Keys Corner

A useful replacement for JHymn which unfortunately stopped working when iTunes 6.0 was released. FairGame strips the DRM (digital rights management) copy-protection from songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Saves copying the music to CD just to reimport it as MP3 into iTunes. (By the way, this is an OS X tool, if you’re looking for a Windows tool to do the same you could start looking here).

Grab it while you can; I suspect it won’t please Apple!

(via vowe dot net – thanks, vowe!)

Update: At the moment it throws an Apple Script error just before it finishes the conversion – the current version is 1.0, keep an eye on the site and see if they bring out an update.

I have mentioned Magnatune here before. They offer downloads in all the common formats (mp3, ogg, wav, flac, aac) for a price which you decide and additionally, you are allowed to give the download link and password to three other people. The downloads are not copy-protected. Half the price you pay goes directly to the artist. Typically, if an artist sells an album on a CD via a normal record label, she will receive only 25 cents. I think this is an excellent deal and usually pay about the same price per album as I would on iTunes – $10.

I’ve just bought Suzanne Teng’s “Miles Beyond”, so the first three people to contact me by e-mail (keys at pobox dot com) will get the chance to download the album free of charge in whatever format they prefer and can try out Magnatune for themselves. (Our spam filter is rather agressive, so put the word “Teng” in the subject, then we have a chance to finding your mail if it gets eaten by the filter!)

It seems some drivers have difficulty using their brain after they have switched their sat-nav on:

• ...drives off the road onto into a building site, up a stairway and into a toilet hut


• ...gets stuck in the river


• ...gets stuck for over 6 hours on narrow road


• ...(ambulance) takes to 2 hrs to make 15 minute emergency call


• ...drives to cliff edge

The scanning of our thousands of slides continues; every day we manage another 150 – 200 slides (more if we are at home at the weekend). Every few days I copy the new ones over the WLAN from the Dell PC in the cellar where the (quite noisy) slide scanner runs, to our Macs in the first floor office. When I first wanted to copy the delta changes from the cellar to the office, I logged on the Windows 2000 PC that was doing the scanning and started a copy – this is similar to the message I saw:

If you think about it, that dialog is not very useful in this case, since it doesn’t offer me the chance of saying that the slides I already copied shouldn’t be copied again. As we already have some 6 GB of scanned data, we certainly don’t want to re-copy it over the comparatively slow wireless LAN each time. On the Mac, things are bit more user-friendly:

Spot the difference? I can tick the box saying “apply to all” for both not replacing the duplicates and for replacing them. That makes a difference of several hours to the length of time the copy-job takes!

Five years ago today Apple introduced the iPod. The video above shows Steve Jobs explaining why Apple decided to develop the iPod and what he thought differentiated the iPod from the competition.

It’s hard to believe now (Apple shipped 8.7 million iPods in the last quarter), but at the time the analysts didn’t think it would be a success. It was expensive ($399) and could only be used with a computer which had less than 5% of the market share for personal computers (the Mac).

PC World has interesting article looking at why the iPod did become the market leader.

Autumn leaves in Bad Homburg, 2006-10-22
We went for a walk in the Kurpark (Spa Park) in Bad Homburg this afternoon. It’s the best time of the year to enjoy the park, which contains the oldest golf course in Germany (founded in 1899). You can still play golf on the course today; here’s the clubhouse:

During the last week or so, as well as setting up the Mac mini, we have started a mammoth scanning session. We have somewhere between 6000 and 7000 35mm slides in the cellar, which we haven’t looked at for at least ten years because we’re too lazy to set up the projector and screen. The slides go back about 40 years – to our respective childhoods. We decided that rather than have them taking up space we need, we would scan them digitally and then dump the slides, the projector and screen.

So we’ve rented a Reflecta DigitDia 4000 scanner and some professional scanner software (SilverFast Ai with IT-8 calibration), because a test we read reported that the scanner’s own software is not too hot. The scanner is the only model we could find that can scan up to 100 slides at a time, meaning that we can set it running and it is busy for the next several hours before it needs feeding again – most scanners only handle 4 or 6 slides at time, which just isn’t practical if you have thousands to process.

At first we thought we might have wasted our time and money – the highly recommended Silverfast software is great for scanning single slides, but the calibration didn’t seem to offer any improvement over the other software package as far as colour was concerned and with the scratch/dust removal filter set (which is supposed to used the scanners special “ICE” hardware filter) a tray of 50 slides was taking nearly 24 hours to scan.

