous lump. This means that it will take the drive head longer to read the file's content and may ultimately slow down the game, especially in situations where large amounts of data has to be loaded, such as walking around Dalaran.

Thankfully, you can defragment the data files to make them contiguous again, which should reduce access times and allow data to be loaded more quickly. You can use Windows' built-in defrag tool, but this will attempt to defragment your entire hard drive, which can take a very long time, especially if you have several hundred gigabytes of data.

Instead, you can use a tool such as Power Defragmenter, which can be pointed at a single file or folder. That way, you can tell it to only defragment your World of Warcraft data files and not everything else. The program is actually a front-end for a command line tool called contig, developed by Mark Russinovich who now works at Microsoft. Power Defragmenter does not include contig but will offer to download it for you when you run it. Once contig is installed, point it at your World of Warcraft data folder - usually C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\data and let it run for a while - depending on your situation the files may be in many fragments (over 100 for just one file in my case). It's important that you don't interrupt the process as otherwise you may render the files corrupted, in which case you may have to re-install the game.

Note that for optimum performance you will probably need to do this after every major content patch. The next big patch - 3.1, which introduces the Ulduar raid dungeon and the Argent Tournament, as well as Arena Season 6 - is due out either this week or next, so you may want to wait until then.

Microsoft have a new web ad out, whereby a person known as 'Lauren' is on a quest to buy a laptop that meets her need for under $1000 US. Here's the ad, first of all - I'd suggest you watch it first before you read my commentary so that you can make up your own minds:

Watched it? Okay, my views coming up....

January wasn't a great month for me and my 2 Macs, as I managed to get both of them to stop working. First of all, the backlight on my MacBook's screen stopped working, which I managed to fix after about half an hour's Googling. Then I found my Mac Mini was refusing to boot but alas was not able to fix it.

The good news is that I have now fixed it. The bad news is that I'm not entirely sure what it was I did that got it to work again. Essentially I took the lid off (easier said than done as it requires using a thin, flexible knife to prize the shell away from the base), poked at it, put the lid back on again and it booted up fine.

I say essentially because there was more to it than that. Because I was receiving the error 'ALLOC-MEM request too big!' from OpenFirmware while booting, I first assumed it to be a RAM error, so I took the RAM out and re-seated it, then booted the machine without putting the cover back on. That didn't work, so I poked at the Bluetooth and Airport aerials to see if that made any difference - again nothing. So I put the lid back on and was about to concede defeat, but decided to see if putting the lid on had made any difference. And it had - the machine booted up, albeit slowly.

The computer is now running, although it does seem slow - that may just be because it always has been slow and I just haven't used it recently. I haven't yet restarted it so it may of course be a fluke, but right now all the programs on it seem to be working fine - no unexplained crashes and no grey screens of death as yet.

So if you have the dreaded 'ALLOC-MEM request too big!' error, trying taking your Mac apart and check if everything is seated correctly, and then try booting again. It may fix it. Of course, if it doesn't, it may be indicative of bigger problems so don't rule out a trip to the Genius Bar or a call to AppleCare.

As many of you will know, as well as my MacBook, which I use as my main computer, I have a Mac Mini as well - this was my first Mac which I bought in 2005. It has spent the past year or so searching for a purpose - I was, and still am, hoping to turn it into a media centre but I've neither had the time or money to go ahead with it, and to be honest, I don't really need to either.

Anyway, after yesterday's shenanigans with my MacBook, it's the turn of the Mac Mini to refuse to work. It's actually not a problem that developed today - I noticed it wasn't working last week, but as I run it headless I didn't have a computer monitor to plug it into. All I knew was that it wasn't registering itself on the network.

Today I had chance to use it with an external monitor. I heard the startup sound, saw the Apple logo on the screen, and then, nothing. No status indicator, just the Apple logo.

So, I zapped the PRAM - Command+Option+P+R. This time, the status indicator appeared for about 10 seconds before the Grey Screen of Death appeared, showing a kernel panic. This happened with subsequent boots.

So, I tried booting from the OS X CDs. Same problem. In fact, after a while, all I could do was access the Open Firmware command prompt.

This therefore means that there's something wrong with the RAM or another component. Over the Christmas period, I took my Mac Mini with me to my parents in York, rather than leaving it in Bradford as I figured it would be safer. I'm guessing that it may have got jolted in transit and one or more of the components is out of place. It could also be bad RAM, but the RAM was only replaced in November 2006 and it was good-quality Crucial RAM. Plus, it's a faff trying to get the damn thing apart and will probably require the purchase of another putty knife seeing as my existing one has gone missing.

In the meantime, I have a nice iOrnament.

Had a bit of a panic this morning when I let my MacBook go to sleep, and upon re-awaking the screen's backlight would not come on. The screen itself was working, as I could see a small portion of the desktop in the middle where the Apple logo is, but the rest was un-viewable.

It's working now, but not after trying almost every trick in the book. I've listed all of the methods here, mostly for my own reference in case it happens again but also for anyone having a similar problem.

Diagnostics

First of all, make sure that the rest of the computer is working. If you have an external display handy, plug that in and use Fn+F7 to activate it (you may not need to hold down the Fn key depending on your Mac's settings). If you can see your desktop on the external display then the problem is with the display - if not, you computer may have deeper problems. If you have VNC set up, you could try this too.

1. Set your brightness

Sometimes it's the basic things - your brightness might be set to minimum. Use Fn+F2 to turn up the brightness (you may not need to hold down the Fn key depending on your Mac's settings).

2. Zap your PRAM

One trick to deal with minor hardware problems is to reset your PRAM and NVRAM. To do this, power down your Mac, then, turn it on and hold down Command+Option+P+R at the same time, until your Mac makes the 'ding' noise again. Command is the Apple key, Option may be labelled as 'alt' on your computer.

3. Reset your Energy Saver settings

You may need to use an external monitor or VNC for this. While you Mac is booted, open System Preferences and choose Energy Saver. Under 'Put the displays to sleep', set the timer to 1 minute, and then wait 1 minute for your machine to go to sleep. Wake it up, and hopefully your screen will spring back to life.

4. Take out the battery

If your Mac is a portable, turn the computer off, unplug the AC power cord, and take the battery out. Next, hold down the power button for 5 seconds, and the re-insert the battery. Then boot up again. In my case, this is what worked.

There's more information on Apple Defects Wiki (linking to old version as it has since been vandalised).

As those of you who have read my blog for some time will know, in summer 2005 I bought a Mac Mini. This was my first ever Mac and my experience with it has ensured that, for the foreseeable future, any new computers I buy will also be Macs. Indeed, when my Toshiba laptop finally died a year later in 2006, it was a MacBook that replaced it.

Though I still have the Mac Mini, it's now rarely used; it quickly became too underpowered compared with my MacBook. This was despite a RAM upgrade to 1 GB and an upgrade to Leopard. Right now it is set up to be used as a media centre, but I don't really have a use for one and I'm also missing a remote control for it.

All this being said, there are rumours on the internets that at next week's MacWorld convention, Apple will announce a new Mac Mini, potentially with a smaller form factor, faster processor and nVidia graphics. If they do, this new model could well be my next Mac purchase.

This is mainly because I am a World of Warcraft player, and right now I am playing World of Warcraft on a first-generation MacBook. Though it has a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, and 2 GB of RAM, its graphics are provided by a 64 MB Intel chip. Though the machine does provide better graphics performance than my Mac Mini, with its 128 MB ATi chip, there are times when the framerates are painfully low. This is particularly the case in the new areas in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and especially in Dalaran, the new capital city, which unfortunately is where I end up spending quite a bit of time. Trying to move around with 4 fps is not my idea of fun. And this is with all of the graphics settings turned down to minimum.

If Apple delivers a small, reasonably priced Mac Mini with reasonably good graphics performance, then it's quite likely that I'll buy one this year, once I have the money for it. As much I'd love to buy a Mac Pro, at its current price it is way out of the realm of affordability for me at around £1700 for the cheapest model. The iMac isn't bad but it too is rather pricey and I already have my own screen, keyboard and mouse. The current Mac Mini is only £400 - provided I get a reasonable job, I should have no problem affording that by the summer.

We won't know for sure what Apple have up their sleeves until the keynote on Tuesday. But the Mac Mini is long-overdue for an update and Apple would be wise to position it as an affordable entry-level Mac with some premium features. If they do, I'd definitely buy it... when I can afford it.

VirtualBox 2.1 is out, and with it comes an important change: VT-x support. This may mean nothing to you, but VT-x is a feature of Intel's newer processors that improves the performance of virtualised operating systems, and, importantly, should bring VirtualBox's performance up to a similar level to Parallels'.

As you know, last month I switched from Parallels to VirtualBox as I was growing tired of the lack of decent Linux support in Parallels and the cost of upgrading to version 4. I'm still using the Windows Vista image that I converted from Parallels and it works well, especially with the speed upgrades that come with enabling VT-x support. VirtualBox has also matured somewhat, so that features such as Seamless Mode (equivalent to Coherence in Parallels) now work well enough to be usable all the time. It's not quite as polished as Coherence but it works well enough - and, crucially, it works in both Windows and Linux.

Remember - once you've updated the VirtualBox software, you will also need to re-install VirtualBox Guest Additions in each guest operating system, to take advantage of the new features.

Despite Parallels and VirtualBox both being programs which run virtual machines on Mac OS X, they both use different file formats for storing the virtual machines on disk. Though I believe Parallels will open a VirtualBox disk, VirtualBox cannot automatically import Parallels disks. But it's not impossible...

If the guest operating system, i.e. the system that is running inside Parallels, is Windows 2000/XP/Vista, then it is possible to use a free tool from VMWare to do the conversion. Here's a step-by-step:

1. Back up your virtual machine

Seriously. We'll need to modify it a bit before it's converted, so you'll want a backup copy as otherwise it might not be as useful.

2. Uninstall Parallels Tools

This is the modifying bit. Load your Windows virtual machine in Parallels, and uninstall Parallels Tools (the helper program that adds drivers and clipboard sharing, and other stuff). This is important as otherwise your virtual machine won't boot in VirtualBox - and I know this from experience. You also can't uninstall Parallels Tools unless you are running Parallels at the time.

3. Close all programs

Close as many running programs in your virtual machine as possible. We're about to take a snapshot image of it while it is running, so any unsaved data may be lost when you boot the image in VirtualBox. That includes programs with icons in your notification area, such as virus scanners, instant messaging programs etc.

I've previously recommended Parallels Desktop for Mac as a good way to run Windows on a Mac. But I'm not going to upgrade to version 4.

Essentially there's no big stand-out feature that I see as important, bar some speed improvements. Though better performance is always nice, I don't want to pay £33 for it (that's $39.99 plus 19% sales tax). The rest of the new features, such as the bundled Acronis software, just don't interest me.

There's also the new kid in town - VirtualBox. It may not pack as many features as Parallels but it certainly beats it on price as it's absolutely free (and open source too). In my opinion VirtualBox is better for running Linux as a guest OS than Parallels 3 (in terms of my experience of Ubuntu). Once I can get my Windows VM converted to VirtualBox I may not even need to use Parallels anymore.

I may consider Parallels 4 again if there's an upgrade at a more reasonable price - say $19.99 - which has the performance improvements but doesn't have all the bells and whistles that I'm never going to use. I don't own an iPhone so I don't need the remote control, I can't imagine I'll ever need to use PXE booting, and I never use speech recognition.

This is mostly for my own reference, but may also be useful to you.

My MacBook has been afflicted by an issue whereby the root process syslogd uses up excessive CPU time. Thankfully, there's a reasonably straightforward fix on The Mark Bao Weblog for those who are reasonably au fait with the OS X Terminal, and it certainly solved the problem for me. That said, your mileage may vary - this is one solution to a problem potentially caused by many different things; a Google search also brought up potential issues with iDisk, Back to my Mac and Time Machine.

I've had a few issues with the MacBook getting too hot lately (while playing World of Warcraft) so hopefully the fact that both CPU cores are not working flat out will mean it runs cooler. And make the battery last longer.

Those of you on Macs or Linux boxes may be interested to know that you can get a free 1-year license for CrossOver. It's only available today (Tuesday 28th October) and only allows you 1 copy. Existing customers (like me) will get a free 1-year extension to their existing license, which is nice.

CrossOver is an enhanced version of Wine, an open source tool which allows you to run Windows programs on computers which do not have Windows, namely Linux and Mac OS X (Intel only). On OS X, I use it to run programs like Picasa and IrfanView which I haven't quite found acceptable native Mac alternatives for, as well as Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Media Player. Even without the special offer, it's cheaper than a Windows license and more convenient than either rebooting the machine or running Windows in a virtual machine.

Note that the site is suffering from the Digg effect at the moment, so while you can request your license key you probably won't be able to fully register your copy straightaway.

(Heads-up via Brad Choate)

It's fair to say I don't like the archiving software StuffIt - see previous rants - but it's been a couple of years since my last rant. StuffIt 13 is out in all of its flavours so it's about time for another rant, I think. Unlike previous rants, I'll focus purely on the Mac version since I'm a Mac user and the StuffIt .sit file format used to be popular with Mac users.

In a nutshell, I dislike StuffIt for the following reasons:

1. It's bloatware. The downloadable disk image for the basic StuffIt Expander is over 22 MB. To put that into context, Firefox for Mac, which is a universal binary, weighs in at 17 MB, and is arguably a far more complex piece of software. In fact, Firefox supports the unzipping of (at least) gzip and zip archives since web pages and images can be encoded using these formats. Quite what they need all of those megabytes for is a mystery, since all the expander does is dump the contents of an archive into a folder. It would be hugely ironic if the expander's disk image wasn't compressed, of course.
2. To download it, you have to give a working email address. You can't just give a fake one and get the download link, as the download link is emailed to you. And there's this gem of a notice at the bottom of the page:

   Please note: By confirming your email address and downloading this file, you are signing up to receive periodic followup emails from us. Any emails we send you will contain unsubscribe information, and you may opt-out of future emails at any time.

   Sure, you can unsubscribe when the next email comes through, but frankly I would rather not be subscribed in the first place. SmithMicro, StuffIt's distributor, is an American company, which is probably a good thing for them as I'm pretty sure this would fall foul of data protection laws in other countries. All I'm asking for is a tickbox that lets me opt out of receiving emails. Or, better still, a direct download link, like 95% of other software downloads.
3. The free expander program has been made deliberately obscure, and instead its bigger but non-free brothers are promoted. Now SmithMicro have to make their money somewhere but even when you select to download the free Expander you are bombarded with links to the paid-for packages. And when you click the link to download the program from the email that you receive, it defaults to the paid-for version, even if you previously selected the free version.
4. StuffIt is the only program I know of capable of reading the .sitx format, which is apparently an improved version of the .sit archive format. .sitx thankfully hasn't really taken off so these files are rare, but I have Expander handy in case one crops up. If it weren't for this archive format I wouldn't even bother with Expander, never mind any of the other StuffIt programs. The Unarchiver is what I use for every other type of archive and it works well without needing my email address or trying to sell me software that I don't want, but alas .sitx support is missing.

The fact is that these rants essentially echo what I have previously written 3 years ago - in other words, the situation hasn't improved in 3 years. In fact, I'd say version 13 of the Expander, with its vastly over-inflated size, is probably the worst version yet. It's telling that its Wikipedia page has a 'Criticisms' section. If SmithMicro are serious about people wanting to use the .sitx format, they either need to make the software considerably less intimidating for those wanting to open the files or publish the file format for people to integrate into their own programs.

Windows users wanting to free themselves of StuffIt can use ExtractNow, which supports .sit files when the appropriate addon (available from its FAQ page) is installed, but again, no support for the .sitx format. Again, it's free and doesn't require your soul email address.

Whereas I sometimes do things like this:

Before you get giddy, this is just the splash screen for the setup. In other words, it boots, but doesn't seem to do much else. Apparently it can take a long time before it even gets to the point where it asks you how to partition.

No idea what on earth I'm up to? Here is Wikipedia on OS/2, and the screenshot is of it running in a VirtualBox window on my MacBook.

For today only, MacZOT is offering Parallels Desktop for Mac for only US$49.99 - which is a saving of $30. I would unhesitatingly recommend Parallels to anyone who needs to run Windows on the Mac as it works well and offers good integration with your existing Mac environment, and this offer makes it all the better.

Parallels isn't perfect and I have had issues when it comes to Ubuntu Linux (which are still not yet fixed in the current build) but it's very easy to use and works fine with Windows.

And before you ask, I have no affiliation with either MacZOT or Parallels, I'm just a satisfied customer of both companies.

As promised, here is more about the upgrade I did to my parents' computer last weekend.

The computer will be 4 years old in October and I wanted to sort out its current shortcomings while also making it capable of running for at least another 2-3 years. The agreed budget was £100, about 6 times less than the original cost of the computer.

In the end, we went for the following internal components:

• 2 GB of Corsair Value Select PC3200 RAM
• 256MB XFX nVidia GeForce 6200A AGP 4x/8x graphics card
• A no-brand USB and FireWire PCI card

The upgrade I mentioned in the previous entry has now been done. I'll write more about it later (probably) but for now I want to pass on a word of warning about the USB Wifi dongle that we bought for the upgrade, which in this case was the Netgear WG 111.

When you install the drivers for the device, it replaces your 'GINA' (Graphical Identification and Authentication) library with a third-party one, probably to allow authentication to a wireless network. Now this will happen regardless of whether you are using Windows XP Professional, which can connect to a login domain, or XP Home, which can't. And if you are using XP Home, this means that you get the standard login box where you have to enter a username and password, rather than choose from a graphical list as per default (sometimes known as 'family logon'). Furthermore, when you try to change it back using the Users control panel, it tells you that you can't, with a rather cryptic error message.

The solution is quite simple, and provided you aren't connecting to an authenticated wireless network (i.e. one where a username and password is required), it won't break anything. Doug Knox, who I believe is one of Microsoft's MVPs, has a small program which you can run to correct the behaviour back to Windows' default - it's available here. Install that after you have installed the drivers for the Netgear device.

As a sidenote, I am unsure if this affects all versions of the drivers (it certainly affected the copy on the CD) so it may now have been fixed. And I wouldn't necessarily say it's not a reason to buy the dongle. But you should be aware that this happens as it's not immediately straightforward to fix.

My parents' computer is in need of a mid-life upgrade. It was bought in October 2004 and at the time gave acceptable performance, but it's flagging a bit now in comparison to the latest and greatest. To save you reading the old entry, here's the specs:

• AMD Athlon XP 3000+
• 512 MB RAM
• 80 GB HD
• DVD rewriter
• 64MB onboard graphics
• Plus all of the usual stuff

Three-and-a-half years on, and it looks like the main weak points are the memory and graphics. The processor is reasonably good, and I'm not inclined to replace it as the prospect quite frankly scares me, and they still have ample space on the hard drive.

512 MB RAM is low by today's standards, and so I'm proposing an upgrade to 2 GB - the maximum the machine will hold. Upgrading the RAM on Hari's machine, which is of a similar specification and age, made a big difference and so this would be my first choice.

The graphics are the other aspect I want to upgrade. Right now it's a VIA onboard job, which as well as being underpowered also lacks Windows Vista drivers, so if my parents do ever upgrade (unlikely but I wouldn't rule it out) they would potentially run into problems. The machine does have an unused AGP port, and so a cheap graphics card would be an instant upgrade. It would also return those 64 MB of RAM that it used to the computer, although 64 MB is a drop in the ocean when you have 2 GB.

We still have Hari's old graphics card lying around (in a static-proof sleeve), which is based on the nVidia GeForce 5200 FX chipset. This was okay for normal use on her computer but seriously impacted her WoW gaming - now, my parents are hardly likely to be fragging noobs or levelling shadow priests any time soon but a better card can be bought for very little money. In fact, £25 would buy you something based around the full nVidia GeForce 6200 chipset (as opposed to the budget FX range). So it's a question of saving £25 and recycling the old card, or getting something better for a little more money.

