A great free tool from Radio Silence called Private eye allows you to see in real time everything they is talking on the network. You can filter by incoming, outgoing or by application. You can grab this fine piece of software (Mac only) from the site

Came across this open source free-ware media player that is out there for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It can be skinned, plays just about anything and its called UMPlayer.

UMPlayer comes packed with dozens of advanced features, such as skinnable interface, built-in subtitles search, audio / subtitles sync, enhanced filter rendering and YouTube™ player / recorder, yet has a simple and intuitive user interface that was designed for ease of use.

With over 270 built-in Audio and Video codecs UMPlayer can handle nearly all media formats, including AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID and many more.

Until recently, I had not really looked into buying any sort of apple computer mainly because my current system does everything I want and I do have the ability to run OSX on either a hackintosh if needed or a Virtual machine. I had passed a 21.5″ iMac in the local ‘Comet’ Store and it looked very clear and glossy and it got me thinking. I looked on Apple refurbished site and saw various models of the 27″ with £200 to £400 off. At this point we start to drop into the world of which version is worth the money, if any.

The various years and models.

While they all feature the amazing 27″ Screen, it seems that there is a few different configurations to choose from depending on what year it was made. We start with the CPU, we have the Core 2 Duo and we can agree I want to write these off as no use to me, this is old technology. We have the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 and apple mix it up somewhat with Dual Core Core i5 and Quad Core i5.

Graphics cards seems to be ATI 4670 (which I currently use in my Dell machine), ATI 4850, the ATI 5670 and 5770 I think. Of course the latest and greatest is always better of which your not going to get with the iMac but the 5770 I am sure beats my 4670 for example and even the 4850 is a good card.

Why the iMac?

Looking at the Mac Range, I have no interest in spending £600+ on a very underpowered mac mini (in my own view anyhow) and I have no need for a Laptop, this leave either the iMac or the Mac pro. While the Mac Pro is very powerful, it would be a waste of power with the 8 core model and I know that the 12 Core is just too much for me to spend on a computer. The iMac by chance though comes with a very nice 27″ Screen, I love real estate and this can deliver. My thought was simple enough, the Core i7 can provide enough power – if I can find a cheap one of them, that would be the model of choice.

What about the i3 or the i5 ?

The Core i3 is a dual core CPU (direct replacement for the Core 2 Duo) that has hyper threading to simulate 4 cores. The Core i5 is a Quad core unit, no hyper threading to my knowledge (I could be wrong) and finally the Core i7 has 4 real and 4 virtual core plus can over clock on the fly.  

The Future of the iMac

I read that the iMac is due a refresh, I do not want to buy a 2009 model only to find a month later they bring out the Sandy Bridge version for the same price with thunderbolt and a better graphics card. For now, I shall leave well alone, I have no great need for a mac as of now, it would just be nice to get rid of all my surplus computer and monitors and be left with the Dell XPS 435, Work Laptop and a 27″ iMac.

It is quite hard to turn your average PC into something that runs Mac OS X and normally requires you have the right motherboard and other parts to make it even get to the install stage. What if you could make a USB stick that boots a safe version of OS X (no graphic or sound drivers) and generally works without wiping your present drives – great right? I shall document what I have done so far and what the outcome was in regards this amazing program – iPortable.

What is it?

The first thing you need to do is get your hands on it – if you search for iPortable, you should find a torrent – now you need a few things to get this to even work. The first thing you need is at least an 8 GIG memory stick, I have also used in the past a USB External Hard drive but that will be slower (and its not that quick as it is). The other requirement is some sort of working Mac, be it a real one, a Hackintosh or a Virtual machine. As it happens I had my Athlon machine running 10.5.8 with the slight annoyance that you must have the USB already plugged in for the machine to even see it.

Making the Bootable Stick

The guide (included) explains how you mount the file on the mac, format the memory stick and then use included CloneTools to write the image onto the memory stick. I had to use the boot fixer before my computer would allow this device to boot. Once this process is over, you now have a memory stick that as long as your computer can handle booting from USB sticks (Mine showed up as blank in the list which fooled me for a while) – you can boot into Mac OS X 10.6.2.

A Working Mac – just slowly

It takes a LONG time for the USB to boot and eventually get into OS X, just be patient at this part. Of course you do not want to be booking and running from USB for a main OS, this is now the process to get a harddrive ready for the same image. I used the same process as making the USB but instead picked the 250GIG harddrive I had as slave, this meant that when I started the computer I either had Windows 7 or if I pressed F8 and choose the secondary drive – OS X 10.6

Getting the parts working

As with any Hackintosh, getting the right files to make the things work is a fine art, I had a Creative Labs sound card fitted and a ATI 3650 Graphics card. The sound worked fine, I searched the forums and found the correct driver, ran it and rebooted and we had sound. Graphics was a different story though, I picked I think the wrong one and while the machine was working, I was stuck with a blue screen (the mouse moved though).

Worse then any of the above though, evn though the Hard drive was 250GIG, as far as the OS was concerned, it only had 64meg free. It was at this stage I had to so some googling to get the answer I needed. When I was booting from the memory stick, it picked the first Mac OS it had found and in this case was on the HD. I had to tell it at the boot prompt rd=disk2s1 and now we were from the memory stick. The reason for this – to run the hard drive repair tools on a drive that is not in use.

