• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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The last time I posted on the state of play for free Astronomy software for the Mac things weren’t looking so good. At that time your best option was to build the Linux program KStars from source using Fink. A long, complicated, and rather daunting install for anyone who’s not a Unix geek. I’m happy to report that things have improved a lot since then. There’s now a choice of three apps and you don’t have to compile any from source (unless you want to).

[tags]astronomy, OS X, Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel, KStars[/tags]

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Tagged with: OS X • review • software • open source

I’ve heard Leo Laporte prattling on about twitter for what seems like years on TwIT and have been actively avoiding it for ages. However, a few weeks ago I finally caved in and decided to give this whole Twittering thing a go. My overall impressions are that it’s a great idea, just poorly implemented. The service is about as stable as a pencil balancing on its point! I’ve only been twittering for two weeks and already I’ve experienced two Twitter outages, there’s no word for that other than poor. Then we come to their website. What an ugly and clunky mess! Yea, it works, but not that well and it’s far from a joy to use. Then we come to the main thrust of this post, Twitter clients on the Mac, overall I’m not really that impressed. I’ve settled on a client that’s good enough, but that’s the highest praise I’ll give it.

[tags]Twitter, OS X, Titterific, Spaz, TwitterPod, TwitterPost[/tags]

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Tagged with: twitter • OS X • review • software • messaging • cloud service

A few months ago I happily reported that iTunes 7.5 had fixed one of my major gripes with the way photos are synced to iPods and the iPhone. When Apple introduced iLife ’08 they made a big deal about how iPhoto now automatically organised your photos into events for you so you no longer had to waste your time creating albums for everything. Albums and smart albums were now for creating special sets of related photos where the photos could come from any event. This makes perfect sense so I use iPhoto Events extensively.

Before iTunes 7.5 only albums were synced to iPods and iPhones. This made is much harder than it needed to be to find a particular set of photos. This was one of my initial gripes with the iPod Touch. However, iTunes 7.5 improved things dramatically. It treated Events as albums and dutifully synced them. regular Albums and Smart Albums were also synced, and given priority by placing them at the top of the list of albums, above all the Events. The only minor issue with iTunes 7.5 was that events were not in reverse order so you had to scroll to the very bottom to get to your most recent event.

With iTunes 7.6 Apple have thrown all that good work out the window. All the had to do was change the sort-order on events and they would have had it nailed. Instead they added an option so you can now sync EITHER events OR Albums, but not both. This is a real step backwards and nothing short of retarded in my view. It’s an uncharacteristically stupid and negative thing for Apple to do. They had better fix this again in iTunes 7.7 and they had better leave it fixed this time!

[tags]iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone, iTunes, iPhoto[/tags]

Tagged with: Apple • OS X • iTunes • review • software • iOS

In my recent article on securing your home broadband connection I mentioned the importance of setting a password on your router. In that article I mentioned hypothetical web-based attacks on your router, now we have a real-world example to really drive the point home. The attack happened in Mexico and involved users visiting a web page which contained some very simple HTML code which re-programmed people’s broadband router behind their backs to change the DNS settings. The effect this change had was to return correct IP addresses for all domains on the internet except one, that for a major Mexican bank (more details on that specific attack in this NetworkWorld article).

[tags]broadband, router, Eircom, phishing[/tags]

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If you’re just too busy to sit down and watch an entire Steve-note the good people at Mahalo have condensed it down to 60 seconds for you. The scary thing, it doesn’t miss any of the important points!

(thanks to Allison for the link)

[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, Macworld, Mahalo[/tags]

Tagged with: Apple • review • media event

I’d meant to post this picture last night as part of my post reflecting on the Macworld 2008 Keynote but I forgot. I just found it sitting on my desktop today and decided to share it anyway. Since the keynote is no longer streamed live by Apple we Mac faithful who can’t make it for real have to try get what ever scraps of info we can from those lucky few who can. You obviously can’t rely on a single source since Macworld Keynotes tend to take down websites and different people will report different bits of info. You also need to be prepared. You need to get into the relevant IRC rooms early before they fill up etc.. To facilitate all this I created an extra space in Leopard in which I laid out everything I needed and had it all ready to go well before kick-off. I took a screen shot which I’ll stick in at the end of the post.