The computer also needs equipping for Wifi, probably by virtue of a USB dongle, but at less than £10 a piece that's not a major issue. The total budget for all of this is £100, with the RAM costing about £50 (looking at Crucial and Corsair prices). There's ample room for a reasonable graphics card, but I'm wondering whether to bother or not.

What do you think?

Months ago, I downloaded a Kernel Panic Screensaver, which is a screensaver for Mac OS X that simulates a kernel panic - the Mac equivalent of Windows' Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). I suppose the main reason why you would download this was so that you could stealthily set it as someone's screensaver and then watch their face when they think their system has crashed and all of their unsaved work has gone.

Anyhow, yesterday I was flicking through my screensavers and saw 'kpsaver'. Not remembering what it was, I tested it out. Lo and behold, a kernel panic appeared on my screen and my heart sank. I'd just crashed my MacBook.

Of course I hadn't and I soon realised that actually this was a joke. But for a moment there I actually thought I'd crashed it.

So yeah, I managed to prank myself. Go me.

For reference, I've had kernel panics on both of my Macs before, but I can't honestly remember when - certainly not in the past 6 months (i.e. since the upgrade to Leopard) and probably even longer than that. But then Hari hasn't had a BSOD in the same time frame so that proves nothing :) .

After promising I wouldn't blog too much about the 3 Mobile Broadband dongle that I'm trying out for 3 Mobile Buzz, I then managed to not blog about at all for a couple of weeks, which was clever... Anyhow, here's another blog post, and, as you'd expect, the dongle is what is helping me post this entry.

Right now I'm on my lunch break in a place that normally has free Wifi. Unfortunately the Wifi isn't working (DHCP seems to be failing so I get a self-assigned IP address), so it's a chance to try out the dongle. Here, the signal quality is good enough to get HSDPA, which means I get speeds equivalent to lower-end DSL or cable-based broadband packages. In theory at least.

Wireless broadband does have more issues with latency than fixed-line broadband, and this is noticeable when browsing web pages as it takes longer for images, CSS files and JavaScript files to download. Simple pages load quickly, but complex ones will take some extra time. This does make it appear slower than the Wifi connection that I'm used to here, even though I should have a higher top speed (if memory serves correctly the Wifi is capped at 512 Kbps, whereas HSDPA starts at nearer 2 Mbps).

Although this is a free trial, if I was to buy one of these then I would definitely go for a package with at least 1 GB of included data transfer. Running my computer normally while connected racked up 6 MB of downloads after doing very little. Now this is probably down to things like Firefox updating its phishing and malware site lists, Plaxo synchronising my address books, iScrobbler sending data to last.fm etc. If I had been paying 10p per megabyte, which is what many packages were offering recently, I'd have racked up 60p already through background tasks alone. This is one of the main differences between a dongle you plug into your own computer and the internet experience you get on your PDA or mobile phone.

I'm also starting to get a feel for the battery requirements that the dongle puts on over and above normal battery drain. My battery only has about 50% of its capacity remaining, which usually gives me just under 2 hours on a full charge. With the dongle in, I can probably lose half an hour and get about 1 hour 25 minutes. So it does have a noticeable impact on battery life, but it doesn't totally drain it. Still, older batteries may suffer a bit.

I'm probably boring you all now with my incessant ramblings about the hard disk upgrade, but the good news is that it is done and dusted. I picked up the correct screwhead from Maplin and switched the drives over without any major problems, although I would advise you that when you boot the computer up after switching the disks over, you press Command, Alt, P and R at the same time to reset the PRAM (see this article for more info) as you may encounter minor booting issues otherwise.

The old disk is now firmly screwed into its USB enclosure and is acting as a Time Machine device, as well as a place to put files. I decided that it would be best to go with HFS+ for Time Machine, but made a 4 GB FAT32 partition so that I can access files from other computers should I need to. As it's such a small enclosure and came with a nice carrying pouch, it lends itself well to being used as a portable file store.

Unsurprisingly I have noticed a performance improvement with the new drive - on the old drive I was frequently pushing for free space and so data fragmentation was likely to be a major problem, but with this drive the data has been laid out from scratch and there's well over 150 GB of free space on here at the moment, so fragmentation shouldn't be an issue for some time to come.

So what's my next project? Hari's computer needs some TLC in the heat-dissipation department. Since the new year it's had major problems keeping cool, so while I was in Maplin I picked up a rather large can of whoop-ass compressed air to give it a good clean out. I'll also check that its temperature sensors are pointing in the right places and that the fans are working correctly.

This upgrade to my MacBook's hard drive is proving to be more effort than I first thought. I was hoping that, by now, I should have had the new drive fitted and working, but as of now it's still not in there. Here's a brief recap of the problems I have encountered:

Problem 1: Wrong disk enclosure

For some reason, when ordering a USB enclosure to hold the new disk while I copied all my files across to it (and to hold the old afterwards), I managed to order an older IDE enclosure, rather than a newer SATA enclosure. This is important because the MacBook only uses SATA hard drives and so the IDE enclosure is basically useless. I still have it; if you want to buy it off me drop me a line, but note that it's only good for 2.5" (i.e. laptop) IDE drives and not the usual 3.5" drives you get in desktops.

Problem 2: The Royal Mail misplaced the replacement disk enclosure

I ordered the original enclosure from dabs, but went to Amazon for the replacement as it was going to be quite a bit cheaper (and there was a model with good reviews). It should have been delivered on Wednesday last week, but neither myself nor Hari were in the house at the time and so we got one of those 'Sorry, you were out' cards. It said to wait 48 hours, so we did, but it hadn't been returned to the depot by Friday. Or by Saturday. I didn't go on Monday or Tuesday but did make it down there yesterday, so I finally managed to get my grubby paws on it.

Problem 3: Wrong type of screwdriver

If you're like me, you'll have more screwdrivers than you care to admit. I have at least 7, and most of those have interchangeable heads with a wide variety of screwheads. In other words, give me a screw and I should be able to screw it in. Unfortunately none of my screwdrivers or screwheads are of the Torx T8 variety, which Apple use to screw the MacBook's internal hard drive to the drive plate. I have T10, T15, T20 and T30, but they're all too big, and the design of Torx screws makes it basically impossible to use another type of screwdriver. So now I can't change the drives over until I can get hold of this coveted screwdriver.

On the plus side, I have now got the new drive in the enclosure and have used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the entire contents of my existing driver over to the new one, ready for the switchover. I also appreciate your comments about what file system to use; those that I have received so far have been good but it has occurred to me that I may well be using Time Machine on the external drive (the drive that is currently in my MacBook) so this may well restrict my choices.

Right, my external HD enclosure has finally arrived (and it looks quite swish too), and so I will be cloning my MacBook's hard drive and swapping them over, thus leaving me with a 60 GB external hard disk. However, I'm at a bit of a loss as to what file system to stick on it. The options are:

HFS+

The good ol' Hierarchical File System from Apple and the default for OS X drives. Now this drive will probably spend 95% of its life connected to a Mac and so having it use HFS+ would be a plus since it will have the various file metadata that OS X likes to include. But HFS+ support on non-Macs is almost non-existent without buying programs like MacDrive (for Windows), so it's not going to be a whole lot of use on any other computer.

FAT32

The most-compatible but the least features. Any operating system from the last 10 years will read FAT32 drives, but you don't get any fun features like extended metadata (without lots of hidden files) and compression, and its cluster sizes mean that it's not the most efficient.

NTFS

So now we have Windows XP's file system of choice. It's more efficient and has more features than FAT32, and it's even supported by Macs. Well, kind-of. Macs can read from NTFS volumes natively but to be able to write to them you have to install third-party software. The software is free and open-source, and quite a few people rely on it, but I'd be worried about data corruption. Incidentally if this is something you want to try yourself read my guide for Tiger users and this updated guide for Leopard users.

I'll probably go for FAT32 as it's the most compatible, but if you have any other comments or suggestions to make then I'd be happy to hear them.

Oh, and while I'm here, I've found out Windows XP won't let you format hard drives larger than 40 GB as FAT32. There's a free tool called SwissKnife which lets you overcome this limitation. It's also dead quick.

Thanks to the guys at 3 Mobile Buzz, I am trying out 3's mobile broadband service free for 3 months, in return for some blog posts about the service. I have the Huawei E169G USB modem, which allows me to get 3G broadband internet access wherever 3 have a signal (and GRPS/EDGE if a 3G service isn't available).

I'll post a full disclosure soon, but to show that it's working I am posting this sat in the local bus station, where it has already proved its worth. Hari has been away at her parents for the weekend, and so I have gone to meet her. However, having checked the details of her coach online, I have found out I had the wrong time and have instead come several hours early...

Of course, I could have phoned her, but it's nice to be able to look a less of a prat in front of your girlfriend. There's no Wifi here whatsoever so without the modem I would have had no internet access.

So, as I said, I'll post more about the modem, its capabilities, and the wider implications of mobile broadband on the UK internet market as the days and weeks go on. If you're contemplating purchasing one - say, for example, you find internet access on the train useful and have found that the Wifi service provided by your train operating company has declined recently - then I hope this will be useful.

I've had my MacBook for over 18 months now and during that time it has served me very well. Unfortunately I'm starting to hit its limitations and so it is due a bit of an upgrade.

The biggest problem right now is the hard drive, which is practically full to bursting. I had 2 GB free this morning but only after deleting a lot of stuff (which now needs to be copied back over) - this was due to the fact that Fury of the Sunwell came out for World of Warcraft and it requires a minimum of 1.6 GB to install (although you get most of it back after it has patched your game files). Part of the problem is that I have both Mac OS X Leopard and Windows Vista (by way of Parallels) on there - Vista's virtual hard disk occupies around 13 GB of space, which is a lot when the total drive capacity is only 60 GB.

Also, when running large applications like World of Warcraft or Parallels, it starts to struggle a bit with just 1 GB of RAM (this is something I never thought I'd say 10 years ago...).

So, I need to upgrade the hard disk and get another gigabyte of RAM. I've been holding off any upgrade for a while because I imagined it would be quite expensive; however, in actual fact, I can do the who she-bang for under £100, and that includes memory from Crucial and a branded hard drive. Though I can't see this happening right away, in a couple of months I should have enough cash spare to justify doing this.

Hopefully, the bigger RAM and hard drive will provide the performance boost I'm after. The graphics on the MacBook is still a weak point but it provides passable Warcraft performance and I can't upgrade it, so I'll bear with it.

In April last year, which was nearly 11 months ago, I introduced The Mac Mini Media Centre Project. This was a project to convert my Mac Mini, which was becoming rather under-used, into a media centre - a computer connected to a TV and controllable by a remote control that can play DVDs, show TV channels and play recorded media (music, video etc.).

As you can tell by the lack of any news since that post (bar a promise five weeks ago that I would write an update) I haven't made massive progress. However, the machine is now running as a media centre, albeit not how I originally envisaged it.

Right now it is missing a number of the promised features - it won't receive TV signals, and cannot be operated via a remote control. But it is connected to a TV and I do have the relevant hardware to allow it to receive DVB-T broadcasts.

The reason for this is partly down to where we live, i.e. Bradford. The geography of the area isn't favourable to TV broadcasts and so we only have patchy coverage via a shared aerial. As such, we opted to go for cable from Virgin Media, which requires their set-top box and makes the TV receiving aspect largely pointless as most of the same channels are available (Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three currently excepted, but we don't watch them anyway). We also have a perfectly good standalone DVD player.

The Mac Mini therefore now sits in the bedroom. It still has media centre software, in the form of MediaCentral, and outputs to a television set by way of Apple's official DVI-Composite/S-Video adaptor. However it also acts a wireless bridge for a PlayStation 2, since there's no network connection in the bedroom, and also is the host computer for our printer. Yes, we have a printer in our bedroom.

I am hoping to add an infra-red receiver so that I can use a remote control with it - as it is an older Mac Mini it didn't come with one as standard. Right now we have to use a wireless keyboard and mouse which is workable but less than ideal. As far as this blog goes, I hope to do a review of MediaCentral and also the TubeStick device for receiving DVB-T broadcasts on a Mac.

It's often said that you shouldn't upgrade to a new version of Windows until at least Service Pack 1. So if you've been holding out from upgrading from Tiger to Leopard, then version 10.5.2, released yesterday, should be what you've been waiting for.

The update weighs in at over 300 MB for the full version (Software Update only needed to download 180 MB), plus there's a follow-up Leopard Graphics Update to install afterwards. It's a lot to install but then it does fix a lot of residual bugs that weren't fixed in 10.5.1 - finding Windows computers with shared folders now finally seems to work properly, for example. But there's also some new features - stacks can now be made into Tiger-style lists if you so wish, the menu bar translucency can be disabled, and Time Machine has its own menu bar icon (but this can be disabled if you don't use it).

The Graphics Update is also worth installing, especially if you use your Mac for gaming (stop laughing) - World of Warcraft users report much higher framerates and I can back this up too with my own experience.

Macworld has an article detailing some of the changes (thanks, Robert) but most of them seem to be background stuff that you won't see from day to day. In any case, if you've been waiting for Leopard to become more stable, your wait should be over.

I've just bought a new wireless mouse for about £7.50. I'm telling you this because it's actually quite good.

Normally I'm used to paying a little more for decent computer equipment - I am a Mac user after all - but this mouse was a total bargain. It's made by 'Technika', which is the consumer electronics brand of Tesco, hence you'll only find this in branches of Tesco. For your £7.50, you get a small USB dongle, and the mouse itself, which is rubberised. You also get a set of 2 AAA alkaline batteries included.

Its rubberised coating means that it is nice to hold and grip, and it's a nice shape; furthermore it's useable by both left- and right-handed people. It has a power-saving mode, so that if it's not used for a couple of minutes it turns off; clicking a button re-activates it. It's optical and has a 800dpi accuracy, which isn't perfect but not bad either. And because it uses AAA batteries, rather than AA, it's about the same weight as a standard corded mouse.

It doesn't have a charger cradle or a low-battery indicator, but then you have only paid £7.50 for it, not £75.00. All in all, I'm quite pleased with my purchase.

Though Mac OS X includes support for WebDAV folders, it doesn't always work. WDFS is an alternative WebDAV package for FUSE, a Linux utility for mounting file systems, and can be used on a Mac via MacFUSE. So if you're having problems using WebDAV on OS X, this guide will tell you how to install WDFS and mount a drive.

I'm having a problem with WebDAV in Leopard, and I'm hoping that someone knows something I can do to get it working.

The university gives its staff members off-site access to their shared drives via FTP and WebDAV, as well as a web interface; all three use Novell NetStorage (the university's IT system is based around an interesting mix of Novell, Sun, Microsoft and Linux server technology). Now the WebDAV service works fine in Windows XP's Network Places system and I'm able to view my files with no problems. But on OS X, specifically Leopard, it rejects my username and password, no matter what possible combination I provide (whether it's the username on its own or the username appended with the Novell tree that I belong to).

The NetStorage system we use does support SSL, but I've tried it with and without SSL and it still doesn't work (SSL support was added in OS X Tiger/10.4). But it does work in XP, which is why I'm confused. And, naturally, any options to configure WebDAV are hidden away by the operating system.

I'd appreciate any light that anyone can shed on this, as being able to access files from home would be useful. I can use FTP but WebDAV integrates much better with the Finder.

Leopard finally arrived for me today - I bought it from Amazon and selected super saver delivery, hence why it took a bit longer (but also saved me around £13) - and naturally I’ve spent the part of the day when I wasn’t food shopping in Tesco having a play around with it. Here’s my initial thoughts:

• Like the new dock. Some people don’t but I think it looks cool.
• Everything seems a bit snappier now which is good. I’m used to operating system updates slowing stuff down, not speeding it up.
• Not liking the translucent menu bar, had to change my desktop as a result. Would prefer it the option to make it a solid colour.
• New Finder is nice - like the new left panel and CoverFlow could be handy. Trying to work out why some network shares aren’t showing up though.
• Some programs, like AppFresh, not working.
• Firefox 3 beta 1 feels quite a bit faster in Leopard than it did in Tiger, which is good.
• Don’t have an external HD so not used Time Machine yet.
• Quick Look makes me happy in my pants.
• New firewall sucks major ass. And it’s off by default. Bad Apple.
• 4 updates to install once Leopard was installed, 2 required a restart.
• Install took about an hour, much of that was verifying the DVD was okay.
• Seems to take around 5-6 GB more disk space than Tiger did.
• Spaces looks good but I don’t know if I would use it.

You may have heard that there's a trojan horse virus masquerading as a codec pack for Mac users. You may get asked to install this by some, shall we say, "shady" sites in order to view videos, but actually, you're opening yourself up to some nasty stuff, as once installed the trojan will change your Mac's DNS system so that you may get redirected to phishing sites.

The good news is that this is a trojan and not a virus - it shouldn't spread to other machines and you actually have to consent to it being installed on your system (presumably through a bit of social engineering). And you have to give it your administrator password to actually do anything nasty, which should sound alarm bells.

Seeing as Macs have tended to avoid malware threats, here's some top tips for those who have forgotten what Windows users have to put up with:

1. If a program asks for your administrator password, don't type it in unless you trust the application.
2. If you're unsure of the origin of a program, you can use ClamXav, a free, open source virus scanner based on the popular ClamAV anti-virus software, to check it first.
3. And as for codecs, installing RealPlayer, Perian and Windows Media Components for QuickTime, or VLC, should have you covered. If you have all of those and a video still doesn't play, then it's probably dodgy, tied up with DRM or not worth watching.
4. Only download from sites you trust. If needed, install McAfee's SiteAdvisor if you're a Firefox user.

There's a copy of the Mac OS X Leopard Family Pack which will be making its way to me some time in the next two weeks from Amazon (since they're slightly cheaper than the Apple Store). I settled for the family pack as although I don't use my Mac Mini very much now, it's cheaper than buying another copy later on. And if I ever pick up another Mac second-hand (can't imagine I would but let's assume for the sake of argument that I might) then I have some spare licenses to use on it.

Incidentally I'm trying to think of all of the features that appeared in Windows Vista (or XP) before they appeared in Leopard. So far I've got file backup*, library memory randomisation and digitally signed executables - any others?

* = This is a little unfair - though Windows has a backup tool, it's got nothing on Time Machine.

I've finally come across a legitimate copy of Windows Vista at a price I was willing to pay, so at last I'm able to put Parallels Desktop to full use by running it alongside Mac OS X on my MacBook. I could write a long essay about my experiences, but here's some bullet points instead:

• Parallels makes installing Windows a snap. If you choose 'typical' mode, you are asked what Windows you want (2000, XP, Vista etc), your Windows product key, and, erm, not much else. You then get to skip the first part of the Vista installation so it dives straight into the file copying.
• Vista's install is a little more boring compared to its predecessors - no feature tours while you wait. But it is a lot faster, a welcome break from XP's hour-long install.
• Once installed, there were 41 updates to install through Windows Update, and Vista informed that it wanted an anti-virus program. So I gave it one, even if the concept of installing an anti-virus program on a Mac is a little bizarre.
• Coherence, the feature of Parallels that integrates Windows into your Mac desktop, is fantastic. I currently have my Mac menu bar with the Windows taskbar below it and a mix of Windows and Mac windows open. And a mixture of Windows and Mac applications in my Dock.
• After one of the reboots from installing updates, Windows told me that my copy may not be genuine. A quick trip to Microsoft's Genuine Advantage site, in Firefox no less, made it learn the error of its ways. But it shouldn't have done that in the first place as this is a genuine copy I'm using.
• You can't use your iSight camera straightaway - Parallels does support it but doesn't ship with the Windows drivers for it. You instead have to pillage them from Boot Camp, using these instructions. Once you've done that it works fine.
• This may have been Parallel's fault but I started off in Vista with the 'Administrator' account with no password. Would have preferred the option to create user accounts and passwords but this can be done afterwards at least. Haven't seen a User Account Control dialogue yet, even though it's enabled, which is also concerning.
• While Windows is running in a virtual machine, Parallels mounts the C drive in OS X, so you can manipulate the disk from both operating systems. This makes sharing files between the two really easy.
• I haven't yet installed much software - a virus scanner, Firefox, Flash and Windows Live Messenger and that's it so far. I'm unfortunately running a bit low on disk space so I'm treading carefully.
• This MacBook only has 1 GB of RAM - if you're going to attempt this, get 2 GB. Trust me.