In Diskwarrior (Supplied) so far it has found 1929 Overlapping files and is still going. I am hoping by the end of this process I have the full free disk space otherwise its pointless.

Is it worth the effort?

I do this as something to do, If I wanted a mac that badly I would just go and buy one. It is good to see people faces when I boot a work computer with Mac OS X even if it is slow from USB. It is safe as you can try it out and it gives you a bootable OS for another Hackintosh should you need to sort it out.

Before we begin, the story is not about me buying an Apple for Christmas, this is a tale of the ‘normal’ people view of apple, what there children are asking for and the shock factor when you tell them how much they cost, what they do and probably why there children want one. By the way – the picture above – Designed and hand-built by Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the Apple I was Apple’s first product, and went on sale in July 1976 at the distinctly unsettling price of $666.66. Only 200 units were produced, and unlike many other computers of the day, the Apple I came as a fully assembled circuit board containing around 30 chips.

My Son wants an Apple Computer for Christmas

My first encounter was a person at work wanted some advice, her son requested for Christmas he would like an Apple Computer, in fact he was specific – he wanted an Apple Mac Pro Desktop. The mother of course had seen all the desktop computers in the local stores and assumed it would cost about £500. I showed her the Website and explained that the mac Pro starts at £1999, this does not include a monitor or anything crazy like that. She was in shock – how could a computer cost so much money? She asked me “What does it do” and the best way I could describe this without been bias was it is built from the same parts as a normal PC (aka Dell) inside but the build quality is better and it runs a very different operating system called Mac OS X.

Now before people start hating on me – I had to keep this simple, to a person who has no great understanding outside the box on her desk made by Dell and Windows XP. We also discussed the iMac but each time the main shocker was the price.

I have heard about this Apple TV – What does it do?

The next question coming my way is the Apple TV – they heard it was only $99 and given the current Exchange rate of 0.6212 ($ to £) this means it will cost a mere £64 right? Well wrong, it cost £99. Wait one minute there, all they have done is changed the Symbols, do Apple not understand the world uses different currency and has a thing called Exchange rate?

What does this little device do though – well I do not own one but from my understand it connects via Wireless and sync’d up with iTunes and streams your iTunes content. The person seemed puzzled, did it not record your programs for you, show you TV and play movies and on and on? It seems people are confused over that this device does and I think it is the price that is making them look – after all it is made by apple right?

Bottom line on Apple products

You need to ask yourself, what can an Apple computer do for you, is there a program you must run and only out for Apple? Do you like the all-in-one of the iMac (I do) and do you prefer the look and feel of MAC OS X? I have proven (while I owned one) that in fact you can do anything on Linux, On OS X and finally Windows. Each one has something missing and I personally am not happy to be chucking money at an Apple, not when my current computer has enough power to cope easy and I could have bought 4 of my computers for one quad core Mac Pro – that’s the difference and of course Windows 7 is a very well behaved operating system with stable drivers.

Back when I owned a iMac, I installed and used Growl for Mac – the utility ran in the background and popped up telling you when the track changed in iTunes, you had new mail and various other functions. Back then the Windows Version was not so good and very early in development – it is not until recently that I downloaded an application that could send Growl messages – I went on my search for the Windows version.

Growl for Windows

If you head of to HERE – you will find the Windows Version of this program and unlike the Mac version, this needs a few tweaks and programs before it starts to tell you what is going on.

Some applications can send to growl already, such as Songbird (with a plug-in) while others need some help. The first one I tried was the iTunes plug-in – you can find this and many others HERE, once we have that working, the next thing is the looks.

The looks

Some of the displays you can grab are good looking, such as below:

There is also others that can display infomation on the current track for example:

In Use

Basically once you have application talking to Growl, when your track changes in iTunes – you get a pop up with the Album Art and song title. You can get alerts from other devices such as an Android – good to know that somebody is calling you on screen for example.

It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.

The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.

The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that mashed characters from Valve games into retro Apple ads. Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games, called Apple and Steam a natural fit.

“If there’s anything like iTunes on the PC right now for games, it’s Steam,” Connors said. “So you’ve got two great leaders in digital distribution coming together.”

Steam is the pre-eminent digital distribution platform for PCs. With more than 1,000 games and 25 million user accounts, Steam is by one estimate responsible for more than 70 percent of digital game purchases. Bringing the service to Macs means wider selection, quicker updates and more episodic content for Apple’s traditionally game-deprived computers.

Valve wants to position its games not as static products but as part of an ongoing, constantly updated, ubiquitous service, company co-founder Gabe Newell told Wired.com in advance of Monday’s announcement.

“The traditional model has always been that you have these really extended development times … where you do nothing for customers for several years and then you try to drive everybody into the theaters or into the stores on a given date,” Newell said. “It makes it hard to steer your decisions based on customer feedback, and customers don’t particularly like that. They would like to have the experience of being part of an entertainment community where they’re getting something on a daily or more frequent basis.