Read the rest of this entry »

One short update to the last post – after swapping the Iomega drive for the LaCie unit shown in the photo, I started to have problems putting the Mac to sleep. Every time I put it to sleep, it waited a couple of seconds and sprang back to life; it would then continue cycling every few seconds between sleep and life until it got bored and had a kernel panic (in other words, the operating system crashed).

After reapplying the latest OS X updates and having searched the usual Mac support sites (including Apple’s own support site) the problem persisted and I was none the wiser. It was clear that ever since the beginnings of OS X there have been weird and intermittent problems with external firewire and USB devices and after quite a bit of experimentation, I discovered that changing the Canon LIDE 80 scanner and a D-Link USB hub from being attached via the LaCie unit to direct attachment to the Mac, the problem went away.

On a similar note, I have also discovered that if I run Windows 2000 under Parallels on the Mac mini, Windows doesn’t detect the ENTER key being used if my Microsoft trackball is attached to a USB port on the Apple keyboard. Attach it to the LaCie unit, and all is well.

Just before the weekend a smallish package arrived here. A Mac mini to replace my old G5 1.8 GHz tower, which is over three years old. I ordered the mini as I don’t need a new screen so an iMac would have been overkill, and I wanted a quiet computer – the G5 may not have been as noisy as the notorious G4 machines which were so loud that Apple was eventually forced to replaced the fans, but quiet it was not. Under the Mac mini you can see a LaCie 250 GB firewire/USB hard drive and hub (4 USB ports and 2 Firewire).

By the way, the LaCie drive is considerably quieter than the equivalent Iomega drive/hub, which does not have the spacers on each corner to raise the computer above the drive and allow the drive to stay cool. The fan on the Iomega drive fires up after about a minute of use and is noisy! (I’m speaking from experience, having originally ordered an Iomega drive with the Mac mini from Apple.)

You can see the difference in size to the old G5 in the photo below (No – the G5 did not stand on the desk when it was in use!) – processing power seems pretty similar for both machines, despite the mini having a dual processor core, but most of the software – apart from the operating system and Apple applications – is still Power PC software running under Rosetta (which emulates the Power PC on the Intel processors which the mini has). So far I am very pleased with the Mac mini, and once I have deleted the hard disk on the G5, I will probably sell it.

McAfee, one of the larger anti-virus (AV) software companies, has taken out full page adverts in the Financial Times to criticize Microsoft’s anti-virus strategy in their soon to be released new version of Windows, Vista. Microsoft has effectively locked out the independent manufacturers of AV software by making access to the kernel of their operating system impossible for them, using technology called Patchguard, and by providing Microsoft AV software as part of the operating system, leading McAfee to complain:

Microsoft seems to envision a world in which one giant company not only controls the systems that drive most computers around the world but also the security that protects those computers from viruses and other online threats. Only one approach protecting us all: when it fails, it fails for 97% of the world’s desktops.

They point out that in fact few viruses target the operating system kernel, most attack applications.

Symantec, the other major AV-software vendor is also not happy, voicing a similar complaint on their Security Response Weblog. But they also point out the motivation behind Microsoft’s approach:

Microsoft’s motivation in protecting the Vista kernel is twofold. The first and most obvious reason is one of security. Kernel mode threats such as Rootkits and malicious drivers have become commonplace and eradicating this risk is certainly in everyone’s best interest.

The second motivation, which may not be as apparent as of yet, is one of digital rights management (DRM). In order to create a protected path between DRM components and the system hardware, it is vital that no malicious code be allowed to insert itself within the media path lest it intercept protected content. This is apparent as Microsoft is positioning Vista as a safe platform for the delivery of protected media content.

Those are interesting – and related – points, as although McAfee is right that most viruses don’t go for the operating system kernel, it is certainly true that authors of DRM copy-protection software have contributed to an explosion of Rootkits whose job is to hide the fact that when you played your favourite group’s latest CD on your PC, you unwittingly installed a copy-protection program which is now not only stopping you copy the CD to play in your car, but also – because it contains bugs – is causing your PC to crash and generally misbehave.

So not only will the AV protection in Vista be suspect (Vista’s kernel has already been hacked; but the Patchguard technology makes it difficult for the AV companies to hook into the kernel permanently, which they need to do to provide permanent AV protection), but consumers will be even more restricted in making copies of music and videos that they have legitimately purchased. I wouldn’t be surprised if when consumers become aware of those facts, the migration from Windows to alternative operating systems accelerates.