I mentioned previously that I was trying to set up a machine to run Ventrilo 2.1 since I couldn't get it running on my Mac using CrossOver. Turns out that I'd made a mistake when setting the bottle up in CrossOver, so when I started again and did it properly, it worked. So Ventrilo 2.1 does work on a Mac, as does the Windows version of 2.3.

Incidentally CrossOver 6.2 has recently been released, which should make outbound voice communication work better in Ventrilo. But the best bit is that CrossOver applications will now appear on the dock as their own icon when running, making the integration a little more seamless. I've also noticed that the performance of some programs, namely Picasa, has improved dramatically since updating.

I'm running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, which I've previously installed Pidgin 2.0.2 on. Today, I wanted to upgrade it to 2.2.1, the latest version, using the package from Gutsy Gibbon, the next version of Ubuntu. This is a mistake.

Pidgin, it seems, depends on a lot of libraries. And, of course, these libraries have to up-to-date in order for the package to be installed. Eventually I got about halfway through the packages before giving up, because there's so much stuff that has to be updated. The dependency tree goes several levels deep. For example:

Me: Please install Pidgin 2.2.1.
Ubuntu: Sorry, your version of gStreamer is out of date. Please update it first.
Me: Okay, install the new version of gStreamer.
Ubuntu: Sorry, I can't do that, because your version of libXML is out of date. Please update it first.
Me: Okay, install the new version of libXML.
Ubuntu: Sorry, I can't do that, because your version of zlib is out of date. Please update it first.
Me: Okay, install, the new zlib.
Ubuntu: You do realise it's better to use the old version of zlib you already have?
Me: No, I want the new version so I can run Pidgin.
Ubuntu: Okay, done.
Me: Now, install the new libXML.
Ubuntu: You do realise it's better to use the old version of libXML you already have?
Me: No, I want the new version so I can run Pidgin.
Ubuntu: Okay, done.
Me: Now, install the new gStreamer.
Ubuntu: You do realise it's better to use the old version of gStreamer you already have?
Me: No, I want the new version so I can run Pidgin.
Ubuntu: Okay, done.
Me: Now, since I've satisfied those dependencies, please let me install Pidgin.
Ubuntu: Sorry, your version of libGTK is out of date. Please update it first.
Me: loses the will to live

I realise now that installing a package that isn't designed for the specific version of Ubuntu that I have is a bad idea, but seriously, why is it this complicated? Why can't programs install their own versions of libraries, like on Windows (and presumably Mac OS X), and can't these be distributed with the binary package?

Guess I'll just have to wait for Gutsy Gibbon to be released properly.

I mentioned back in June that Hari and I inherited a spare computer, which until now has been sat in our house serving no purpose. However, I now have a reason to use it - I joined a new guild in World of Warcraft and need to run Ventrilo 2.1 to be able to take part in raids, and I can't for the life of me get it to work properly on my Mac using Crossover.

I mentioned that the computer lacked a network card so I bought one today, and fitted it. Alas this machine is not running a nice operating system like Windows 2000 or XP, but Windows 98SE which doesn't ship with the relevant drivers. Worse, as this machine had never been used on a network before, it was missing all of the Windows network components. Worse still, I didn't have the Windows 98 CD, and even worse than that, the relevant files were not saved somewhere on the hard disk. Big problem.

Of course I was busy installing the network card drivers by this point and so upon rebooting I received a series of errors to do with missing .vxd files, namely vnetsup.vxd, vredir.vxd and dfs.vxd, the latter of which gives me a mental image of a double discount sofa sales. Anyway, I found a forum post on some site which I can't seem to find again which pointed to these technical support files, namely 'Directory Services client for Windows 95/98' which includes these files and will happily install them for you. You can then get rid of the program through Add/Remove Programs and it'll be nice and leave the .vxd files there for you.

Alas, these were only some of the missing files needed for networking, so while they did remove the horrible errors I was getting they didn't actually get me on the network, so I've had to resort to downloading some files from a shady torrent site in the hope that I can get things going.

Ideally I would have liked to have been able to wipe the hard drive and stick Linux on this machine, but unfortunately its primary role as a Ventrilo machine means that it's Windows or nuthin.

Like most people I have one of these USB memory sticks/thumb drives/flash storage/pen drives/whatever you call them, which I use for storing useful stuff. It's not a big or clever one, but it works.

But for some reason, the university student cluster machines have a hard time with it. I've tried it on 4 different machines, and every time I do, it shows me the contents of a network drive instead of my memory stick. So instead of 64 MB of useful stuff, I get several gigabytes of, well, random stuff.

It works on my Mac and on other, similarly configured Windows machines, so I'm at a loss as to why this is happening. It's quite annoying when there's some files on your stick that you want to print and all you can find is a bunch of DLLs for some random maths program.

Scratch that, it didn't embed properly - click here to view it instead.

I'm testing out Skitch, a new program from Plasq, makers of Comic Life, thanks to invite from Dave. One of the nice touches is that you can save images not only in JPEG and PNG, but PDF, and also SVG which is what I've shown here. You'll need a recent copy of Firefox or Opera to view it, or the beta of Safari, and it probably won't yet work in most feed readers, but all of that is a big lump of XML code.

I may post more about it when I've had more time to play with it, but it looks like a fantastically useful little program.

Safari? On Windows? Didn't see that one coming.

While I'm still sticking firmly with my beloved Firefox, I welcome the extra competition for browsers. It now means that Windows users have choices beyond Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer (and their derivatives like Flock, Maxthon, Seamonkey and so on).

If you use Safari on OS X already then there are some goodies in store. Safari 3 uses a new build of WebKit, which means you get niceties like:

• Resizable text areas
• Rich text edit on sites like Gmail
• Inline browsing of PDF files

It doesn't, at least for now, support things like Extended Validation SSL certificates or 256-bit SSL, and still offers the insecure SSL version 2 which has been phased out in Firefox and Internet Explorer. It also insists on calling feeds 'RSS' - while it does support Atom, it still uses the blue 'RSS' icon when one is available. And, at least on 10.4 Tiger, it still has the brushed metal appearance and not the new look that applications like iTunes have adopted recently. Though the screenshots of Safari 3 on 10.5 Leopard suggest that the Leopard version will have the new look.

With a bit of luck, Hari and I will be picking up the keys for our new place today - we're well into packing stuff although there's still lots to do. One of Hari's current housemates is donating his old computer, which he no longer needs and doesn't want to sell, mainly because it's rather old and wouldn't sell for much and hasn't got a monitor or keyboard (and isn't able to take it for recycling). So we're taking it.

Except I don't actually know what to do with it.

The computer has an 800Mhz processor, 30 GB hard drive and 32 MB graphics. It's recent enough to have 2 USB ports and an internal modem, but not recent enough to have a network socket. It also comes with not one, not two, but three optical drives - a CD-ROM drive, a CD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM drive. I have no idea what operating system it has but I'd imagine it'll be Windows 98.

The lack of a network socket means its usefulness is somewhat limited, but adding one isn't going to be difficult. Even then, I'm unsure what it can be used for. Its hard drive is a bit too small for a network server, and to make it into a router would require adding 2 network cards and a Wifi card if we wanted that as well. Furthermore, if it was a router it would probably have to go in the living room and I'd prefer not to have a big beige box there if possible - I'd rather have my Mac Mini, given the choice, or preferably a dedicated router which we'll probably need to buy. A dedicated router would also use up less electricity, seeing as it'll be on 24/7 essentially.

I can get an old CRT monitor for it and I'm sure I can pick up a cheap keyboard from somewhere so it won't cost much to make it into a decent computer system, but I can't imagine there'd be much demand for a computer of that vintage if I were to sell it. Hari and I between us already have 3 computers - my MacBook and Mac Mini, and her XCcube - so we don't need another system really. So what would you lot do?

If you have a Mac and have Boot Camp installed, you'll notice that you can access the NTFS partition used by Windows while booted to Mac OS X. However, access is read-only - you can open files and copy files from it, but you can't save to it. This makes sharing files between OS X and Windows difficult as there isn't a common place that both operating systems can read and write to (unless you have an extra FAT partition or an external drive).

The purpose of this good is to get around this technical limitation by using some extra software in Mac OS X to make your NTFS partition writeable as well as readable - that way any files on your NTFS volume can be read and written by both Windows and OS X.

We're going to use 3 packages - Google's MacFUSE (which I mentioned yesterday), and MacFUSE Tools and NTFS-3G.

Apple has updated the MacBook range again, this being the third revision since they were launched last year. Mine is a first revision, and while there's nothing wrong with it, had I waited 9 months I could have got (for the same price that I paid):

• A 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, instead of a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor
• 80 GB hard drive, instead of 60 GB
• 802.11n Wi-fi, instead of 802.11g (108 Mbps instead of 54 Mbps)
• Faster writing of CD-RW discs (16x instead of 10x)

But never mind. It's had 9 months of very heavy use and yet doesn't seem to be suffering - the battery is still at well over 90% of its original capacity and everyone else seems to work fine. I guess I'm just envious.

Equinux's TubeStick is a great budget DVB-T tuner for Macs - but out of the box, it will only work on a Mac. Put it into a Windows PC and the Find Hardware Wizard will simply mull over it for a few minutes before coming up blank.

The good news is that there is a signed Windows driver for it, or at least the model I have. The TubeStick is based around the Afatech AF9015 chipset, and the driver can be downloaded from this page on Afatech's web site. It apparently works with Windows XP and Vista - I only tried it on XP SP2 but it seemed to work okay.

To actually watch TV, you'll also need some software to interact with the TubeStick, and it's here that I've come up blank, however, getting the driver should be a good starting point.

I'm working on a full review of the TubeStick on a Mac but I've pushed it back a bit since a new version of The Tube (the Mac software you use with it) has been released with some new features. I'm liking it so far though.

I'm going to turn my Mac Mini into a media centre computer. This may come as something of a surprise, considering I only bought it less than 2 years ago and upgraded its memory as recently as December last year, but lately it's been used less and less. This isn't likely to change when Hari and I move in together this summer - I prefer using my MacBook as it's more powerful and versatile (thanks to its Intel processor) and Hari's computer is now hugely improved, so she'll be using that. Consequently, I'll essentially have a spare computer, so I might as well do something with it and this seemed like a good idea.

It's also a great thing to blog about, so I'll be devoting a few entries over the next few weeks to it.

Here's what I need to do to turn my Mac Mini from a normal computer into a computer that can also act as a media centre:

• Install media centre software Most new Macs come with Front Row, however mine was bought before this was standard so I'll need some proper software. I've bought MediaCentral (it came with the TubeStick, see below) so I'll be reviewing this in a later entry.
• Add a TV tuner A media centre is a bit useless if you can't watch TV with it. Sure, it'll be plugged into a TV which has a TV tuner, but this is Britain in 2007 so it must be a DVB-T tuner capable of receiving Freeview. It also must be able to take input from an external aerial through a coaxial cable since I live in Bradford where the TV reception is lousy and a decent roof-mounted aerial is a must. For this, I've bought the TubeStick from Equinux, which I'll be reviewing soon.
• Add a TV output adaptor My Mac outputs DVI, and optionally VGA with an adaptor. New TVs support DVI, either natively or with an HDMI adaptor, but the TV I'll probably be using just has a SCART socket, so I'll need some way of converting the DVI signal to SCART. Apple sell a DVI to composite video adaptor which gets me halfway there - a composite to SCART adaptor is all I'll hopefully need to complete the link.
• Add a remote control My Mac also doesn't have the Apple Remote (and even if it did I'd like more than 5 buttons preferably) so I'll need a remote, and some way of allowing the Mac to receive its signals. Infra-red would be the obvious one here but the Mac is also Bluetooth equipped.

That's the basic stuff. I may go further and add a Griffin FireWave, thus providing surround sound - I already have a currently redundant Creative system which got given to me by a former housemate - and I'll need at least one extra USB 2 hub since the Mac only has 2 built-in. I'll let you know how I progress, and review the two parts that I already have in the next couple of weeks or so.

Also, if you have any questions to ask, post them here and I'll answer them soon. I already have an answer to 'Why didn't you just buy an Apple TV?' and a couple of other related ones but please post away :) .

Since all the Mac geeks are falling over themselves to comment on the announcement that Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) is going to be delayed, I thought I'd throw my thoughts in the arena too.

Good.

By October I might just have enough money to afford it. Until then, I'm quite happy sticking with 10.4.

Here's one for you networking geeks. I'm currently sat in front of two computers - my MacBook, running OS X 10.4.9, and my parents' desktop, running Windows XP SP2. They're connected to each other by a 100 Mbps switch, which then connects to the main house router.

If I were to copy a file from my MacBook to the desktop using SMB, it will happen relatively quickly - several megabytes will take several seconds. The inverse, however takes much longer - copying a file from the desktop to the MacBook will take several minutes. A 45 MB file going one way will take a mere 90 seconds; the other way, it'll take over 20 minutes.

So what's going on? Any ideas?

Here's a tip I gleamed from today's Windows Secrets newsletter. You may well be familiar with the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon which appears in your notification area (or 'system tray' if you must) when you plug in a removable hard drive or camera (or whatever). You may also notice that the icon sometimes isn't there - and this is a problem which my parents' computer randomly suffers from - which means it's difficult to safely disconnect removable devices. The answer: a desktop shortcut.

Right-click on the desktop, select 'New' and then 'Shortcut'. For the item location, copy and paste the following:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL HotPlug.dll

Then click 'Next'. Call the shortcut 'Safely Remove Hardware', and you should be done. If you want to make it look snazzier, right-click the icon, choose 'Properties' and then the 'Shortcut' tab, click on 'Change Icon' and in the 'Look for icons' box type:

%windir%\system32\HotPlug.dll

The first icon in this file matches the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon so you'll be able to recognise it more easily.

Now, if the normal notification icon doesn't appear, all you need do is double-click your new desktop icon to safely remove any disks before unplugging them.

Here's a little trick I found in Boot Camp - you can save the Windows drivers to disk without the need to burn a CD for them.

Run the Boot Camp Assistant in OS X (it's in Applications/Utilities) and then click on the Utility menu. Select 'Save Mac Windows Drivers to a folder...' and put them somewhere which you can access from Windows - I chose my iPod, for example - and then click OK. Wait a minute or so, then reboot into Windows and install away :) .

Note that you'll want to grab the latest Boot Camp 1.2 beta before doing this, especially if you're running Windows Vista like I am (albeit still the beta version). But by doing this you won't have to waste a blank CD.

Hari's new graphics card has arrived, and so I fitted it earlier today. We went with an Inno3D card based around an nVidia GeForce 7600 GS chipset, since it seemed to represent the best value for money for our budget and was compatible with Hari's computer - it doesn't have PCI Express so we needed an AGP card.

As performance goes, the card is an immense improvement. Using World of Warcraft as a benchmark, before, she was getting an average of between 10 and 12 frames per second with all the settings turned down for maximum performance (but low detail). With the new card, she gets a constant 50fps, with many of the enhancements enabled, such as texture detail, terrain distance and spell effects. It looks fantastic, and is very smooth.

This now means that Hari finally has the gaming performance that she's been wanting for so long, and ends an upgrade process that has seen a new external hard drive, new memory and now a new graphics card. All in all, we've spent £220 on new hardware, but seeing as it'll add value to the computer, and make it less obsolete in future, it should be worth it.

Or, at least, it ends for now. She now wants a new power supply so that her graphics card can run at maximum performance. I think we can pass on that.

Actually, I didn't realise that the card needs to have a direct connection to the power supply as well as being connected to the motherboard through the AGP socket. I'll get it sorted soon.

It now looks like Hari needs a new graphics card. The extra memory arrived yesterday, as expected, and has made something of a difference to the computer; switching between Warcraft and any other program is instantaneous, whereas it used to take several seconds and result in considerable hard disk noise (presumably Windows swapping data between physical and virtual memory) and aspects of Warcraft, such as navigating around cities and instances is noticeably smoother. But there's no real improvement to the number of frames per second it can manage during general play, which was one of the main aims of the upgrade (the other being preparation for the eventual installation of Windows Vista).

I had a program I wanted to run on my Mac, but since it's pretty old (circa 2001) it was designed for Mac OS 9, so I made my first forays into 'Classic' mode on Mac OS X. Classic mode allows PowerPC Macs (not Intel ones) to load up Mac OS 9.2 inside what is essentially a virtual machine, although it does have full access to your hard disk. Once running, classic programs will run alongside modern ones almost transparently.

Classic comes with Netscape 4.7 as its web browser, which is hugely lame, so I went to see what else I could find. There really is very little choice in the web browser market for Mac OS classic because almost all of the developers have moved on to OS X - no Firefox, no Safari, and no Opera from what I can tell. There is a version of Netscape 7.02 from 2002, and Mozilla had official releases up until version 1.2.1, from 2003. WaMCoM, which is based on Mozilla, is also available and is comparable to Mozilla 1.3.1. But there's nothing newer than that.

Mac OS classic users are certainly in the minority - I imagine those still using it are either enthusiasts or people who have to run really, really old programs for business - but I was surprised at the lack of newer web browsers. Mozilla 1.3.1 isn't bad - most web pages should render fine - but the fact that it hasn't been updated in over 3 and a half years means that it's likely to be entrenched by security flaws. It also doesn't offer the vastly improved user experience of Firefox and Thunderbird.

Some operating systems, like OS/2 Warp, still have very active developer communities despite being very obscure, and to use the Firefox example it is possible to get a contributed build of Firefox 2.0.0.1 which will run on it (which was the latest version until last week). Seamonkey, the community version of Mozilla, had a contributed build for Irix as recent as last year. VLC's latest version from late last year will run on BeOS. So it's a perhaps a pity that developers have abandoned Mac OS classic so soon.

One thing that sets Macs apart from PCs is the sound they make when they're turned on. PCs make a rather boring beep noise, which is your computer's way of telling you that it's checked its vital components and found them to be okay. Macs, on the other hand, play a noise through the sound card, which is a more pleasant single note.

The problem with this sound is that it can be quite loud, which is especially annoying if you're using your Mac in an environment such as a library, or where your girlfriend is asleep in another part of the room (which is usually my problem). So, enter StartupSound.prefPane.

As the name suggests, this adds a new pane to System Preferences which controls the volume of the startup sound. You can turn it off completely, or make it quieter.

I personally have the sound made quieter - it's still important to be able to hear it, to make sure that the computer is okay. But you can mute it altogether if you really want to.

The official version 1.0 is for PowerPC Mac users only, so Intel Mac users will want this version from MacUpdate which is a Universal Binary.

Thanks for all of your suggestions about memory. In the end I went with the Corsair memory, which is due to arrive some time on Wednesday - Scan seem to insist on using courier delivery whereas Crucial just use the Royal Mail, but then again, at least we know when the memory from Scan will actually arrive.

The machine currently only has 512 MB of RAM (made up of 2x256 MB modules), so an upgrade to 2 GB is going to be quite a step up. It'll hopefully solve the performance issues that it suffers from as most of the other components are very good, and it'll certainly mean it will run Windows Vista with fewer quibbles should it ever get upgraded.