“The Mac represents a great opportunity to deliver these things.”

Bringing Steam to Mac will give gamers several cross-platform benefits, Newell said.

• If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play.
• By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress.

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, director of Steam development, in Monday’s press release.

“We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac and the Xbox 360,” Cook said. “Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows, the company said.

“Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, said Portal 2 project lead in the press release. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”

Bringing Valve’s gaming engine Source, and the company’s Steamworks development and publishing suite, to the Mac will make it easier for developers to bring games to OS X.

“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs,” said Jason Holtman, Valve’s director of business development, in the press release. “We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Easy updates

Steam lets the company take full advantage of the freedom that the PC and Mac platforms give it to constantly update and tweak its games. For instance, the developer has updated its 2007 game Team Fortress 2 more than 100 times, Newell said.

This wouldn’t be possible on a closed system like Microsoft’s Xbox Live, he said: “Microsoft’s QA fees … would be several hundred thousand dollars to do the updates that we did to Team Fortress 2. And that ignores the fact that the cycle on these closed platforms would have taken years to get all these updates through.”

Most recently, Valve leveraged its ability to push updates through Steam and engage its fan base by dropping hints into its 2007 cult hit Portal about the game’s upcoming sequel, letting the fans be an active part of the game’s announcement.

“We want to bring content creators and consumers closer together to minimize the latency between what somebody on the team does versus a fan’s ability to participate in that experience, not put more barriers between them,” Newell said.

Valve isn’t the only PC developer with a strong, engaged fan base looking to Mac. Telltale Games, creator of the episodic Sam and Max games, announced last month that it would be moving to Mac, even inviting fans to vote on which of its games should be ported over first.

While Telltale has not confirmed any of its games will be on the Mac version of Steam, Connors called getting his companies titles on Valve’s digital-distribution platform “a no-brainer.”

“We have games that run on the Mac and we have games that run on Steam, so our goal is to be there,” Connors said. “We think they’re going to do a great job with getting the Steam client over there and we want to continue to be a part of it.”

Asked to name other developers that we’d see on Steam, Valve’s Newell demurred. But Steam’s popularity means that as Valve goes, so go other gamemakers. Steam on Mac means many more games on Mac.

“(Mac) has all of the right pieces, and we know other developers see that as well,” Newell said.

I am running Mac OS X 10.5. 6 and through the long history of the updates from 10.5.0 till now there has been a problem with seeing Windows Shares on the Mac Finder. The way it should work is simple enough, you open a window showing your drives and listed right there would be all the shares it has found but the list remain empty meaning you have to do this the hard way.

If you use “connect to server” and put in there smb://<name of machine> then indeed it brings up that machine, the icon that comes up for the computer though is the lighter of the two – not the dark blue – a picture will explain better:

I noticed for example that Windows XP machines came up no problem most of the time, if I changed the Workgroup or computer name, the machine came up but after a few reboots – once again it was lost and had to be connected by hand. I tested across Windows and it could see all machines including the Linux Box and even the mac, the same can be said of Linux, it had no trouble. After talking to people and looking around, it was one of those classic mac issues were som said “never had that problem on mine ever” to others saying the same as me or results in-between.

I am sure 100% it is the SMB inside the OS X that is at fault – how can an update make it work 100% of the time and the next update comes along and it is broken again? I had many SMB type problems such as me fixing the IP on all the computers and the copy speed going down to the lowest number ever, resorting back to DHCP and the problem went away but been a Mac, you cannot delve deep into the inner workings.

If anybody has any views on this – feel free to comment – I am the only one with this issue?

While I am a proud owner of a iMac 24″ with all the trimming – I have come across 3 ‘features’ that in my eyes are plain stupid on the OS X Platform. Remember that I have various machines running XP, Vista, Ubuntu – so I am not a die hard Apple fanatic that will defend it no matter what, its good but not perfect.

REPLACE FILES

Let us imagine that I am moving some files around from drive to drive and a make a directory called Home_Movies. I start by moving some files but later choose the much quicker method of dragging the original “Home_Movies” onto the new drive. OS X at this point explains that there is already files in there as follows:

If you click STOP – nothing happens but if you click Replace – that is 100% what it does – it replaces whatever whatever was in there with the folder you are moving and the stuff that was already in there? Well that is gone for good, it is not in the recycle bin. Windows / Linux by default MERGES the files which makes more sense to me. B very careful of this feature otherwise you will loose a lot of files in the process.

IMPORT = REPLACE?

One of the programs I use is Wallet – it stores all your Serial numbers, login details and basically allows you to manage all your stuff in one place. I had another Wallet database file and silly me IMPORTED this into mine which resulted in mine been 100% replaced. Did the programmers not see fit to merge more than one database together? I can tell you now the windows version does import and merges the two – is this a new feature of the Mac?

iWeb – No Save, open or anything

iWeb is easy for the beginner to design web sites but did they not feel to Import, Open or whatever existing sites? What happens if you loose the file – if it goes from the side bar – that is your web site gone for good. Even Frontpage has all of these features and I see that as a very low level beginners program. This is a case of “My way or bust” attitude from the Mac programmers – very sloppy and very bad.