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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 161. Apple seeking a Mobile Marketing Manager. Former Apple CFO Andersen resigns from Apple board. Target gets in on movie studio “persuasion”. Apple posts new “Get a Mac” ads. Starbucks most recent expansion… iTunes. Is Santa Steve bringing us a real video iPod for Christmas this year? iPod Screensaver trick. Comment about iTV and HDMI connector. Rumors of Core 2 Duo MacBooks (Pros?), but are they worth it? Is Apple’s .Mac customer service sub-par? How I create an enhanced podcast. How to display the full date in the menu bar. Can we get a non-Apple BT mouse and keyboard recommendation? Geekanoids Mac Expo London Coverage.
New music, Open Mind by Daniel Bjornmo.
In the fortress you will need more than men and swords. You will need the power of the glave. — Krull (1983)
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Hey Adam!
Thanks for yet another great MacCast! You always help me learn something new every episode.
Wanted to provide some feedback concerning your comments regarding iTV and the HDMI connectivity. We’ve done a little informal testing here among some of our engineering staff who are upgrading to newer, larger LCD and Plasma TVs at home and we are finding that using the HDMI or DVI connection does NOT provide a superior video signal over the Component Video connections. Some research on the net has revealed similar experiences by other users as well. Although this does mean using seperate cables for video and audio signals, the end result is noticably better color saturation in the image. While we, too, would prefer to reduce the clutter behind our equipment, we choose to have a better viewing experience over less wiring.
Hope you find this useful. Keep up the great work!
-Mike-
Hey Adam,
You mentioned something about FairPlay not going to be [in your opinion at least] hacked: well, DVDJon [the one to hack DVD-CSS encryption] did it but so far he says he’s not going to release anything to the public. http://www.ugeek.com/news/geeknews/2006Oct/gee20061003039083.htm
There’s an Engadget post about it too: http://www.engadget.com,%20www.engadget.com/2006/10/02/dvd-jons-is-back-to-once-again-make-fairplay-fair/
From the article it seems that he has only reverse-engineered it; but how hard would it be to take it a step further? Don’t know if the same technology is/will be used for video content though.
Cheers and thanks for the show!
Adam,
Enjoy the show..
Re the issue of the expected appearance of Core 2 Duo chips in Macbooks and Macbook Pros, there is one point you overlooked that is potentially of great importance for some users.
The Core 2 Duo chips are 64 bit as opposed to the 32 bit of the Core Duo. This may not be directly related to a performance improvement, but what it _does_ mean is that machines based on the 64 bit chips would be able to address more than the limit of 2GB of RAM that the current notebooks can address. For some users, this is a very big deal indeed. I work in music production, and when using software such as Logic where an entire studio’s worth of musical instruments and effects are all virtually created in RAM, you very quickly run into a performance hit when your physical RAM limit is reached. For instance, when using samplers in Logic, you can load up huge libraries of orchestral sampled instruments that can quickly fill up all the RAM, when you are producing a big orchestrated piece of music. When this happens, the software has to start streaming data off the hard drive and suddenly things slow down very significantly. This is even worse when the hard drive is also being used to play and/or record mulitple tracks of audio files that you may be using in your production at the same time. In a desktop G5 that I’ve been working on in the studio, you really hit a brickwall when working on big arrangements when you’ve got 2GB of RAM, and this is suddenly completely fixed when you install 4GB or more of RAM. The machine no longer chokes, you can continue to work on the music without it stopping with CPU and disk access overloads.
So for me and many other music professionals like myself, sure a Macbook Pro is already a fabulous music production machine. However, with the possibility of there being a newer model that could potentially have even just 4GB RAM installed, the advantage is a serious consideration. The minor performance gain you mentioned of the CPU alone is not a big deal — but it’s the chance that a Core 2 Duo machine might allow more RAM to be installed that is the single reason I’m holding off purchase for the moment.
Keep up the good work, great podcast.
It is clear that no matter how much .Mac service is bad, their site hosting is worse because we seem to have overloaded the site that the screensaver guy is paying $100 a year for!
Hi Adam,
Thanks for a recent podcast about podcasts. In an earlier issue of your podcast you have mentioned the type of a microphone you use. At the time I was not really interested in podcasting myself, but now I’d like to try one. Instead of me searching and listening to your older casts, could you please give me some direction where to find the best type or simply let me know what kind you are using. I have a unidirectional mic that served me quite well in making music, but it is not suitable for speech, especially since there will be two people talking simultaniously. Any thoughts or ideas from you would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for delivering a great Mac podcast.
I tried to change my menu bar clock/date like you said and mine didn’t change. I have 10.4.8. Any suggestions? Do I have to restart the computer?
Thanks I love your show!
Hey Adam, that iPod screensaver trick…too much work. Sounded like you were teaching how to do it for a Windows iPod user.
Hey Adam, I enjoy the podcast. You mentioned customer service for iTunes and I actually wanted to say I had a good experience when I used iTunes customer service.
With iTunes 7, I downloaded a couple of TV episodes and had trouble where they didn’t show up. I went to account, check on purchases (to see if I had gotten charge). From there, you can report a problem per line item of your purchase. I received a response within 24 hours (though in the meantime I had figured out what I was doing wrong). Since I had multiple files with the same complaint. I received multiple responses. Even though I had cut and pasted my problem description, I received slightly varied responses (same solution, but slightly different language used), which told me that they were somewhat personalized (or at least they have multiple cut and paste versions of answers). On the .mac side, yes, the email has been down quite a bit lately and since I renew soon, I need to look at whether or not I will.
Thanks again.
.mac is worth it if ou have to sync several macs or useful for large file transfers to other folks. Let’s hope the current problems come from updating a live site. if Apple won’t give good service, how about they encourage a help yourself and others community like Firefox. It’ll take something special to encpura euse over googles growing blob of services.
Hey Adam, why not mention your few (week previous)favorite MacCast blog entries on the show? I keep forgeting about the new blogging. Now I’ll stick the XML tag on my Vienna blog feed, see if that helps!