Long-term readers will know that I first raised the issue of upgrading Hari's computer back in July; however, it's only now that we can afford to do so. We eliminated the hard drive as a problem by buying a second, removable hard disk for her music and video files, which freed up a lot of space and allowed for a complete defragmentation run of the drive, but that only led to a very marginal performance improvement. Hopefully, adding more memory will solve the problem, but if not then a new graphics card will be the next step.

Here's a question for all you memory techie nerd people out there:

Given the choice, would you go for Crucial memory, or Corsair Value Select memory?

The reason why I am asking is that I'm finally getting around to upgrading Hari's computer, now that memory prices have fallen far enough for it be a little over £100 for a full 2 GB of RAM. Crucial have the memory she needs at £108, but they're currently out of stock and there's no indication as to when they'll get stock back in. Scan, on the other hand, has Corsair Value Select memory available now for £107 including delivery.

Obviously the two cost the same so price isn't an issue, but should I wait and buy Crucial memory, or get Corsair memory now? The fact that it is 'value select' seems to imply that it might not be as good as Crucial's memory but I have no idea whether this is actually the case; all I know is that Crucial and Corsair are good brands.

Obviously it would be nice if she could afford high quality gaming memory but this is about the best we can do for now. Any thoughts are welcome.

Even though Intel-based Macs have been on the market now for over a year now, the Adobe Shockwave Player browser plugin won't work properly on one. Shockwave is Flash's older and less-used sibling but some sites still use it occasionally; the BBC is one.

There is a Mac version of the plugin but it is designed for PowerPC-based Macs, not Intel ones. So, to play Shockwave content you have to use a workaround, which means running your web browser as a PowerPC program through Rosetta (since you can't use a PowerPC browser plugin from an Intel web browser). It's not the worst workaround ever but it's still inconvenient.

Why am I blogging this? I guess I'm just surprised that a proper Intel or Universal version of the player isn't yet available. Though I suppose Shockwave isn't nearly as popular as Flash and Adobe does not have a great record with getting its applications ready for Intel Macs, with most of its shipping products awaiting new releases before they will be fully compatible.

This is probably quite a niche thing, but it is possible to create a disk image formatted using the FAT file system on Mac OS X. Normally the Disk Utility that comes with OS X will only let you create images formatted using Apple's own HFS file system, which isn't very useful if you want non-Mac users to be to open the disk image.

Unfortunately, you are going to have to use the Terminal for this as there's no GUI for it (nor have I found anyone who's made a GUI for it). Whip terminal open, and type the following:

hdiutil create -megabytes n -fs MS-DOS -volname Somename -o /path/to/DMGname

To explain:

• -megabytes n specifies how big you want the image to be, so -megabytes 69 would create a 64 MB image.
• -f MS-DOS tells hdiutil to create an image using the FAT file system. Keep this as is.
• -volname Somename gives the image a volume name. If you're really stuck, call it 'Untitled'.
• -o /path/to/DMGname tells hdiutil where to save the image. For my home folder, I'd put type in -o /Users/neil/newimage for example.

So, to create a 10 MB image with the volume name 'OMGWTFBBQ' called foo.dmg in my home folder, I'd type this:

hdiutil create -megabytes 10 -fs MS-DOS -volname OMGWTFBBQ -o /Users/neil/foo

This will create a file called foo.dmg, which you can then mount to work with. Of course, it's still in Apple's proprietary DMG format, and not in the more universal ISO format, so you'll need another program to do that. Damage Isolation from Murder Thoughts should take care of that for you. It's also only FAT16 and not FAT32, so you won't be able to create anything bigger than 8 GB. If anyone knows how to create FAT32 images in OS X, let me know :) .

This was all found by the way of MacOSXHints Forums, incidentally.

I mentioned that when I tried Ubuntu 6.10 in Parallels, it didn't seem to support the maximum resolution offered by my MacBook's screen. Instead of getting a resolution of 1280x800, I was getting 1024x768, which meant that everything was fixed in a square in the middle of the screen.

A number of people suggested ways of fixing this (sadly all of them involved editing scary-looking configuration files or running scary-looking configuration utilities as root in the terminal) but nothing I tried seemed to work - I was still stuck with 1024x768.

And then I installed the latest build of Parallels - beta 3, instead of beta 2 - and suddenly the resolution is perfect. It turns out the problem was a bug in Parallels, not a problem with Ubuntu. So I can enjoy Linux in full widescreen glory.

Imagine this: You've just bought yourself a new Apple Mac, complete with an Intel processor. You think it's great and have had fun discovering all the new programs that you can install, but find that there's a handful of Windows programs that you just haven't been able to replace with any Mac equivalent.

VLC 0.8.6a has been released - it is a security update to VLC 0.8.6 to fix a vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution. The bug was reported publicly two days ago, as part of the controversial Month of Apple Bugs pseudo-project which aims to oust a new, unreported security bug affecting OS X every day. However, the VLC bug affects all VLC users, including those on Windows, so everyone needs to upgrade - it isn't just an OS X bug.

While I'm happy to hear that an update to VLC has been released so soon after the issue came to light, and that security flaws in OS X are being found and reported, I really deplore the decision to publish full details with exploit code on the internet. This means that these exploits are now public, and any old Johnny Hacker can come along and write a virus or a trojan that takes advantage of the flaws. Considering that most Mac users do not use a virus scanner - up until now there's been no real need - that puts a lot of users at risk.

The researchers would have been far better off publishing very limited information about the flaw - the application affected and a brief description of it - and giving the full details directly to the vendor of the software to allow them to fix it without putting users at risk. Most proper security researchers follow this idea of 'responsible disclosure' so it is a shame that these guys haven't done the same; instead, they seem to want to milk the publicity that comes with giving all of the details and giving virus writers a head start.

Finding flaws in software applications is good, because the vendors can fix them to make them safer. Publishing those flaws for all and sundry to see is not good, because that gives the hackers a chance to get there first.

Over the Christmas period I installed Ubuntu 5.10 (Edgy Eft) on my MacBook under Parallels, and I have to say that it's the most likeable Linux distribution I've tried so far.

It's not the first time I've used Ubuntu, but it's the first time that I haven't been driven mad by it. Though I still do not like their decision to keep support for MP3 and DVD playback out of the box, it is at least a great deal easier to install if wanted, as well as the official Java runtime environment. The inclusion of Firefox 2.0 (albeit what looks like a release candidate thereof) is a nice touch and the default packages aren't bad, though I'm still annoyed that I can't remove Evolution - I don't need it and prefer Thunderbird, but to do so would apparently remove lots of important dependencies. Most of the packages are quite up-to-date too - maybe not the most recent stable versions but not exactly old either.

The system itself isn't bad either - nice and simple and it looks good. Though as a Mac user, having a menu bar at the top is confusing, especially when it's not the menu bar for the current application.

Some other things that I would change:

1. The default font size is too big - menu bars and toolbars end up taking up too much space on screen, especially on a low resolution
2. It doesn't appear to support the 1280x800 maximum resolution offered by my MacBook's screen, so it's stuck at 1024x768 (which means black borders either side)
3. Support for the beta of Adobe Flash Player 9, although manually installing the plugin for Firefox is pretty easy

But on the whole, I like it. It hasn't scared me away yet.

Today I finally got around to upgrading the memory in my Mac Mini. Since buying it last year it's had 512 MB of RAM, which is fine for general computerry stuff (reading email, browsing the web, maybe running iTunes in the background) but lately it's been used more and more for playing World of Warcraft, which is a very memory-intensive program. With it running, doing anything else on the system is, at best, difficult - switching between WoW and, say, Firefox takes a long time.

I ended up buying the memory from Crucial - I've bought from before and had no problems, and this time was no exception. I ordered the memory yesterday morning, and despite going for the free delivery and not the more expensive guaranteed next day delivery it still came today, which is excellent. Crucial also happened to be cheaper than buying Corsair memory from either Scan or Dabs, and I'd rather not have generic memory if I can avoid it.

The reason why I have been putting the upgrade off isn't so much the cost aspect (which ended up at £85 for 1 GB of PC2700 DDR RAM), but the actual upgrade itself, and in particular taking the unit apart. It's a very small unit and the case isn't screwed on - you actually have to pry it open with a knife - I used a standard putty knife from Wickes. Because my unit also has Airport and Bluetooth, you have to then detach one of the antennae before then lifting the RAM out and inserting the new module. Thankfully, there are videos which explain this process - I really would not have bothered if I hadn't seen it being done first. One thing I did do, however, was boot the computer before putting the lid back on and making it sure it worked - after going through all the effort of taking the machine apart I didn't want to have to do it all over again just because the module wasn't seated correctly, for example.

Thankfully, the upgrade worked, and now the Mac has double the memory to play with. It's not a seismic difference in speed but it does feel snappier; still, my MacBook, with its Intel Core Duo processor, beats it when playing WoW. But not by quite so much.

Here's a tip I've uncovered, mostly for my own use but hopefully it will be benefit to someone else.

If you're using an application that runs in full screen on Mac OS X, and it crashes, you can use Command+Alt+Escape to instantly close it. I've had this problem with World of Warcraft a few times, and, not knowing what to do to get out of the game, I've ended up just restarting the whole machine.

When not in full screen, the key combination brings up a small window that lists the programs you have running and gives you the option to force quit each one, or relaunch the Finder.

I now have yet another excuse for not posting here much: OpenTTD. Its aim is to be an open source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, although right now you need the original game for the data files for it to work.

And unlike the original Transport Tycoon series, this is cross-platform, with official builds for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and there's even a PocketPC build lying around. Hari and I have both been playing it a lot, including as a network game against each other, though you can play online as well should you wish. One thing to note as that you'll need to open port 3979 on your firewall, especially if you use a Mac.

I used to play Transport Tycoon almost incessantly when I was younger and didn't have internet access; this take me back to those halcyon days. It's surprising how much I remember about it too, bearing in mind it's probably been 7 years or so since I last played it.

If you're a Mac user, get yourself a copy of Perian. It's a small (less than 1 MB) add-in for QuickTime which enables it to play back a much wider range of video formats, including DivX, XVid, Flash Video, 3ivX and a number of others.

This means that, when combined with Flip4Mac (for Windows Media) and XiphQT (for Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Theora and Speex), QuickTime on OS X is capable of playing all major audio and video formats, bar RealMedia which you will still need RealPlayer for. But that means that you can get away with just 2 media players, rather than having one for Windows Media, one for QuickTime, one for DivX and VLC for everything else.

Perian is open source and is a universal binary, so it'll work on both old and new Macs.

Well, here I am, running Windows Vista RC1 on my MacBook. And I have to say it runs pretty well, too - I've even got Aero enabled and it's barely making an impact on performance.

It's running through Boot Camp - previous Vista builds have choked on this but RC1 works fine, and the install procedure is largely the same as it is for Windows XP through Boot Camp. One big difference, however, is that Vista does not take nearly as long to install - half an hour at most, compared to an hour for XP, though the speed improvements come at a cost of extra disk space and so you'll need to create a partition that's at least 15 GB in size. I went for 20 GB.

Getting the system up and running was no more difficult than it should have been, however I did hit problems installing the driver disc that you burn during the first stage of running Boot Camp. It gets so far and then freezes. Killing the setup.exe task did spring it into action and a number of bits and pieces did get installed (and therefore enabling sound and Bluetooth support), but I'm still without a functioning iSight camera. Everything else seems to work as it should, although there are still 4 devices in Device Manager with exclamation marks.

The OS itself certainly looks nice, especially with Aero enabled, although lots of things have been moved around so it'll take me time to get used to it. Copying files between it and OS X may also prove interesting as you have to use the disk as NTFS, not FAT32, which means that OS X can read it but can't write to it, and Vista doesn't read HFS at all, or at least not without third-party software such as MacDrive.

But overall I'm pleased with how the installation went, and it means I have yet another thing to distract me from my dissertation, which I start in the coming weeks. Now I just need to get Office 2007 on here.

This is mostly for my own future reference, but if you need to verify an MD5 checksum on a Mac, you need to do this:

1. Open Terminal
2. Type openssl md5 [filename]

Change 'md5' to 'sha1' if you want to verify the SHA-1 hash as well.

I downloaded Windows Vista RC1 last night and so I needed to verify the MD5 hash before burning it to DVD-R. Apparently it does work with Boot Camp now (the betas didn't) so I'll be sticking it on my MacBook this afternoon, just as soon as I've bought a DVD-R. I didn't opt for a SuperDrive on my MacBook so it can't burn DVDs, but I've been at my parents' this weekend and their computer does have a DVD-RW drive.

And though this will undoubtedly come as no surprise to most of you, but verifying an MD5 hash on a 2.52 GB file takes a long time.

Mine was built in China, apparently. This is thanks to coconutIdentityCard which will tell you where and when your Mac (and your iPod) was made. Compulsory screenshot:

Admittedly it's not the most useful application ever but I suppose it's at least interesting. While you're there, pick up cocunutWifi - it adds an icon to your top bar which shows whether any open wireless networks are available. Turns out my parents' neighbours have jumped on the Wifi bandwagon, albeit without using WEP or WPA - potentially handy when their internet goes down (which is usually every Sunday, silly NTL) though there's obviously the ethical issue of stealing someone else's internet...

One thing I maybe haven't made especially clear is that I've spent the past 2 and a half weeks with my MacBook running solely Mac OS X (bar a brief dip into Ubuntu under Parallels Desktop). In other words, it's been a while since I used Windows outside of work or fixing other people's computers.

It's typical isn't it - as soon as I leave Hari's parents' house to go back to Bradford, her computer breaks. So until she comes back to Bradford next week I'm having to diagnose problems from over 100 miles away.

It was working fine earlier today, but this evening it had all manner of problems - no sound, programs crashing with gay abandon, and then it wouldn't shut down properly. Cynics (read: Mac zealots) among you would describe this as normal Windows behaviour, but this machine has been looked after well and it's definitely not normal.

Though she has installed a couple of games this week, there were no major changes to the software today that would trigger problems like this, which leads me to believe it's a hardware problem. I have a suspicion that the RAM has gone dodgy, which wouldn't be too bad as I've promised her a memory upgrade soon (and I think we're going the whole hog with 2 GB), but it may also be the HD which obviously is not a good thing. I may have to walk her through running Memtest86 or something equivalent to be sure.

If any of you have any better ideas, please comment, since I now have a girlfriend eager to play on World of Warcraft, but can't. :(

One of my friends picked himself a MacBook a few weeks ago and now that I have mine we've been comparing notes about how utterly awesome they are. But one thing neither of us have tried was using iChat AV, with full voice and video, so of course this was what we did this evening.

However, it took quite a bit of trial and error to get working, especially as the troubleshooting guide in iChat Help doesn't get much above the 'make sure you have a broadband internet connection' level. Here are the two things that helped us get going:

• In iChat, open up Preferences, and choose Video. Then, under Bandwidth Limit, set it to something like 500KB/s, rather than the default.
• If you're behind a NAT firewall, like me, you need to allow UDP connections on port 5060 and on ports 16384 to 16403 and have them forward to your machine.

With that done, we were able to have a two-way video conversation with no problems. Though iChat will open the ports on your Mac firewall, if you have another firewall downstream of your computer then you will need to open ports on that manually - Mac OS X doesn't natively support UPnP or similar technologies that do this for you, which is a shame.

The MacBook is here, and currently downloading about 10 system updates. Unfortunately, I have an exam in 3 hours so I can't play with it much, but for now I can say the following:

• Wow, it's so small and light
• The battery seems to be charging up really quickly
• I really wish my Mac Mini had an Apple Remote

More later (including photos), after I've spent 2 hours sat in a room writing about internet security and encryption protocols.

How hard is it to play an MP3? Well, if you're using Linux, harder than it should be, as far as my experience goes.

I've lamented before how Ubuntu neglects to include any MP3 support out-of-the-box - if you want to play MP3 files you have to enter a series of terminal commands to enable support for the less 'pure' application package repositories and then install it manually. I'm using Mandriva at the moment and so I hoped the experience would be better. And it is, somewhat. It comes with a confusing array of sound programs, several of which seem to do the same thing, and I eventually settled on Rhythmbox. This was happy to play the first MP3 I gave it, but trying to play anything else gave me the error 'Could not open /dev/dsp' which may as well have been 'Ooga Booga Shmoo!' because both mean about the same to me. I then tried Amarok, which played about half a second of each song, before the system just turned itself off.

After rebooting (which takes a while on a Live CD) I did manage to get Rhythmbox to play a few songs without it moaning. But why the cryptic error message? And why did Amarok totally crash my system? I thought those sorts of things didn't happen on Linux. I could have installed VLC, but this is a Live CD so I'd lose it when I reboot and it requires lots of long terminal commands and downloading huge files.

Anyway, apologies for the rant - I was stressing out over a plugin for some PHP guild software that I was trying to install and wanted some music to calm me down, when actually it did the opposite and just frustrate me even more. I am so looking forward to going back to a Mac.

(By the way, if you want to tell me that MP3 is evil and that I should be using Ogg Vorbis - screw you. I have an iPod.)

• I think I may have found out the key to getting the hard drive in my laptop to work - keeping it warm. If the machine is cold, after being off for several hours, then it doesn't work, but if it's warm it'll run first time. I found this out after using Mandriva One (via a live CD) for a couple of hours, and then rebooting. As proof, this blog entry is currently being composed on my laptop. Still, it's far from an ideal situation and that heat can't be doing the rest of the computer good either, so I'm still looking for a new machine.
• This was, incidentally, the second time I'd spent any time in Mandriva, and though it has impressed me the most out of all of the distros I've tried so far I was still relieved to be back in Windows afterwards. Things like installing VLC (which required typing four long commands as root in the terminal) and getting Flash to work required far too much effort, when compared to how Windows and Mac OS X handles them. I know all the cool people are switching from Mac OS X to Ubuntu but don't count me in.
• Those of you using Firefox may be interested to know that Firefox 1.5.0.6 is out (and should be available as an update to you over the next couple of days). A big regression (bug which wasn't there before) appeared in 1.5.0.5, so 1.5.0.6 has been released to fix it. Incidentally it comes almost two years after 0.9.3 was released - don't know if that's particularly interesting to anyone but I've just found it out.

It seems that my laptop is not far off drawing its pension for the last time. The hard drive, despite having been replaced less than 2 years ago, is at the point of failing - it'll only boot up after a few attempts and several 'IDE Error #0' messages. Once it's running it is fine, but I'm going to be spending some time getting everything of any value off here before it totally dies and I lose everything.

This shouldn't take too long as after I lost the HDD the first time around I got into the habit of backing up more frequently. My last backup was only 9 days ago, which included all of my personal documents and my photos - there's now only the less important stuff to be copied, especially as my email is all done using IMAP so it stays on the server as well.

I also shouldn't be as inconvenienced as before - whereas then I just had a laptop, I now also have a Mac and a PDA. Admittedly Hari tends to monopolise the Mac but I shouldn't find myself stranded.

This does mean that the MacBook that I keep hinting at may be coming sooner than I was intending. I do have the money for it now (although I might ask for a small amount of parental assistance) but I'll be waiting until after the Steve Jobs Keynote next week, just in case they decide to upgrade the MacBook model. It's unlikely but with PC manufacturers scrabbling to get machines with the new Intel Core 2 Duo chip onto the market it's possible that Apple will follow suit.

Though I've had my Mac for almost a year now (minus about 5 days), it's taken me until now to allow my laptop to connect to my printer via my Mac. I have an Epson Stylus C42 Plus printer connected to my Mac via USB, and I've wanted to be able to print from my laptop to the printer over the network so that I don't have to fiddle around with unplugging cables here and there. While I've had no problems doing this with two Windows machines, thus far having a Mac in the equation has prevented things from working - a shame considering that I've had no such problems with accessing network shares between Windows and Mac computers.