You can see that I had MacRumours’ coverage open which turned out to be very good. You can also see Twitterific open showing the ArsTechnica twitter feed which turned out to be not so good – Macworld was just too much for twitter which fell over in a heap. Next up I had two IRC sessions going, one to the ArsTechnical room for keynote coverage which proved to be the best coverage I got, and one to the IRC server of my college netsoc. Finally, I had iChat open to make sure I didn’t miss anything that Allison of the NosillaCast podcast caught, and later to chat to Victor from the Typical Mac User Podcast who was actually in the keynote.

Click for Full Size Version

[tags]Macworld, MacRumours, ArsTechnica, Apple[/tags]

Normally with a Mac keynote you don’t get instant gratification. Sure, you can surf right over to the Apple site and pre-order immediately but you won’t get hold of the goodies for weeks. This keynote was different. My iPod Touch feels like a whole new device today. That’s what I call instant gratification! When the iPod Touch was announced Apple made it very clear what the device would and would not have. The Touch was a very shinny iPod, not an iPhone without the phone, and not a PDA (a point I re-itterated strongly in my initial review). Yesterday Steve announced that from now on all new iPod Touches will literally be iPhones without the Phone, and that those of us with old Touches can upgrade for $20 (or just under €18 in Ireland). That’s $20 to turn an iPod into a PDA. Needless to say I grabbed the upgrade as soon as it became available via Apple’s software update system 🙂

[tags]iPod Touch, Apple[/tags]

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Tagged with: review • Apple • iPod Touch • iPod • hardware

A big list of links today that I’ve been meaning to post for a while now. Lets start with the serious links before lightening the tone for some funny posts to end on. These first links are just scary.

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Propagandists – a not-so-nice look at what some of the candidates for the American presidency have been at and how you can see through the smoke and mirrors.
• A health care system to die for – look at how bad Ireland does – we’re third last, not far behind the US!

These next two stories are funny at first but get scary when you stop and think about them a bit.

• No Fly List Protects Airplane From 5-Year Old Security Risk
• Are You A Hacker? Want To Crash The 787 You’re Flying On?

Speaking of funny yet a little scary:

• Why It Won’t Work – Commentary on Sony’s new DRM free music venture.

I’m not sure this counts are scary but it sure makes me angry:

• Network Solutions – Squat for the Win – some pretty dodgy dealing by a large internet company

OK, enough scary stuff, here are some interesting (nerdy) links:

• Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing – this is really smart and really cool!
• The Enduring Art of Computer Programming
• HOWTO: iPhone Webclip Icons
• Add more power to 10.5’s screen sharing – get more out of Leopard

And finally, a funny note to end on:

• If you have ever been iScrewed
• You snooze, you lose

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) has been contentious for a long time. On the one hand it makes it easier to run badly written on-line programs that insist on making connections to you rather than on your making connections to them. If all networked software was written intelligently we’d never need UPnP. But of course that’s not the case. So, people have a choice, manually map the ports they need which takes time and effort, or just enable UPnP and let it take care of it for you. Obviously it’s easier to just enable UPnP but there is a massive flaw in that. UPnP allows routers to be re-programmed without ANY user interaction, without ANY authentication, and in many cases in such a way that it’s not possible to see what changes have been made even from within the router’s web interface. From a security point of view this is nothing short of retarded. It’s because of this that security experts like Steve Gibbson have been advising people to turn off UPnP for years, and why I suggested people turn it off in my recent article on securing your home internet connection.

[tags]UPnP, Security, Routers[/tags]

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Well, another Macworld has been and gone, we have a new stock of Apple goodies to slurp up our disposable cash, and we get to tally our score and see how well we did with our predictions. In some ways this keynote was rather disappointing, so many of the rumours were true! That’s the second year in a row that we’ve had the big news leak before the show. Then you have the fact that there was no ‘and one more thing’ announcement. On the other hand though, if you just look at what was actually announced it was a very impressive Macworld. There were also some wonderful surprises in the details. Sure, we knew we were getting movie rentals, but with so many studios? Sure, we knew we were getting the 1.1.3 mobile OS X (as I call it) firmware, but we had no idea we’d be getting mail and Google Maps on the iPod Touch! Then we come to the ultra-portable, sure, we were expecting it, but really, I wasn’t expecting something quite so thin yet big. So, although there were no surprises in the over-all structure of the keynote, there were some wonderful surprises in the details. Oh, and I did well with my predictions 🙂

[tags]Macworld, Steve Jobs, Apple, Keynote[/tags]

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Tagged with: Apple • review • media event

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