Education iMac: For Institutions Only

Multiple readers report that Apple's $899 iMac has been designated as an education institution purchase only product. From http://www.apple.com/education...$899 configuration of the 17-inch iMac is available for e...

published on Wednesday, the 12. July 2006, macrumors

Upcoming Talking iPod?

Several readers are reporting on an article in from Scotsman that discusses the possibility of a talking iPod.The new iPod will tell you what it is about to play, removing the need for users to look at the screen while selecting musi...

published on Monday, the 10. July 2006, macrumors

A Perl script to create Tiny URLs

Usually, I make TinyURLs with this Dashboard widget. However, I get a bit frustrated due to the delay when a widget is launched for the first time. I love Tiny URLs for two reasons: (1) they fit in any mail or forum list with restricted line width support; and (2) they hide the address and then make it more surprising for the reader to open the URL.So instead, here's a small Perl program that takes the contents of the clipboard (if no arguments are provided) or converts each argument into a Tiny URL, and then prints the Tiny URL version to the standard output. #!/usr/bin/env perl## testtinyurl.pl## juanfc 2006-06-30## use WWW::Shorten::TinyURL;use WWW::Shorten 'TinyURL';if (!@ARGV) { $small = makeashorterlink(`pbpaste`); system("echo -n $small | pbcopy" ); print "$smalln";} else { foreach $a (@ARGV) { pr...

published on Wednesday, the 5. July 2006, macosxhints

The Cost of the iPod

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is running an article today entitled Apple's Got a Secret. They discuss the cost behind making the ever-popular iPod ... a secret the company is keeping close to its chest. As a result of the company's signature secrecy and antiquated way of tracking profits, analysts are beginning to question the 'trust me' nature of buying Apple stock." From the article: "Geographic disclosure was adequate when pretty much all Apple sold were computers, Mr. Renck said. But the iPod has changed everything. Sales of Macintosh computers now trail those of iPod, which last year made up 46 percent of revenue. 'Apple clearly has its feet in two separate and distinct business models, namely computer manufacturing and software creation, and the consumer electronics industry,' Mr. Renck said."

published on Saturday, the 1. July 2006, apple-slashdot

French Lawmakers Approve 'iTunes Law'

An anonymous reader writes "Lawmakers in the French government have passed a controversial iTunes law, which has the stated intention of forcing Apple to allow purchased music to be universally useable." From the article: "In a statement issued after lawmakers hashed out the final compromise text last week, Apple said it hoped the market would be left to decide 'which music players and online music stores are offered to consumers.' The final compromise asserts that companies should share the required technical data with any rival that wants to offer compatible music players and online stores, but it toned down many of the tougher measures backed by lower-house lawmakers early on."

published on Friday, the 30. June 2006, apple-slashdot

10.4: Easily subscribe to non-iTMS podcasts via Safari

While many podcasts can be found in the Podcast Directory of the iTunes Music Store, some, for whatever reason, may not have a presence there, or there may be other versions of a podcast that you may wish to have in iTunes. iTunes has a convention to deal with this, in the form of the 'Subscribe to Podcast...' option under the Advanced menu item of iTunes. This allows the users to provide a URL for an XML file to subscribe to. While this works, it's often tedious to find the URL of the feed, copy it, and then paste into the box. Of course, Safari has a more convenient way to do this -- the built-in RSS reader. The RSS reader, found in Safari 2 and higher, provides a small link on the right-hand side of the page under Actions called 'Subscribe in iTunes.' Click it, and the feed appears in iTunes as i...

published on Wednesday, the 28. June 2006, macosxhints

Set up server monitoring with Nagios and sendPage

I have been running a host monitoring solution (among other things) on an Xserve G5 for about a year now. It has been rock solid stable and has proven to be better than any other solutions I've looked at. It uses Nagios and sendPage, installed on OS X Server. I've created a fairly detailed writeup covering exactly what I did, in case you'd like to set up the same on your server. [robg adds: Typically I would ask the author's permission to mirror the actual writeup here. However, in this case, the provided solution is quite lengthy and detailed, and may not be of interest to a huge number of readers, so I think a link to the writeup will suffice.]

published on Monday, the 19. June 2006, macosxhints

EU Officials Cautious on AntiTrust Issues

An anonymous reader writes "News.com has a piece up looking at reactions from EU officials to the ITMS antitrust case. The individuals involved are wary of cracking open the DRM that protects the music sold at the iTunes Music Store." From the article: "One of the most outspoken government advocates on the issue is Norwegian consumer ombudsman Bjorn Erik Thon, who said he would act soon depending on how Apple responds to a letter the government had sent the company. If Apple can require an iPod for songs via iTunes, then music, book and film companies might restrict their products to specific players too, he said. "

published on Friday, the 16. June 2006, apple-slashdot

A few more site features added today...

We now have an RSS feed for each and every topic on the site -- you can see them all listed on the new RSS information page. (This page is also linked to "RSS" in the nav bar.) I've included a hint count for each category, so you can get a sense as to the volume in each feed.At the suggestion of a reader, I also modified the search results display. No major changes (yet), but I added a column to show the number of comments for each hint. Between the Comments and Hits columns, you can get a good sense for how much activity a given hint has generated.Since this seemed like a pretty good idea, I also added a comments column (Cmnts) to the Headlines page.-rob.

published on Tuesday, the 13. June 2006, macosxhints

Dvorak Admits To Trolling Mac Users

jalefkowit writes "Tech pundit John Dvorak has long been known for his inflammatory opinions. Many have suspected that these opinions are just a way to drive up traffic to his column. Now, we have it straight from the horse's mouth: Dave Winer has Dvorak on video describing his methodology for trolling the Mac community to pump up his stats." I have to admit I'm also guilty of posting the occasional inflammatory story, but I find it's usually best to suffix the title with a question mark, and let our ever-knowledgeable readers hash out the issue and decide for themselves.

published on Saturday, the 10. June 2006, apple-slashdot