The answer, however, came in the form of Bonjour, and, in particular Bonjour for Windows, a link for which is on the bottom-right of that page. Once I had that installed, it was only a matter of running the Printer Wizard that Bonjour installs to add my printer under Windows, and I was able to print fine.

One gotcha I did have was that I had to use the generic driver on Windows that the Bonjour wizard selected, and not the actual printer driver which I had already installed. Using the actual driver meant that although the documents were successfully sent to the printer, they didn't actually print out. Using the generic PostScript driver worked fine, although it means that I can't query the ink levels or initiate printer head cleaning from my laptop - not a big deal but slightly annoying nonetheless.

Ironically, just as I was about to write this entry, Chris had a very similar experience. If you have a Mac in your house then installing Bonjour is highly recommended.

My copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 arrived today - I don't have a DVD burner so I ordered it on disc instead (more photos here and here). It comes on two DVDs - one for the 32-bit edition and one for the 64-bit edition, and also includes the product key on a sticker inside. It also says you can install it on up to 10 computers on any one time, something I don't think the final release of Vista will let you do.

I'm not installing it yet though. My intention is to install it on my MacBook, although judging by Mark's experiences I think I'll wait until it can be installed without messing up your partitions. Unfortunately it's not supported by Parallels Desktop yet either, but again that'll hopefully change soon. I've bought a copy anyway, just again.

Thanks for all of your memory recommendations, by the way - they've been a great help.

I know some of you are top-notch computer geeks, so I have a couple of questions regarding computer memory that I'd appreciate some answers to.

The first question relates to Hari's computer. It should be quite a high performance machine, but she still gets rather low framerates on World of Warcraft. Software-wise her system checks out - it's not bogged down with unnecessary programs running and she has always been pro-active in checking for viruses and spyware even before meeting me. She has a 128 MB nVidia graphics card and a 2 GHz Pentium 4 processor too.

So we reckon that the one thing she is a bit short of is memory. She has 512 MB, which isn't bad but could probably be upgraded, especially as her system can take up to 2 GB. Right now she has two 256 MB modules in the two slots on her motherboard.

Because we're both students and neither of us are swimming in cash, any upgrade has to be good value for money. So we're aiming for the most amount of performance boost for the least amount of cash - sure, we could go for the full 2 GB but if only going up to 1 GB would give a pretty good performance boost then we'd prefer that as it'll undoubtedly be cheaper. Question is, what combinations do we go for?

Our options are the following:

1. Buy new 1 GB module and take out both 256 MB modules and sell them (total RAM: 1 GB)
2. Buy new 1 GB module, sell one 256 MB module and keep the other (total RAM: 1.25 GB)
3. Buy new 512 MB module, sell one 256 MB module and keep the other (total RAM: 768 MB)
4. Buy 2 new 512 MB modules and take out both 256 MB modules and sell them (total RAM: 1GB)

I've heard there may be issues with having differently-sized memory banks, which may make options 2 and 3 inappropriate, but I don't know how likely these issues are or whether they still apply to DDR RAM (which is what Hari's machine takes). Buying two 512 MB modules seems to be cheaper but then having a 1 GB module gives more room for future expansion. Any help would be appreciated.

The second question is about memory suppliers. In the past I've gone to Crucial because I've heard good things about them and they've been good to me as a customer, but they can also be expensive. If anyone knows of any good memory suppliers who are cheaper than Crucial then I'd love to hear from you. I'm also contemplating upgrading my Mac Mini to 1 GB, which I'd like to do for £50 if possible - with Crucial it'll be more like £70 when you include VAT.

A couple of months ago I mentioned the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, a piece of software for Windows XP that will tell you whether your computer is capable of running Windows Vista when it (eventually) comes out.

Microsoft have just released an updated version of the tool which more accurately predicts whether Vista will run, and what problems (if any) you may encounter when running it. I ran it on my laptop again, and the results were more positive than last time. Though I still don't have the 15 GB of hard disk drive space necessary for the installation, more of my drivers will be supported. In fact, theoretically I should have no problems - before, my printer, screen, sound card and wi-fi card would all not work. The printer, screen and sound card should be supported by Vista out of the box now, and the wi-fi card should just require a trip to Windows Update. Bluetooth support may still be an issue, but Belkin/Widdcom still has some time to sort that out.

Of course, I'm fully intending not to use Vista on this laptop - I'll be putting it on my MacBook instead, when I get that in a couple of months or so.

This is good news - Microsoft is officially backing an add-in for Office 2007 that adds support for OpenDocument. As you may be aware, OpenDocument is the ISO-approved XML-based document format used in OpenOffice.org and other suites, however, with Office 2007 Microsoft also launched its own Office XML format, which is another XML-based document format that is seeking ECMA approval. Microsoft have stuck by their own format and tried to play down OpenDocument, refusing to support it in Office 2007.

This is an apparent u-turn on Microsoft's part. Though Office 2007 will still ship without OpenDocument support, there will be a Microsoft-backed add-in that will enable users to open and save OpenDocument files and convert them to and from the Office XML format.

What's more, the tool is open source and released under the BSD license. Right now it'll only work with Word 2007, but it should also support PowerPoint and Excel in future - whether it'll work with previous versions of Office is unclear.

There has been pressure for Microsoft to support OpenDocument, especially from governmental organisations such as the State of Massachusetts, and there have been efforts on the part of at least two organisations to integrate the format into Office. But this is the first time that Microsoft has formally backed one.

If any Mac user tells you that OS X doesn't have all of the annoying updates that Windows has, please do me a favour and slap them around a bit with a large trout. Yesterday the OS X 10.4.7 update was released, which fixes a variety of functional and security bugs in OS X Tiger, which was around 40 MB to download. Then today, I've had QuickTime 7.1.2, iTunes 6.0.5 and the latest iPod firmware updater. These three roll in at over 100 MB, meaning that over two days I've downloaded 150 MB of updates.

Of these, the 10.4.7 update is important, so I don't have many qualms there, and QuickTime is the main multimedia system in OS X so it's also needed. I use iTunes quite a bit, so I suppose I need that updating, but my iPod is set up with my laptop, because setting it up on Windows means it uses the FAT32 file system instead of HFS+ and thus becomes infinitely more useful as you aren't stuck with using it only on Macs. It also doesn't have any firmware updates for iPod Minis, which means that even if I did set it up with my Mac there would still have been no point in downloading it.

I suppose I appreciate things like QuickTime and iTunes being pushed through Software Update, since they come with the OS and are useful, but the iPod stuff isn't needed for me. Sure, I could opt not to install it this time around, but the next time I boot my machine I'm sure it'll ask me to install it again.

Oh well, now I need to reboot to finish the QuickTime installation, so cheerio for now.

I've just bought an official copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 on DVD. I could have downloaded it for free, but I don't own a DVD burner and so getting it posted to me is probably easier.

I'm not installing it yet though. I've got it for my next laptop which will probably be a Macbook and will probably be bought around September-time, depending on my financial situation. By then, I'm hoping that Boot Camp will run Windows Vista.

If I was to buy a Macbook, to be able to run Windows would require purchasing a Windows XP license (since I tend to do things buy the book and actually pay for software). If Vista is going to be out in the next 12 months then there's little point in buying a license for XP as it'll be of no use once Vista is available. So in the time between me buying a Macbook and Windows Vista (the real one) being released, I can pursue the cheap option of using a beta of Vista.

As to why I've bought it today: apparently the number of users allowed to try Vista is limited, so if I don't get in now I may not be able to get it in future. It's perhaps a bit selfish, as someone else could have got in there who would be testing it now and not later, but nevermind.

The latest chapter of the war of words between Microsoft (with its Office Open XML format) and the ODF Alliance has Microsoft claiming that Office Open XML is faster:

"The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory," Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft’s information worker strategy, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. "The Open XML format is designed for performance. XML is fundamentally slower than binary formats so we have made sure that customers won't notice a big difference in performance."

Yates cited a study carried out by ZDNet.com that compared OpenOffice.org 2.0 with the XML formats in Microsoft Office 2003. But Marino Marcich, the managing director of the ODF Alliance, claimed this was not a fair comparison as it was not testing Open XML itself and only examined one implementation of ODF.

The ODF Alliance is right, here. The study compared the speed of OpenDocument files in OpenOffice.org, with the speed of Office Open XML files in Microsoft Office. Which is really unfair because the general speed of the application will hugely affect the results - anyone who has used OpenOffice.org will know it's pretty damn slow.

Right now it isn't possible to compare the two directly because neither supports the other format yet - you can't yet open OpenDocument files in Microsoft Office, nor can you open Office Open XML files in OpenOffice.org. That should change soon, however, as an import filter allowing OpenDocument files to opened in Microsoft Office should be released soon and it's likely that a future OpenOffice.org release will support Office Open XML. Then, and only then, can proper speed comparisons take place. And I'll bet that there's hardly any difference in speed.

There's been a lot of misinformation about what hardware Windows Vista will require when it is released. Because it introduces a new display system called Aero, which needs a system with a powerful graphics card and lots of memory, some commentators have said that only the latest machines with high-end hardware will be able to cope with it, however, Aero is optional and isn't even included in the basic version of Vista (Home Basic). Without Areo enabled, Vista will only make modest demands on hardware and will run on machines that are a few years old.

Microsoft have released a beta of their Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, which you can use to scan your system to see how likely it is that your computer will be able to run the new operating system. It checks things like how much hard disk space you have, how fast your processor is and what hardware you have, and then lets you know if this will be sufficient. You can also select what sorts of things you'll be using Vista for to allow it to better suggest which version of Vista to buy, which is a nice touch.

My machine, a 2 1/2 year-old Toshiba Satellite Pro, would not be able to run Vista as-is, but this is mostly because Vista needs 15 GB of free hard disk space and it only has a 20 GB hard disk. Presumably fitting a new hard disk with a higher capacity would solve this problem. It also may have driver issues since it identified four devices where Vista may not have drivers for it - these were my Epson C42 printer, my laptop screen, my sound card, my wifi card and my Belkin Bluetooth dongle, none of which use drivers signed by Microsoft. My RS232-USB converter would work with a driver update. It also suggests that Windows Vista Home Premium is most-suited to my needs, which is good as it's the second-cheapest version.

If you're considering upgrading to Vista when it finally comes out, it may be well worth your while running this tool. I imagine it will be updated as time goes on (and more Vista-ready drivers become available) so if your computer doesn't score well now then try again in a couple of months. As it is, I'm intent on replacing this laptop before Vista arrives so this isn't so useful to me, but it may be useful if I ever decide to sell this machine as it being Vista-capable may be a good selling point.

I've been having problems with Skype on my Dell Axim x50v PocketPC, whereby the text in the application would all be garbled gobbledygook. I managed to fix it today, by removing Skype, then going to Start, Settings, System, Regional Settings and changing the locale to 'English (United States)', and then re-installing Skype. You can then change the locale back to whatever it was ('English (United Kingdom)' in my case) and it should work okay. I'm guessing that Skype is multi-lingual but doesn't support British English yet.

Funnily enough, Intel's graphics drivers suffer a similar problem. Damn those yankees for not respecting British culture ;) .

Talking of PDAs, I took the latest version of Minimo (version 0.015) for a spin today. Seems to work well on my Axim (a device that it's had problems with in the past), though it's a bit slow to start. Still, the interface is good and it supports things like tabs, and unlike Opera it's free. It now also means that my PDA has more web browsers installed on it than my laptop, which is slightly bizarre but there you go.

...will probably be an Apple MacBook. I've been comparing the MacBook with the MacBook Pro, and come to these conclusions:

1. The MacBook has a smaller screen than the MacBook Pro - you're limited to 13" instead of 15" or 17". But right now I'm managing fine with (I think) a 13" laptop so that's not a problem.
2. The MacBook Pro has the option of a faster processor in the more expensive models, but 2 GHz is probably enough.
3. I could get a big HD, but I've been surviving with 20 GB on my laptop for a while now and I still have 8 GB free. My Mac Mini still has about 40 GB of free space.
4. MacBook Pros have dedicated ATI cards using PCI Express for graphics, with either 128 or 256 MB of dedicated RAM. MacBooks only have 64 MB of RAM, which is shared with the system, and only use Intel chips. The higher-end Pros also have 1 GB of RAM as standard, whereas the MacBooks ship with 512 MB by default. You can add more though.
5. You get a Superdrive as standard with the MacBook Pro - the lower MacBook models have a combo drive.
6. The higher end MacBook Pro has a Firewire 800 port and an extra USB port, and the MacBook Pros all have ExpressCard (which I think is a successor to PCMCIA).
7. The screens on MacBook Pros support higher resolutions - up to 1680 x 1050. The MacBooks can "only" reach 1280 x 800, but it's still an improvement over the iBook.
8. The MacBook is lighter than the MacBook Pros, weighing a little over two kilos.
9. The MacBook Pro has a metal case, whereas the MacBook is mostly plastic, I think.

To be honest, for what I want to use it for, the MacBook isn't that much worse than the MacBook Pro, but it is much cheaper. By the looks of things, I could probably bag the white 2.0 GHz MacBook with an upgrade to 1 GB of RAM for under £850. A comparable MacBook Pro would cost close to £1500 - another £650 for not a lot more in terms of features. I think I know which one I'd go for.

Of course, this is all based on the assumption that the MacBook runs BootCamp, which is a necessity as I'm using it to replace a Windows laptop and will still need to be able to run the odd thing in Windows from time to time. I'm guessing it will but when the MacBook start shipping in a few days I'm sure we'll find out. Update: Macworld says you can - awesome!

The second alpha build of NeoOffice 2.0 was released today. NeoOffice 2.0 is based on OpenOffice.org 2.0, and so it brings with it the updated interface, full OpenDocument support and a database program. Like previous versions of NeoOffice, it retains its closer integration with Mac OS X, with a native menu bar and print facility, as well as using system fonts, though the interface is still a very Windows-ish grey for the time being.

The alpha builds are available under the 'Early Access Programme', which means that you have to pay to use them (they become free after the 23rd May). From tomorrow, the alpha build will be $10 but at the moment it's $25. The money will help to support the development of NeoOffice.

This looks good - right now, the existing stable version of NeoOffice does not fully support OpenDocument and lacks the much-improved interface that OpenOffice.org provides, however, OpenOffice.org itself on OS X isn't very good as printing doesn't always work and you're restricted to using a subset of fonts. It also has to run in X11, making it very slow. I can't wait for the final release of NeoOffice 2.0.

This is the project I've been doing for one of my modules. It's due in on Wednesday and the practical part (i.e. the computer program) is all-but finished. It's not very good but it works.

The aim of the project was to create a virtual environment using OpenGL and C++. Because OpenGL has a built-in routine for creating teapots (a fact that must surely mean it was developed by Brits) I decided to create a teapot museum with various differently-sized and coloured teapots. This is what I ended up with.

I now just have to write a report to go with it.

I have a new mouse for my laptop. The scroll wheel on my old one stopped working, which is rather annoying as I find scroll wheels on mice really helpful (and why it amazed me that it took Apple until last year to stick a scroll wheel on its mice). It's still a corded mouse as I them on my laptop (my Mac mouse is RF wireless) and like the last one it was bought from eBay for not a lot of money. It's silver and has a brushed metal appearance, and the scroll wheel glows blue when it's turned on. Naturally it's an optical mouse, and it's USB - like most laptops mine does not support PS/2.

My laptop keyboard has also developed a minor problem - the 'W' key sometimes doesn't work. It's not a major problem since 'w' doesn't feature too prominently in English words but typing 'www.' at the beginning of web addresses can be a bit problematic, as you can imagine. I'm sure it's easily fixable though.

While trying to install the latest (and near-final) build of Windows Live Messenger Beta, I got this error message: (click to view full size)

Nice one, Microsoft.

Update: Looks like I'm not the only one, as this El Reg reader had the same issue. Windows Live Messenger is now a public beta, so you no longer need an invite to download it.

I can't say that I've ever tried to get Bluetooth working under Linux, but I was using Mandriva One today and noticed a Bluetooth icon in the panel. So I plugged in my Belkin USB Bluetooth dongle, and - lo and behold - it actually worked. I was able to browse my Nokia 6230i with no problems - using it as just as easy as in Windows or Mac OS X. And all I did was plug in a USB dongle - no complex configuration or anything like that. It "just worked" - something that I wish I could say more often about features in Linux distros.

It's certainly more than can be said about my experience (thus far) with getting Wifi to work in Mandriva. I have two Wifi PCMCIA cards, both made by Edimax - an old wireless-B one based on the Atmel chipset and a newer wireless-G one based on the Ralink RT500 chipset which also supports WPA. Mandriva wouldn't work with either of them, even after using drakconnect to try to get it to recognise them. Which was rather annoying.

Considering Bluetooth worked so well, the fact that it wouldn't accept two Wifi cards based on different chipsets was rather annoying.

I've learnt that it's not a very good idea to buy random cheap computer peripherals from eBay. If you have to reinstall the drivers and don't have the original CD, you may well be very screwed.

This happened with my USB Infrared Data Access device (IrDA), bought off eBay last year for about £8. Apaprently it's an Edisonsoft ES620, but with Edisonsoft not having an official web site finding drivers is hard. In all, I tried about 5 different drivers, all claiming to be for the ES620, and Windows would not install any of them.

Though these devices are cheap, the extra cost of buying proper-branded devices is probably worth it, since the manufacturer will usually have a web site where you can download the official drivers and get support if you are having issues with it.

As it happens, I only needed the IrDA device for my phone, which supports Bluetooth anyway and I have a Belkin Bluetooth device. It may not be the best device in the world but at least you can download the drivers easily.

Anyone who has used OpenOffice.org knows that it can be very slow at the best of times, however, a friend forwarded me this tip for making it faster:

1. Launch one of the OpenOffice.org applications (doesn't really matter which)
2. Click on the 'Tools' menu and choose 'Options'
3. Expand the 'OpenOffice.org' tree and choose 'Java'
4. Untick 'Use a Java Runtime Environment'.

Apparently one of the reasons why OOo is so slow is because it also loads the Java RE every time it loads - this should prevent it from doing so. It will stop you from using Java with OOo but the chances are most home users won't need it anyway.

Note that this probably won't have any effect on NeoOffice on Mac OS X, since it has to use Java for some of its operations.

Update: For those interested in knowing exactly what the Java RE is needed for in OpenOffice.org, Wikipedia has a handy guide. It will disable the wizards and all database connectivity, as well as preventing you from saving files in mobile formats like Pocket Word, restricting some of the functionality of Base and the media players on Unix systems.

My laptop now has a super-fresh install of Windows XP on it. As it happens, I couldn't find the restore CD for it, but the restore disk for my Dad's Fujitsu-Siemens laptop worked fine, bar some issues with the product key which were sorted out with Microsoft over the phone, and the lack of drivers and utilities which I'm now downloading from their respective web sites. That said, I have saved some time thanks to the recovery CD including Service Pack 2 and a number of the security updates released since.

Though I am going to need to re-install lots of software over the next few days, the machine is already noticably quicker, and it's now got NTFS on it instead of FAT32 so it should make better use of its 20 GB hard drive. Looks like I have an "interesting" weekend ahead of me.

About nine months ago I complained that Windows lacks a tool for monitoring processor temperature and that it won't warn you if your machine is getting too hot. Compare this with warnings about disk space and battery life in notebooks.

Since then I've found two programs which will offer to warn you if your machine is getting too hot, allowing you to quickly shut down or hibernate if you want to preserve your data (instead of having your computer cut out when the hardware tells it to).

I've decided that the time has come for me to reinstall Windows XP on my laptop. The installation is over 18 months old now and is a bit on the slow side due to my continual abuse of it - it's had lots of software installed and uninstalled, many of it beta or even alpha quality. I also managed to goof up my IE7 Beta 2 Preview installation (the fault was entirely mine) which means that although it still works, I can't upgrade it to the MIX06 release that came out last week.

Other factors that have influenced my decision include the purchase of a Mac, which means that I don't really need to dual-boot to Linux anymore since a perfectly good Unix machine is available to me, and that a valid Windows XP Professional license has come into my possesion. I'm also keen to migrate to NTFS as I'm still on FAT32, which means I don't get niceties like file system compression and encryption.

If this installation can last me at least a year, then by that time I should have a job and Windows Vista should be out, so I'd be able to afford a new laptop with Vista. Though I like my Mac and use it primarily, I still haven't been able to wean myself off Windows and there are a handful of applications I still use on my laptop.

My plan is to start the reinstall later this week. In the meantime I have lots of data to backup.

A few weeks ago I found that Hari's computer had StarForce Copy Protection installed on it, after reading it about it on BoingBoing. It was left over from a game that she used to have but had since uninstalled, since uninstalling a game that bundles Starforce's copy protection does not remove the protection as well.

By following these instructions I was able to remove it, since its effects on a system are worrying. Essentially it can make a system much more vulnerable to virus infections, and if the copy protection software doesn't like what you are doing it can reboot your system. It can also cause stability problems and system slowdowns, according to Wikipedia and its cited sources.

There's more on the Boycott Starforce web site, including how to find out if Starforce is on your system. It's a nasty piece of software and if you don't need it on there you should get rid of it.

(Note: Starforce staff have a habit of attacking sites where information criticisng their product is published. Please bear this in mind when reading the comments)

So every man and his dog now knows that Apple launched their Intel Mac Mini yesterday. As an owner of a G4 Mac Mini bought a mere 7 months ago I've decided to give the world my 2 cents on the issue.

Reasons why I'm jealous of the new Intel Mac Mini

• It's supposedly up to 4 times faster than the G4. I have a feeling that refers to the Core Duo and not the Core Solo, which I'm using for the basis of my comparison since it costs the same as the 1.42Ghz model I bought.
• It has Front Row and the Apple Remote. The latter would be quite useful as Hari and I somewhat use the Mac to watch DVDs in bed, but MediaCentral essentially mimics the functions of Front Row so it's not a must have.
• More USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet and line-in. I had to buy a Griffin iMic to be able to input sound, which uses up one of the 2 USB ports - now the Mini comes with 4 USB2.0 ports and has a built-in line-in port. That said the onboard sound output was not up to a lot on the G4 (the iMic providing much better sound quality) so it may still be worth the purchase for audiophiles. Gigabit ethernet is nice though to be honest probably not necessary for me as none of my other networking equipment supports it yet.
• iLife 06 and Comic Life are included as standard. Comic Life looks cool though I'm still mulling over the iLife update - I don't use any of the iLife apps much but that may change if I upgrade since iPhoto 06 is supposed to be a big improvement.

...and why I'm not jealous

• Intel Macs are very new, and a lot of software won't run natively in it. Rosetta works with most applications but not with some like NeoOffice which I use regularly. OpenOffice.org has only just released a version that runs on Intel Macs and I'm not sure how stable it is. So at least for the time being a lot of software will be slower and some may not even work at all.
• Intel integrated graphics. Hari uses my Mac Mini a lot to play World of Warcraft and I don't think having up to 128MB of system RAM allocated to graphics will do anything for performance. An upgrade to 1 GB is not cheap either.
• It's less value for money. The mid-range G4 Mac Mini was the same price as the entry-level Intel Mac Mini, and while it has a faster processor, it has a smaller HD (60 GB instead of 80 GB), worse graphics and less RAM as a result.

So the new Mac Mini is better than the original in some ways, but not in others. Though Apple are no longer selling the G4s direct you may be able to pick them up cheaply from resellers, and I'm sure some people will see them as being more attractive than the Intel models.

Gledster was kind enough to point me to this solution to the 'Can't Find Requested String.' error that I've been having with my Intel graphics. The problem is a result of me not being American and therefore having my region settings in Windows set to English (United Kingdom) and not English (United States) - the installer will select the correct language file for US English, and indeed for many other languages, but not UK English.

What this means is that you have to uninstall your existing graphics drivers, reboot, set your region settings to US English, reboot, install the new graphics drivers, reboot, change your region settings back to UK English and then do one final reboot. You could possibly get away with only 2 reboots but to do it properly that's 4. All because of some sloppy programming on Intel's part that never used to be an issue. I imagine this will also affect Canadians and Australians, too.

Considering the update really doesn't deliver much, to be honest it isn't really even worth installing anyway.

A stable version of OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 for the Mac is now available. Previously the latest build was a release candidate of 2.0. There is also an Alpha build which works on Intel-based Macs, apparently making this the first Office product other than iWork that works on Intel Macs. Microsoft have yet to release an Office:mac that will work on the new Intel machines, which means that OpenOffice.org is the only Intel Mac-compatible tool that lets you create and edit spredsheets, as far as I know. No, seriously.

While the OpenOffice.org developers who have made this possible have something to be proud of, the fact is that OpenOffice.org on the Mac is not a particularly good experience. It's very much a port to OS X as it uses X11, and will not use OS X's fonts or printers. I've found that I can't print and I can only use a very limited selection of fonts - essentially I'm stuck with a subset of the Lucida fonts and some of the Bitstream ones. It's also very slow to start.

NeoOffice, which aims to be a more native version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac, doesn't get much better. It's use of Java means it's still very slow, but you can print and have access to all of your fonts, and the menu bar is where you'd expect it to be on a Mac. But it still has grey Windows-esque toolbars, context menus and dialogs, and the menus are very slow (I'm using NeoOffice 1.2 Beta here though). And because it's based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 it can only import OpenDocument files - it can't save them. NeoOffice will also only run on PowerPC-based Macs, not Intel ones, and this is likely to be the case for some time.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, though. A Cocoa (i.e. native Mac) version of OpenOffice.org is in the works but since it was announced in July 2005 I've not heard of any progress being made. NeoOffice may be working towards greater Mac compatiblilty too.

But I've also recently discovered AbiWord, which is a cross-platform open source word processor which supports OpenDocument and OpenOffice.org's own file format, as well as MS Word files. I've had it on my Mac for a few weeks without really playing with it much, but it seems faster and more Mac-like. It's only a word processor and so it won't handle spreadsheets and presentations, but word processing is what I do most with NeoOffice now so I'm willing to give it a try.

One of the great things about ScummVM is that it is cross-platform. Essentially, it'll let you play the games that you bought for your PC 10 years ago on many different platforms. These include mobile platforms such as PocketPC.

However, the later Scumm games like Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max Hit the Road come with 'full voice talkie' versions. While this means you'll be able to hear the characters talking in the game, it meant that, in the case of Day of the Tentacle, the size of the game shot up from around 12 MB to 270 MB. For most mobile devices, that's more memory than is available.

Thankfully ScummVM has a few tricks up its sleeve. As well as playing the original game files as distributed, it will also happily play files that have been converted to MP3, Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, which can result in a vast reduction in file size. I'm going to use this how-to to show you how you can do this. Read on...

Now that I've had time to sleep and think straight after Steve Job's keynote yesterday, it's dawned on me that buying an Intel-based Mac now is probably not the best of ideas. The reason? Software.

Because the Intel-based Macs have completely different software architectures to older PowerPC-based Macs, all your Mac software will need to be recompiled so that it will work on Intel Macs. Now this is fine if all you use is Apple's own software, as I imagine that's all good to go already, but if not, then you have to run them in Rosetta.

Rosetta essentially emulates a PowerPC processor (as far as I understand it anyway), so that it will allow applications written for PowerPC processors to run on your Intel-based Mac. But they will run more slowly than if they were compiled natively, if they will even run at all. Despite Apple's claims, not all apps will run in Rosetta - NeoOffice being one example. That's a program I have to use regularly for writing essays and preparing presentations and can't do without, even if it as slow as a decapitated tortoise at times.

Because Apple brought forward the expected launch date of the Intel-based Macs, it looks like many third-party developers are simply not ready to ship updated versions of their software. The situation will improve, but if you rush out to buy a new Intel-based Mac you may find that some programs will be slower than expected, and others just simply won't work at all.

On the plus side, Intel Macs definitely will run Windows. It'll be unsupported and Apple won't sell it, but they won't stop you from running it either. Which is good news.

Sorry to all the people not remotely interested in anything Apple or Mac-related, but I have one last bit of news: Google Earth is now available on Mac OS X. Previously you needed Windows 2000 or XP, but now it will also run on OS X 10.4 (Tiger). It's a 12.5 MB download, and works just like the Windows version but with a more Mac-like look and feel.

There's also better UK aerial photography available for both versions - I was able to see my house in almost ridiculous level of detail as now the whole of West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester has better imaging. It's about 3 years old by my reckoning.

As well as new iMacs and MacBooks (not sure if I like the new name, but, heh), Apple have delivered updates to QuickTime and iTunes, now at versions 7.0.4 and 6.0.2 respectively. They're available via Software Update on OS X but I'm not sure if they're available to download from Apple's site.

They're not big updates, as you'd expect from the version numbers, but iTunes gets a 'MiniStore', which adds a strip at the bottom of the screen with links to the iTunes Music Store. It's context-sensitive - highlight a Gorillaz track and it'll let you buy other songs by Gorillaz and suggest similar artists. It's on by default, but can easily be hidden via the Edit menu or Cmd+Shift+M.

The other thing I've noticed is that if you right-click an MP3 file and choose Get Info, it's able to tell you what encoded it if the data is in the file. As far as I know, only the Lame encoder adds this data, but it'll at least tell you the version used.

I'm still waiting for the OS X 10.4.4 update to become available.

And typically, as Apple were announcing loads of cool new schtuff, Microsoft were announcing... critical update patches. As well as the WMF patch that was released last week, there's another critical patch for Windows and one for Office. I don't have MS Office but the Windows patch did not require a reboot, which was nice.

Update: Note that if you have the MiniStore enabled, iTunes will send the current track that you are playing back to Apple so that it can suggest music store links. If you hide the window, then it doesn't, and this has been verified by packet sniffers. It's a pity Apple didn't make that particularly clear in the update, but at least it's easily disabled.

There are many people who have reviewed this distro, some more thoroughly than others. This is my personal experience, written over several days when I've had time. Hopefully you'll find it useful.

Some excellent news via F-Secure - Microsoft have released the patch for the WMF flaw a few days early and it's available now. The advisory hasn't yet been updated but you can install the patch from Windows Update. I advise all of you who use Windows to install this patch immediately.

Update: You can download the patch separately here. Note that on Tuesday Microsoft will be releasing other patches as well as part of its normal patch cycle. The details are here, but in summary there will be critical updates for Windows, Office and Exchange, plus some non-critical updates that do not affect security and a new version of the Malicious Software Removal tool.

There's a lot being said about the WMF flaw. Since my last post, it has become apparent that the code causing the WMF exploit has been in Windows since Windows 3.0. This was released in 1990, making the flaw over 15 years old. Yet only now is anyone aware of it or actively exploiting it.

Potentially, this means that this vulnerability will affect more computers than any other software flaw ever, since it's been in every version of Windows since 1990. But it's not that simple. Apparently, according to this research by eWeek, the flaw will only affect Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, because in the past WMF files have not been associated with any program by default. It is only with the advent of the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, which supports WMF amongst other image formats, that this flaw has become a threat.

But, there's another but. Some of the viruses taking advantage of this flaw have been using JPG file extensions, even though the files themselves are WMF files. What this research didn't test was whether viewing an infected WMF file disguised as a JPG file caused an infection. Microsoft has this to say on the subject:

At this point, the only image format affected is the Windows Metafile (WMF) format. It is possible however than an attacker could rename the file extension of a WMF file to that of a different image format. In this situation, it is likely that the Graphic Rendering engine would detect and render the file as a WMF image which could allow exploitation.

If that's the case, then users of most other recent versions of Windows are also affected, i.e. Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT and Me. Still, Windows XP is now the most widely used operating system on the internet, so even if the flaw only affects XP it still means that a large number of users could get infected, should a virus use this method of propogation.

Thankfully, though there have been isolated reports of viruses, none seem to have spread widely yet, and most anti-virus programs have employed heuristics scanning to detect malicious code that exploits this flaw, meaning that as long as your anti-virus program is up to date and set to scan WMF files (most scan all opened files by default anyway), it's likely that you will be protected. You can, and indeed should, go further by un-registering the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer DLL (which will stop this program from working but it will also keep you safe) and installing this temporary hotfix. Microsoft's next patch day will be a week today - January 10th - so presumably the most we have to wait for an official fix is 7 days.

Update: Microsoft has updated their advisory to state that the patch will be available on Tuesday 10th January. They have completed development of the patch, however it still requires testing and localisation, so that it will work on all native language versions of Windows and won't cause any further side effects. Unfortunately, when you have a big, complex operating system like Windows used by so many different computers with so many different configurations, being able to identify and fix a flaw without causing any further problems in only two weeks as not easy.

Via F-Secure is a temporary fox to the WMF vulnerability which does not restrict Windows functionality. Microsoft's current suggested workaround involves disabling the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, which you may want to do if you actually use that program.

This fix patches a system DLL to prevent the vulnerable function from working, so that you can use WMF files safely. To get it to work, download the file, install it and then reboot.

It is, however, only a 'temporary' fix and the author suggests removing it when Microsoft releases an official patch. The next round of Windows patches is due on January 10th, so this patch will bind you over until then (or earlier if MS manages to get something done quicker).

Note, however, that you may not even be vulnerable to the WMF exploit. If you are using a processor that supports hardware DEP (Data Execution Prevention), then the vulnerability cannot be exploited on your machine. As far as I know, AMD Athlon 64 processors, plus other very recently launched processors from AMD and Intel support this extension. Sunbelt Blog has details about how to tell if your system has hardware DEP. You will need to change the settings from "Turn on DEP for essential Windows programs and services only" to "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select" to be properly protected, and it will only work if Windows doesn't warn you that your computer does not support hardware DEP.

Pity the poor Windows Metafile. The vector image format is now the bringer of yet another Windows vulnerability, this time an unpatched "0-day" exploit - i.e. where malware has begun exploiting the flaw before any advisories have even been published, never mind a patch.

F-Secure has some information here. The situation is pretty grave for Internet Explorer users - merely viewing an infected image will have your system infected. Firefox users won't be infected just viewing the file, but if it's opened it's another matter. In fact, just selecting the file in Explorer may lead to infection if it needs to show a thumbnail or preview the file, and Google Desktop users had also better beware because even downloading the file may cause an infection when GDS indexes it.

All in all, it's not a good situation. Three viruses are already using it, even though the first was only discovered yesterday. I think I'll be using my Mac a bit more over the next few days...

I picked up a USB Bluetooth dongle today for my laptop, since they now only cost £20. My Mac has Bluetooth already, but the Nokia PC Suite software is Windows only and iSync doesn't support my Nokia 6230i phone (you need to buy PhoneDirector for that). I've already got a USB Infrared adaptor but I thought I'd give Bluetooth a try since it's supposed to be better.

I've now come to the conclusion that Bluetooth on OS X is somewhat superior than the Broadcam Bluetooth stack that my dongle came with. It's okay, but still seems very long-winded in comparison to what Apple bundles by default on OS X. Still, I've been able to get my PDA to work over ActiveSync and my phone to work with Nokia PC Suite, so it does at least work in the end. But it could be made so much more simple.

The thing is, Windows XP SP2 actually has Bluetooth support built-in, but the installation of most drivers for Bluetooth dongles supresses this. If it's because MS's implementation sucks, then fine. But I'm sure MS will have come up with something more graceful that complements the general Windows user experience better than this.

My dad bought his new laptop today. We went to PC World again, and picked up a Fujitsu Siemens laptop that seems to be pretty good. For £529 we got a 1.5Ghz Celeron M processor, 40GB HD, 512MB RAM, Wifi, DVD-RW drive, built-in graphics and a 15.4" widescreen TFT screen, which isn't too bad. He's certainly happy with it, but then he's been grappling with my old Samsung laptop which is getting on for 4 years old and wasn't all that good even when new. I'll be selling that old laptop in the new year - initially just around campus but I'll plonk it on eBay if there are no takers. It's probably worth around £100 at most.

Setting up the new laptop was made easier by Fujitsu Siemens not installing lots of silly and unnecessary software on it. With my parents' Packard Bell desktop machine, I spent the best part of a day removing things like AOL, 30-day trial of MS Office, Norton Anti-Virus (with only 90 days of free updates) and other crap that we didn't need. This laptop, other than Windows XP itself (SP2 with critical patches up to November this year), only had Nero Express, and trials for AOL and Wannadoo on it, which was nice. It's now got OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, Picasa and IrfanView on it, along with essentials like QuickTime and Java, and it's also configured for the home network through Wifi.

The laptop itself is pretty nice - though it's not a Centrino, it is quite slim and looks good, and having widescreen is useful for my dad since he's big on his photos (his digital SLR camera takes photos that are roughly 5x4 instead of 4x3).

My parents' desktop computer has RealPlayer installed, which, for the record, I didn't put there. I decided to update it to the latest version today, and it reminded me of why I usually steer well clear of it.

We're going to pretend we're Joe User for one moment. Joe is a UK citizen, who pays his TV License fee, and wants to listen to one of the BBC's audio streams. He has a relatively new computer running Windows XP SP2. This computer ships with Microsoft's Windows Media Player, which is a good all-round media player, but it is incompatible with RealMedia streams.

We'll assume that Joe asks a slightly more knowledgable friend why the audio doesn't work and his friend tells him he needs to download a program called 'RealPlayer'. He goes to Google, types in 'realplayer' and clicks on the first result - real.com, the RealNetworks homepage.

For all of you who wanted to try OpenOffice.org 2.0 but have an aversion to software which ends in a 0, you'll be pleased to know that OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 is now propagating to mirrors - you can download it here. It's not yet on the main web site though.

The release is mostly to fix bugs but there are a few new features, mainly in the realm of internationalisation.

It's been on Digg and Boing Boing, but here's a guide to taking screenshots while playing a DVD using DVD Player in Mac OS X. It involves dropping to the command line and using he screencapture command.

There is, however, an easier way - just download VLC. By playing your DVDs in this you can use Grab as normal, or cmd+shift+3/4. In fact, VLC has a menu item on the Video menu called Snapshot, however this wouldn't work for me.

This is just one more reason why I love VLC - it's now my default media player on both Windows and OS X. Its DVD playback is especially good as you can skip the opening sequences and go straight to the menu - handy on discs like Shrek 2 which have around 10 minutes of unskippable trailers. It can also often playback discs from any region, even if your drive is set to a specific one, though I think Apple now sets the region in its hardware so this probably won't work on newer Macs.

Last summer I used GnuPG for a bit on my laptop, mainly to see what it was like. But when my laptop's HD failed and I had to re-install everything, I never got around to re-installing it. I'd also lost my private key and couldn't find the backup files.

On Monday we covered PGP in one of our lab sessions, during which time we had to each create keypairs for each other. I saved the keypairs and have imported them onto my Mac, so I'm able to sign and encrypt messages again. My new public key is here if you would like to add it to your keychains - you can delete any old public keys from me if you have them as I can't use them anymore.

GnuPG on a Mac is a much nicer experience than on Windows. The main command line client has a graphical installer, and the GPG KeyChain Access application is very nice. I'm using it in conjuction with Enigmail, which has a build for Thunderbird 1.5 RC1. It too has improved quite a bit since I last used it and now has its own key management dialog built in. My only gripe was that it wouldn't automatically detect the location of the the GnuPG executable, which is almost always /usr/local/bin/gpg on Macs.

Cryptography is something that interests me as it's quite a major component of my course - we have a full module devoted to cryptographic theory, as well as other mentions at a higher level in other modules.

Anyone know of an Mac IM client that will let me talk to my MSN buddies using my webcam (and audio?) The official Microsoft Messenger:mac doesn't support it, nor do Adium or Proteus as far as I can tell, and iChat AV only works with AIM. Even it did work with MSN, I'd need to buy iChatUSBCam to get it to work since iChat normally only works with the iSight camera.

The Mac version of Yahoo Messenger does work with USB webcams though, which would be good if many of my friends used Yahoo. The vast majority, however, use MSN and nothing else.

So if you know how I could get the camera working with MSN, please let me know :) .

incidentally macam looks potentially useful - it's basically a USB webcam driver thingy for OS X that lets you capture images and video. It's even QuickTime-compatible, and works with my Logitech QuickCam Express with no problems. Doesn't work with iChat or Image Capture though.

Update: Shaky pointed out Mercury Messenger, a Java-based MSN client that is cross-platform and supports voice and audio chat. It also seems to have one of the most complete MSN protocol implementations that I've seen on a non-official client, supporting many of the features of MSN 7.5. By the looks of things, AMSN also supports webcams but I'm not entirely sure - again, it's cross platform.

If, like me, you use NeoOffice on the Mac, you may like to install this update patch. Essentially it allows NeoOffice to use Java 1.4.x instead of 1.3.x, but this means it launches more quickly and is more responsive, as well as using less memory. After installing, you should see a noticable improvement in performance, both when starting and also while using the program - certainly I did.

You'll need to have installed NeoOffice 1.1 first before applying this patch. It doesn't add features like OpenDocument support or any of the new stuff in OpenOffice.org 2.0 but it does at least make it a bit faster. NeoOffice is probably the slowest application on my Mac - though it's still quite slow this patch makes it more bearable.

Since it took me a while to find out how to do this myself, I'm going to use this opportunity to tell you how to take screenshots on a PocketPC or Windows Mobile device - in my case, Windows Mobile 2003.

Though we have a perfectly good phone line, I think I actually prefer to talk to people using SkypeOut rather than the normal phone. The main reason for this is being able to use a headset instead of having to hold a handset to my ear all the time. Not only do I not get a very tired arm (or have to juggle the handset between hands) but it means I can do other stuff at the same time - like order my mum's birthday present after she subtly hinted at what she wanted.

Still, I may consider a Bluetooth headset. From what I can gather, Skype on the Mac supports any Bluetooth headset that can be paired with the OS, and I could also use it with my phone too since that has Bluetooth now as well. It may even work with my PDA though I wouldn't bet on it. And it would be another gadget to add to my collection :) .

The hub in my room seems to have died on me. The house had Cat-5e cables wired in, but as I have two computers in my room and the cable isn't really long enough to reach either I've been using a hub - the same one that I used in my previous house. I bought it for £9 off eBay about a year ago to replace the rather slow 10-BaseT hub we had.

It's been having some problems for a while, in that it after a while it just 'stops' - any packets sent through it just disappear into the ether - but normally turning it off and on again is enough to fix it, and usually it only happens when there's heavy network activity such as when I'm using peer-to-peer software. But now even when I restart it, it won't come back up again.

Thankfully our modem/switch/firewall thingy downstairs is also a wireless network hub so I at least have some kind of network access in my room. Unfortunately being two floors up from the hub means that the signal is a little on the weak side (2 out of 5 bars) and there's the greater CPU overhead (since we're using WPA encryption) and latency. It's also only 54Mbps instead of 100Mbps. But it's better than dial-up, at least. :)

Still, I'll be investing in a new hub, or perhaps even a proper switch this time.

Um, Adium does actually support meta-contacts. Just drag the screen names on to each other. Damn me for not trying the seemingly obvious first...

I think I now know why Gerry recommends Proteus over Adium.

Adium is really nice but it doesn't support 'meta-contacts' - a single contact with several screen names. In one case, I have 6 screen names for one contact and in Adium they appear as 6 different buddies. Which means that when he signs on or off the computer sounds like a duck on speed and my contact list turns into a christmas tree, as well as becoming considerably more cluttered.

Proteus does support meta-contacts (as does Trillian Pro on Windows), so I may give it a try - at $15 it's not too much to pay if I decide to keep it. Still, I really want to like Adium, since it's open source and so very cute.

The latest post on IEBlog details how secure sites will be handled. It's interesting stuff - here's a summary:

• Support for sites using SSL v2 will be off by default. SSL v2 is an older, unsecure version of SSL only used by a handful of sites - most now use SSL v3 or TLS. As far as I know MoFo are also moving away from SSL v2 (see this weblog posting by Gervase Markham) and I imagine others will follow. I've had SSL v2 turned off for some time now and not encountered any problems while browsing.
• Sites with certificates that have problems (wrong URL, untrusted root, expiration or revocation) will now show an error page instead of a modal popup dialog. The user can choose to ignore the error, unless the certificate has been revoked, and the address bar will turn red.
• If a page has a mix of secure and insecure content, then the secure content will be shown and the insecure content hidden, with the information bar at the top appearing to notify the user of this and letting them optionally enable it. This is very welcome as I don't like the modal yes/no box, and I'm sure about 90% of web browser users neither know what the error is about or indeed care about it. Firefox should do this too - you can tell it not to alert you to this kind of problem in future but, and I quote, very few users (or web developers) fully understand the security risks of rendering HTTP-delivered content within a HTTPS page.
• When run under Windows Vista, AES 256-bit encryption will be supported, which brings it level with Firefox which already supports this higher level of encryption. From what I gather, Windows XP users of IE7 will only be able to browse secure sites with weaker 128-bit encryption, though in reality I don't think it matters hugely as neither can be broken as far as I know.

As much as I like to evangelise Firefox it's good to see IE7 making progress, and there have been some really good ideas going into the product. It will certainly make the browser wars more interesting, and hopefully drive innovation in the browsers further. I've been playing around with Flock over the weekend after a tip-off from Daisy and while it didn't win me over straightaway it looks like it has potential.

On the Firefox front, we can expect Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1 on Friday, from what I've heard. The final release really shouldn't be far away now - it would be nice if it was released on November 9th as that would be exactly one year since 1.0. But as OpenOffice.org didn't quite make its 5th birthday for the release of version 2.0, I'd rather that MoFo wait until after then if there are any lingering showstopping bugs, but if it's possible then it'd be cool :) .

And now I'm off to bed, since I'm going to be wandering around Ilkley Moor (possibly singing this song) tomorrow. In the rain... :-/

If you can read this, then we have Broadband :) .

The release candidate of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is out. If you're an OpenOffice.org user and don't mind using something that is mostly stable then you'll like this release. It's a huge improvement over the 1.1.x line, with native support for OpenDocument, a new native-looking interface on Windows and new icons for starters. I've been using the developer builds for some time and I much prefer them to the older stable releases.

A note to software makers: never change a users settings or preferences without asking them.

The university is now allowing students and staff to access its central printers from outside the university, either through a web interface or by installing a driver called PrintWhere. I opted to install the driver, but to be honest I'm now wishing I hadn't, because the damn thing sets itself as the default printer every time I make any kind of configuration change. This is not what I want - I have a printer at home that I'd prefer to use if I can - this is just for convinience or if I want a document laser-printing (my dissertation, for example). It's rude and is more effort for me.

I may well get rid of the driver and stick with the web interface. The driver is Windows-only anyway.

If you're not daring enough to download version 2.0 beta 2, then you may be pleased to know that OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 has been released. It's basically the same as the previous 1.1.x releases but with bug fixes and support for the new OpenDocument file formats, which are the default in 2.0. That said, you can only open OpenDocument files - you can't save them in this release. That requires version 2.0.

Unfortunately there isn't yet an equivalent update to NeoOffice, which is a bit annoying since I've been running the betas of 2.0 and have a number of files saved in the OpenDocument formats. The changes will apply in NeoOffice/J 1.2, but that is slated for a late 2005 release so it's probably a month or two away :( . From what I can gather, this is due to the move from Java 1.3.1 to 1.4.2, which has different interface APIs - the former will not be available on the Intel Macs due out next year, though this will mean that OS X 10.2.x (Jaguar) is no longer supported.

A few weeks ago I took part in the What's on your Start Menu? meme. Dave, picked up the baton, but being a Mac user did 'What's in your Dock?' instead. It's probably only fair that I do too...

From left to right:

• Finder - because you can't get rid of it. Not that I'd want to as it is very useful.
• Thunderbird - the lack of internet access at home has stopped me from really playing around with this but as it's the same as what I use on the PC the learning curve should be much smoother.
• Firefox - here in its 1.5 beta 1 form, which works much better on OS X than previous versions and feels like a proper Mac app. This is my default browser, since it supports all those wonderful extensions (or will do when they're updated), doesn't look too bad and is the same as what I'm used to in Windows.
• Camino - again, a test build (0.9 alpha 2). Looks alright but my initial enthusiasm for this browser is wearing off.
• Safari - looks gorgeous and seems quite fast, but it's just not Firefox.
• NeoOffice - I do need an office application but AppleWorks sucks and Microsoft Office:mac is overkill (and expensive) - this does the job nicely. Sure, you can read several chapters of War and Peace while waiting for it to load and it's not particularly pretty but it's free and does what I want it to do.
• iTunes - this is iTunes 5, which since upgrading now hangs for about 20 seconds after the GUI appears. I wonder if it's trying to call home, but can't because there's no internet connection. Anyway, this is my default 'background music' media player.
• Adium - I love this program. The duck is cute and the interface is brilliant - by far the best IM program I've used. And it's open source.
• Address Book - not really used this but I haven't got around to remove it. Probably not a whole lot of use to me since I use Thunderbird and not Mail for email.
• iPhoto - a nice little app that works well, though I still prefer Picasa2 on Windows.
• VLC - has a really nice interface in OS X. My other default media player, though I also have QuickTime (obviously), RealPlayer and Windows Media Player too.
• iDVD - not really used this so I haven't decided whether to get rid of it or not.
• iCal - again, not really used it. Should really have this run on startup so then it at least shows today's date and not July 17th all the time.
• QuickTime - sucks less on OS X than on Windows, as you'd expect, but I still prefer VLC.
• System Preferences - still playing with some of the settings, and I need it to get to the MySQL preference pane to turn the server on if I need it (I don't have it running all the time to save resources).
• Terminal - handy for installing Perl packages and for being a Unix Ubergeek.
• Trash - again, you can't remove this. Still prefer the less US-centric "Recycle Bin" though.

I may add skEdit, which I've just bought - while it's not as fully-featured as BBEdit, it serves my needs and is a lot cheaper - $20 for lifetime updates versus $49 (educational price) with the likelihood of needing to buy updates in future. I also tend to use Console quite a bit when debugging PHP scripts, so that may get added.

You may have heard that a new unpatched flaw has been found in Internet Explorer. While this may be used to fuel the anti-MS fire, the fact is that (to pick a number out of the air) 90% of users probably won't be affected since the flaw only comes into play if you have VisualStudio 2002 and haven't installed any service packs, or if you have Office XP SP3 set up in a certain obscure way.

In any case, the affected file is nowhere to be found on my hard disk. Of course, it's potentially a big problem if you are affected but there are workarounds to take until a patch is made available. I'm guessing Microsoft won't release a patch until the next cycle in early September though.

(I seem to be doing a lot of Microsoft defence today. Hmmm.)

Normally I agree with John Naughton's regular columns in Sunday's Observer Business section. Today, however, I must take exception.

As well as the new number and new logo, there's something else about Internet Explorer that is new: the name. It's now Windows Internet Explorer.

I'm not entirely sure the name change was necessary. You can now only get Internet Explorer for Windows - the Mac and Unix versions have been discontinued. Its similarity to Windows Explorer may confuse people. It's also longer.

Paul Thurrott reckons it was to highlight the fact that the browser is integrated with Windows and is not a standalone product. But possibly the biggest reason why this probably isn't the best name change is the acronym that the name now creates: WIE. Sounds like 'why' and rhymes with 'die' and 'bye'. Not a great choice, really.

I was debating whether to post an entry about PDAs and how I think they may finally hit the mass market like laptops have, after an email conservation with a friend. Then t'other Neil went and published this entry citing the results of a Gartner report saying that sales of the devices had picked up, though the report also included Blackberry devices which may have skewed the figures slightly.

Personally I do think that PDAs will become more popular, but not necessarily as stand-alone devices - I'm thinking Smartphones with PDA capabilities, like the Palm Treo or all the Windows Mobile Smartphone models. Still, the fact that may PDAs now have wireless capability makes them a whole lot more useful - much of what I use mine for is internet-related which, unless you plug it into a computer (and thus negating the mobility element), is impossible without Wifi or Bluetooth. These technologies have only recently started appearing in these devices, though.

Wifi-enabled laptops are all very well but they're still are quite big. Sure, they're mobile enough to be carried around, but you don't see people using them while walking about, do you? PDAs and palmtop computers, being handheld, are infinitely more portable.

Most importantly, PDAs are capable of being computers in their own right. A few years ago, you could use it as note-taking device and perhaps have your contacts and calendar on it, and not much else. Now, you can watch movies, play music, browse the internet, make phone calls, play games, check your email, write documents, present PowerPoint slides - all things you would have needed a laptop for.

PDAs are now coming to the point that laptops were at some years ago. Then, your laptop was a satellite device to your home/work desktop PC that you could connect to with a docking station. The laptop could do basic tasks but because it was often difficult to pack high-performance components into it you couldn't use it as your main machine. Now, however, many laptops are comparable with high-end desktop machines and lots of people use them as their primary machines, like I do (or did).

Maybe soon, PDAs will reach the same point.

Last night I tried to set up Synergy to allow me to share my keyboard and mouse between my Mac and my laptop. It's much, much easier to set up on the PC because the Windows version has a GUI; the Linux and OS X versions, however, do not.

I have the keyboard and mouse plugged into the Mac so I was using that as the server. It's all configured and can get going if I type a command into the Terminal, but I've yet to be able to get the server running on startup, despite my best efforts.

Thankfully, Engadget has a how-to article which goes into much greater detail and offers another method. That said, I've also found SynergyKM which offers a GUI in Mac OS X. There's also SynergyOSX which offers a GUI for the client, but not, it seems, for the server.

I also found Multiplicity, a commercial application from Stardock (makers of Windowblinds and CursorXP) which does something similar but is currently Windows-only. And it's $40, whereas Synergy is free and open source, though admittedly lacking in the interface department.

Other programs include x2vnc for Windows and Linux which is based on VNC; Teleport for OS X which uses Bonjour and MaxiVista, another commercial program for Windows but cheaper at $30.

I think this will be the last post of this series for at least a few days now, since I've pretty much explored the OS now.

• Managed to get 10.4.2 to install. It turns out I needed the 'Combo' update and not the standard one, which is presumably only for US English users or something. It would have been nice for the non-Combo installer to tell me this though.
• I also managed to finally sort out the keyboard mapping problems using this UK keyboard map. It's a shame I had to resort to third-party software to fix the problem - Apple should really have addressed this in the operating system, especially as one of the selling points of the Mac Mini is that you can bring your own keyboard and mouse.
• Now my next keyboard problem: getting the Home and End keys to do as they do in Windows. In OS X, they do nothing. Any ideas?
• One of the flaws I heard about the Mac Mini was its headphone socket and poor quality output. This is something I've noticed as well; there's not nearly the same depth of sound as on my laptop. It sounds very muffled when hooked up to my stereo, for example. Sure, it's only supposed to be a headphone socket but it is the only built-in audio output, and when you consider it comes with software like GarageBand and iMovie you would expect something a bit better. I may have to consider the Griffin iMic (£30 or $40), especially as the Mini has no way of inputting sound (no microphone or line in).
• The network tools applet in Utilities is awesome! Whois, DNS lookups and allsorts, all in a nice interface. Nice one, Apple.
• I gave in and downloaded StuffIt Expander for the Mac. Even though the StuffIt web site uses browser sniffing and will only let Windows users download the Windows version. Thankfully I have Chris Pederick's User Agent Switcher installed so I pretended I was actually a Mac user and it was okay.
• The main reason for this is so that I could install Windows Media Player 9 for OS X since I imagine I'll need it to view some movies. Alas VLC doesn't yet support many of Microsoft's proprietary media formats (or at least not on its non-Windows builds) so I'd better get it just in case. And you need StuffIt to be able to open WMP since it doesn't use a disk image like, um, just about every other piece of Mac software I've downloaded recently.
• I also have a feeling that I'll need to get a copy of RealPlayer for OS X. Unless, of course, anyone can suggest another program that plays RealMedia files?

Quite a bit of my spare time recently has been spent installing software on my Mac, and I've commented about how easy it is. Last night Mario left this comment and I felt I had to respond:

Even though I think OS X is the most user-friendly and easy to use OS out there, can software installation be any easier than on a Linux distro with apt-get and the Synaptic front-end? I mean, of course dragging an app from a disk image (which you have to extract) is really easy. But prior to that, you’ve got to find and download the image. On a Linux distro like Ubuntu, you do a search in Synaptic, click on install and you're done.

On the one hand, Mario is right. Installing or upgrading software in Ubuntu using Synaptic is a breeze - even simpler than on OS X. But what if the software you want isn't available as a package?

This is one of Linux's biggest problems, and was part two of Asa Dotzler's reasons why Linux isn't ready for the desktop. If the program is not on the list, you're basically faced with three options:

1. Wait until someone creates a RPM or DEB package specific to your distro - fine if you're using a major distro like RedHat or Ubuntu but not so good if you're using a less well-known one
2. Download the binaries yourself
3. Download the source code and compile it yourself

The middle option is what Windows and Mac users generally do anyway. Now while software generally just installs and works on these two OSes, because of how Linux has been designed it can be quite a bit more difficult. You may not have all of the relevant dependent packages - I believe that Fedora, for example, has to offer its own version of Firefox because Mozilla's official build may not work with it. And if you do, you may have an incompatible version. It's more humps to jump through and shouldn't be necessary.

It also brings up an interesting point about security updates. Asa's example of Firefox 1.0.6 was a good one - at the time he wrote the article 1.0.6 had just come out yet many distro vendors were still only offering packages of 1.0.5, or even 1.0.4. What if versions prior to 1.0.6 had a huge security hole that was being actively exploited? If a user of 1.0.5 gets affected, but couldn't upgrade to 1.0.6 because the official binary wasn't compatible with their system and the distro vendor didn't have a package ready, then you have a problem.

As for downloading the source code, this isn't really an option for 'newbie' users. Compiling generally means using the Terminal which is a scary place for any user who doesn't know their way around the Unix command line, and means knowing the answers to all sorts of questions that the Make script may ask. Sure, it may be courteous to ask the user if he/she wants x feature installed but if the user has no idea what x is then it's confusing. And it can also take ages, especially for complex software like Firefox - Henrik Gemal has a guide for compiling Mozilla products in Windows and it goes to 14 steps.

So software installation on Linux can be very easy. It can also be an absolute nightmare.

I'm sure these posts will stop eventually, but anyway...

If you're not in the least bit interested in my experiences with my new Mac then you can safely skip this post. Otherwise, read on...

My two housemates this year have two very different computers. One has a rather nice Carrera machine, custom-specified, with 5.1 sound card, good graphics card and all that jazz. The other has a 300Mhz Pentium II with a 6.4GB HD, which I reckon is now about 7 years old and is still on Windows 98. (See this rant from last week).

The latter of these two machines now won't turn on. I'm pretty sure the problem lies with the power supply (it has, to used the politically correct term, "deferred success"), which is good in one sense because it means the disk and all the data on it is fine, but means the computer isn't exactly usable. And that disk contains a dissertation which needs finalising and printing. By Tuesday.

So I did a brain transplant - opened up the two computers and put the hard disk of the old computer into to the new one. It took a couple of attempts to get the jumper settings right, since they weren't labelled and I don't have a huge amount of experience in that area, but eventually the computer booted and the drive appeared in Windows Explorer. It was then just a case of copying the all important word file onto a flash drive and we were done.

If you're using an old computer - or any computer, really - it pays to ensure that you save multiple copies of anything important, so that if one location becomes inaccessable then you at least have one or more backups. My dissertation was always saved 3 times - on my hard disk, on my flash drive and on the university system via FTP, plus an occasional fourth backup on my parents' machine in York. That way I wouldn't fail my degree if my computer packed itself in days before the deadline.

Filed well and truly under the 'things-that-would-have-been-useful-on-Saturday" department, the university have now given me a foldout Bluetooth mini-keyboard to play with. It's for use with the PDA that I'm also (still) borrowing from them, and it does make writing much easier than tapping letters on the screen or using its handwriting recognition. If I'd had this on Saturday composing these two entries would have taken much less time.

My only complaint so far is that it's a little flimsy and I'm worried about breaking it, but it does fold down into a very small package and would be useful for note-taking in lectures, for example. Which is the intention.

They lasted a lot longer than several manufacturers, but the parent company of Time and Tiny Computers has gone into administration. It is looking likely that many people who have ordered computers from Time and Tiny now won't get the products they paid for. I just hope that many of them paid by credit card - UK consumer credit legislation makes credit card issuers jointly liable for purchases over £100 that fall through or that turn out to be faulty or unsatisfactory (or something to that effect, IANAL), hence the reason I ordered a credit card prior to ordering my Mac Mini. Of course, my experience with Apple has been much better but I'd rather not take the risk.

I always avoided Time machines because I didn't think they were built well and I know several people who have bought them and then had major problems just after the end of the warranty period. Their recent tactic of bundling software dial-up modems that were tied to their own ISP's phone number (meaning you couldn't use it with another ISP) did nothing to raise my confidence with them.

Talk about teaching an old dog new tricks: despite having played Solitaire for, oooh, about 10 years now, I never knew that you could automatically send up cards by right-clicking them. Solitaire games suddenly got so much faster.

In fact, I'd dread to think how much time I could have saved if I'd known this right from the start. Probably several hours at least...

Just got this email from Apple:

Today Apple announced a new Mac Mini. Accordingly, we are pleased to revise your recent order by substituting the original product you ordered with the new Mac Mini at no extra cost to you. The new configuration either matches or exceeds that of the original product. In fact, depending on the configuration you ordered, you may be entitled to a partial refund. If you are paying by Credit Card, Loan, or Leasing, the price will be adjusted automatically.

The new Mac Mini is basically the same as the old one but includes 512MB of RAM as standard instead of 256MB, and the 1.42GHz model includes Aiport Extreme and Bluetooth as standard. I'd gone for all these options which means that Apple should hopefully be refunding me £46 very soon.

The latest update to my Mac Mini's order status suggests it will be ready by Friday, so hopefully delivery will be either then or the beginning of next week. I don't yet know if it'll be one of the "new" models or a standard one, but seeing as it has taken some time for it to be ready I'm hoping it's the latter (I ordered it 9 days ago). We'll see, anyway.

This week is somewhat less interesting than last week was, though I am going home to York this weekend for a friend's 21st birthday.

Update: As you may have guessed, it didn't come on Friday. Apple's current estimate is on or before next Tuesday (9th August). I'm guessing the launch of the new model is the cause of the delay, but considering that it's going to be considerably cheaper and that I still have no proper internet at home I'm not too bothered about the wait.

Gah. Windows 98 and its criminal lack of built-in drivers is really starting to annoy me. If anyone can find a Windows 98 driver for a 128MB red shiny Lenovo USB flash drive I'd be very grateful.

I've also heard of an unofficial generic mass storage device for Windows 98 that works with most brands - anyone tried it and got it to work? And does anyone have the URL for it?

When Asa Dotzler first posted an article criticising Linux over its non-readiness for desktop computing, there was quite a bit of hoo-hah, with a lot of defensive comments from the Linux community along with the usual flamers. The thing is, Asa was totally spot on.

He's now writing a series of follow-ups, this being the first, which explain in more detail his four core criticisms of Linux. A lot of the points relate to things that Mozilla has done in Firefox which make the migration path from Internet Explorer much easier, and this first part suggests creating an import wizard, like in Firefox, that can copy over a user's settings and documents from Windows. So your MS Office settings would be imported into OpenOffice, IE into Firefox, MSN Messenger into Gaim and so on, along with explanations about what program does what in the new environment (for example, instead of Outlook you would use Evolution, which would have all of your emails and account settings imported over).

It's actually quite surprising that no Linux distribution has done anything like this yet. Sure, in the bigger distros with lots of packages it would be a huge task, but in more streamlined distros like Ubuntu it shouldn't be too difficult.

The Linux community need to pay attention to what Asa has been saying. If Firefox can go from less than 1% of web users to almost 10% in a year then surely Mozilla are doing something right.

The release candidate for OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 is out. 1.1.5 will be primarily a bug fix release, hence the unimportnant-sounding number, but it does include one new feature: support for OpenDocument. This is the open file format recently approved by OASIS that OpenOffice.org 2.0 will use natively, though it will still open "legacy" OpenOffice.org 1.x documents as well as a greater range of other file formats.

On a slightly related note, Movable Type 3.2 Beta is now available for download. The page also includes information about filing bugs, some basic guidelines for beta testing (which is common sense for anyone used to testing software) and the issues that the MT team at Six Apart are already aware of. Although they do not recommend upgrading your main blog, in case something terrible happens, I'll probably upgrade anyway at some point.

One final announcement: from 7pm UK time, this site will be down for up to 4 hours while my host fixes a "potential hardware issue affecting the SCSI system".

Microsoft Update is a new variation on Windows Update that also updates Microsoft Office at the same time, meaning that the Automatic Updates system built-in to Windows will download patches for bothe the OS and for Office similtaneously. I've installed it on my own laptop and also on a friend's computer and had no problems.

Unfortunately my parents' computer didn't take so kindly. It was fine at first, but then some updates wouldn't install. Then Microsoft Update itself wouldn't work - apparently it needed to re-register its libraries, but when it did and restarted it would come up with the same error.

Eventually I fixed it by doing a System Restore back to before I installed anything and this seems to have worked - the 'old' Windows Update is now working again. Unfortunately this means that I'll have to reinstall all of June's Windows patches again, plus the Office 2003 patches and all the other software I updated at the time. Oh well...

One of the new and interesting weblogs recently added to the Weblogs, Inc network is Download Squad which concentrates on software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Today it mentioned Monolingual, an interesting looking open source utility for Mac OS X users. It allows you to remove language files for languages you don't need, thus freeing up to a couple of hundred megabytes of disk space. Unless you're Peter Ustinov, you probably don't need to have such langauges as Amharic, Assamese and Aymara installed - and that's just some of the language beginning with 'a'. Might be something to bear in mind when I get my Mac, which should be any day now...

Update: Oook... Engadget suggests that the Mac Mini line may be updated very soon, like, in the next 2 weeks. Hmmm. Might have to wait a little longer...

Windows has a tool for monitoring how much disk space you have left. It will warn you when disk space is getting low and give you the chance to run the Disk Cleanup utility to free up wasted space.

It also has a tool that monitors the battery (if you have a laptop). If the battery is getting low, it will warn you, and if it is critically low, will do a proper shutdown of Windows so that you work is saved.

What is it doesn't have is a tool that monitors processor temperature. While most computers now have hardware monitors, all these do when the temperature gets too high is cut the power, thus meaning that you lose your work and risk file corruption. If it doesn't have a hardware monitor then you may end with BSODs or application errors - or worse, hardware damage - so you'd lose your work that way anyway.

If Windows had a tool that monitored the temperature, it could warn you if it was getting too high and have your programs shut down properly so that your work is not lost. It could even allow the running of external commands, such as one that paused your video player or something.

As you can probably imagine, I could really do with a tool that does the above. I'm fed up of this laptop cutting out when it gets too warm (a particular problem at the moment what with the warm weather of late) - currently, all I have is SpeedFan which on my system only tells me how warm it is. If it could have some automation as well, that would be great.

Oh, if it interests you, I'll probably be ordering my Mac Mini in the next couple of weeks.

Now this is just silly. There's a version of ScummVM for PocketPC/Windows Mobile, meaning that I can play Sam & Max and Day of the Tentacle while on the move, using files copied from the original CDs that I bought nearly 10 years ago.

It does work remarkably well actually. I don't have the actual games here with me in Bradford but the demo versions work great.

I suppose this is the beauty of open source software - it can be ported to new and strange platforms and situations. Take Firefox, for example - you can now run it on an Acorn RISC PC, or from a USB flash drive. Or Linux, which can run from a bootable read-only CD or on your XBox.

Just a reminder - yesterday (or today if you're in the US) was/is Patch Day for Windows users. A quick visit to Windows Update brought up 8 (!) patches, all of which were 'high priority'. If you're a Windows user, you may want to head over there and download the patches ASAP.

Here's something you don't hear about every day - a virus that members of the public actually wanted to spread:

Romanian security firm BitDefender has revealed that after releasing signatures to protect its customers from a virus that deleted files from their computers containing gypsy music, it was inundated with letters of complaint from customers who wanted the virus to spread.

The virus, dubbed Antiman.A, was discovered at the end of April and duped users into executing its payload by pretending to contain news about three Romanian journalists that had been kidnapped. When run, the virus searched the victim's computer for files containing the names of Romanian gypsy music singers.

While this does sound a bit out of the ordinary, having visited Romania 4 years ago I don't find it completely surprising. There, gypsies are very much second-class citizens - shunned by the 'settled' classes as untrustworthy, they find it difficult to get jobs and therefore usually have no permanent residence. Many own little more than a cart, a horse and the clothes they wear. I remember a friend of mine wanted to ride on a horse owned by a farmer near to the field centre where we staying and he was very confused - there horse-riding is something that the gypsy underclass do, not rich western tourists.

It's possible to run an operating system from within another using programs like VMWare or VirtualPC, but if you can't afford either (and find bochs too confusing) then you may find Damn Small Linux interesting. It's a bootable Linux distro in under 50MB, which in itself is pretty impressive, but it also comes in an embedded flavour, allowing you to run it from within Windows.

It works well although it is very slow and will put a lot of strain on your CPU. Despite being only 50MB it includes Firefox, XMMS and VNC, amongst other applications, and it can run windowed so that you can use other apps at the same time, should your computer be powerful enough.

Okay, after this I'll hopefully shut up about the screen, because it arrived this morning (yay for ParcelForce delivering before 10am). It works fine, although I found that you really do have to follow the instructions by turning the computer off first, then turning the monitor on and then the computer on to get it to work - you can't just plug it in and expect it to work. RTFM, as they say.

Having a 1280x1024 resolution is so much better than 1024x768 - the machines at the university use it, as does my parents machine at home - but I've had to put up with the latter as my laptop screen doesn't support it (but then it is only 14"). The screen arrived with no dead pixels, which is good.

Oh, and it works with my PDA, as well :) .

Update: Since I got a rather large birthday money cheque this morning, I've also treated myself to a Belkin wireless keyboard and optical mouse, thus meaning I finally have the luxury of a full-size keyboard. It's USB and both PC and Mac compatible, which will be handy when I order the Mac Mini in a few weeks time.

My one problem now is a lack of desk space...

I have a program on my computer called SamSpade for Windows, which lets you do various discovery actions with web addresses. For example, pasting in an IP address will give you the hostname, and vice versa, and it supports domain and IP whois requests. You can also crawl web sites and pull out things like email addresses or a list of linked web addresses, analyse email headers, and browse sites with the HTTP headers.

It's good, but the interface is pretty old and tired, and the program isn't being updating anymore as far as I can tell. I'm sure this can't be the only program of its type out there, so, if you know of an equivalent program I'd love to know about it.

Before someone points it out, I do know about whois.sc which does do domain and IP whois, as well as checking of blacklists, but it only supports 6 TLDs.

The TFT screen is on order :) . I went for the Viewsonic VX715, which won due to its good response time (16ms), good brand reliability and the inclusion of a DVI input. Thanks to Steve for the recommendation.

I bought it from Dabs who had it at the same price as Insight (the store which Steve linked to), but the delivery charge was only just over a fiver instead of the £11 that Insight were charging. More importantly, I was able to specify a different delivery address to my billing address - this is important as otherwise the screen would get delivered to my parents' house back in York, which would mean me having to go home and being there to collect it, and then having to cart it back to Bradford on the train. I also trust Dabs a bit more having bought from them twice before with good experiences on both occasions.

The only downer with buying from Dabs is that the delivery will be slower since they were out of stock, however apparently some should be available this week so I should have it soon.

On a totally unrelated note, I currently have a torrent downloading with an expected completion time of mid-July (44 days). The only seeder has become disconnected so there's a whole load of peers (like me) stuck at 93.7%.

I'd like recommendations for TFT screens. Here's what I'm looking for:

• £150-£190 price range.
• Preferably with built-in speakers but not a necessity and they don't have to be particularly good.
• DVI input a bonus, but then I've yet to see any TFT screen below £200 with this.
• Would like a reasonably good response time - 25ms max.

I'm not necessarily after specific models but would like an idea about what makes to look for. Apparently Iiyama, ViewSonic and Relisys are good.

If you're an interested, the screen will be my main 21st birthday present. My birthday is tomorrow - I probably won't be able to post much since I'm at work most of the day and then out celebrating.

Via Kottke's Links is this Mac OS X error message which is totally devoid of text. It reminds me of an error I encountered where there was no text, and only 'Yes' or 'No' buttons to click on (I can't remember for the life of me what I was doing at the time). I clicked 'Yes' and everything seemed to be okay, but it makes me wonder what would have happened had I clicked 'No'. Or, more importantly, what I was agreeing to in the first place. It's like a game of Jeapardy, I suppose.

There are three apps I could really do with right now for my Dell Axim:

1. A blogging client. Either an application or a simple web page that can post using either the Blogger or Metaweblog APIs or the Atom Publishing Protocol, which would allow me to update this site while on the move. The Movable Type admin pages do not work well on the version of Internet Explorer on here, and alas Opera only works on Windows Mobile Smartphone and Minimo isn't yet ready for primetime on these devices. I'm just after something that can let me post entries, nothing too fancy - as I said, a basic web page would be good.
2. An FTP app. The version of IE also doesn't have FTP, and it would be nice to be able to up- or download documents to it.
3. Something that allows me to upload to Flickr. Again, browser upload isn't supported. The only way I can send a photo across is by emailing each photo individually as an attachment.

If anyone knows of any apps that fulfil these functions and that will run on Windows Mobile Edition 2005, please let me know.

SlashDot reports that eEye has found several critical flaws in Internet Explorer, which would allow remote code execution.

Unlike with the flaws in Firefox last week, the full details of the flaws are not publicly available, which therefore means that users are mostly safe - Mozilla had to act quickly with getting Firefox 1.0.4 out because the details were disclosed and users were at risk. The situation with IE may change, however, if the details leak out before a patch is ready. But right now, as far as I can tell, only eEye and Microsoft know the full details, which is how it should be, at least until a patch is out.

Because of Microsoft's monthly patch cycle system, it is likely that patches will not be out for another 4 weeks - June 14th is the next patch day. Again, should the details leak out MS may bring the release forward.

Well, this is interesting - apparently Apple has not included Internet Explorer in OS X Tiger. Microsoft has discontinued the browser since most Mac users have switched to Safari (which is faster, easier to use and generally just better, from what I've heard), and now presumably Apple has decided that IE is so out of date that it's not worth including.

As well as improving security (IE for Mac hasn't been patched in months, apparently), it should make it easier for users as they are not presented with two applications which perform the same function (i.e. two web browsers). While I'd love Apple to include Firefox or Camino as well, having them in addition to Safari will just confuse people.

Allegedly Adobe Reader and StuffIt Expander are gone too. The former is a bit of a mystery (unless there's another Mac app for opening PDF documents) but StuffIt is largely irrelevant these days.

I did like one of the comments attached to the article:

If they take out IE, they'll have to call it TGR.

This is my new toy: a Dell Axim X50v. Actually it isn't mine - it belongs to the university - but I've been given a couple of weeks to play with it, basically. It's the first stage of a trial to see if students will find PDAs useful as aids to their learning and whether it helps them stay more organised and so on.

It's a very nice device, running Windows Mobile Edition 2003. It has onboard Wifi and Bluetooth, as well as CompactFlash and SecureDigital readers. There's also a GPS module that connects via Bluetooth.

I haven't spent a huge amount of time playing with it, mainly because I needed to get the first draft of my project finished tonight (which I did, yay!), but it seems to work well. It would be more useful if I had Outlook since I could synchronise everything with it but never mind. Currently it's lacking the extra applications that the university wants to use but those are coming soon, I'm told.

The one thing that does concern me slightly is how much these things are - they sell for about £300 so naturally I'm vary wary of doing anything that would damage it in any way since it isn't mine.

Still, I'll now be able to sit in the pub and check my emails without needing to carry around a laptop. It also means I'll be able to play Solitaire any time, anywhere - I think you'll agree that this is the way forward.

The UK magazine PC Pro has published a survey which says that people are not happy with online music stores. They find that:

• They offer poor compatibility with portable players (i.e. iPod owners are tied to Apple's store)
• The DRM restrictions are too harsh
• The sound quality is poor
• The music itself is overpriced compared to buying the CD

There are also individual complaints about being billed twice for a song when there was an error with the store.

I think this sums up my general attitude towards online music stores. Most of them offer tracks at 128Kbps which is well below CD quality (the difference is especially noticable when you have decent hifi equipment). 192Kbps is usually the best compromise but I think only Tesco (in the UK) offer that.

At 79p a song, a typical 12 track album is £9.50, about the same price as the CD in a number of shops which of course comes without the restrictions. You then get stores like iTunes which, if your computer becomes corrupted and you lose all your purchased music, insists that you pay for it all again. Sure, if you lose or break a CD you shouldn't expect a replacement but it's not like it's going to cost them money replacing it, is it? And since most of the stores have user account systems there's no problem with proving purchase.

The tie-in problem is something that bugs me as well. As an iPod Mini owner, if I want to be able to play back my purchased music it must have come from the iTunes Music Store. To me, this is a bit anti-competitive as I can't go to another store which might have a higher quality version of the file at a lower price. I certainly shouldn't have to carry around several players just so that I can listen to purchased music from different suppliers.

The music industry and the shops that sells its music really needs to focus more on the consumer if it wants to defeat piracy. I want to pay for my music, so that I can support the artists I enjoy. But often I find that I can get a better quality file with no restrictions on file sharing networks. That really should not be the case.

A friend of mine lost her phone recently which reminded me that I didn't have a decent backup of people's phone numbers in case I lost mine. With my phone book holding not far off 100 numbers that's a lot of data to lose.

Nokia thankfully make it easy to do backups via their Data Suite software which is what I use for transferring images to and from the phone. It comes with a Content Copier tool which allows you to backup your address book, text messages, phone settings and user files to your hard disk, which can then be restored either to the same phone after you've had to reset it or accidently deleted something important, or to another phone, say if you got a new one or had lost the old one. It's all done through a nice easy wizard.

The one concern I have with it, however, is data lock-in. Your backed up data is stored in a Nokia proprietary format which can only be opened by Nokia Data Suite, which in turn only works with Nokia phones. In short, if you use this tool and then lose your phone, unless your new phone is also a Nokia you're screwed.

If you do have a Nokia phone then the Data Suite tool is well worth checking out since it lets you do cool stuff like using your phone as a GPRS modem and offers an easier way of working with text messages - great for mass-deletion.