NBC and others thinking of suing over TiVO iPod support

Several TV and studio execs told Daily Variety that they were considering legal action against the company

Most likely upset because this would eat into any direct download purchase options they are working on. Like NBCs upcoming service on DirectTV.

Mention TivoToGo software is PC only with no Mac support planned

Is Apple hoarding iPods for it's own stores?

According to a survey by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster they are.

Spoke with 10 Apple Stores and 11 3rd party retailers (Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City).

All but 2 of the 10 Apple stores had all model iPods in stock, while most of the 3rd party sellers were sold out of at least some if not all models.

France may reduce iPod "tax"

French authorities are expected to reduce a copyright levy imposed on flash music players as early as next week.

If it happens the tax on a Nano for example would go from over €50 (US$59) to about €8.

Mac Mini Entertainment Hub in the future?

ThinkSecret is reporting on an Apple project called Kaleidoscope which they claim is an Intel based Mac mini with Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.

May also feature a built-in iPod dock and talks of Apple replacing the 2.5" hard drive with a standard 3.5" to gain storage capacity.

Their sources say the device would be ready for MacWorld Expo in January

Back in October Apple Germany hired Elgato chief executive Freddie Geier as managing director.

Could be a huge boom as many Mac users would by a 2nd, 3rd or 4th Mac for their living room.

Apple plans to open retail store in Rome

Apple Italy has opening for Mac Geniuses, Specialists, and managers.

Apple has not yet announced the store's location.

Disney and ClearChannel bring ads to iPods

The two media giants will be the first major media corporations to offer promotional videos to iPods and other related players.

Disney plans to offer full-screen, high-quality video from The Chronicles of Narnia, while also providing trailers, clips, interviews, and other content via its website

Clear Channel will provide 60-second video segments of its "Rush Limbaugh Show"

Rumor that AppleCare will finally be available in Florida

Because of consumer laws in Florida it was previously only available to business customers.

I have reports of an internal Apple Store email that say it will be available to Florida residents December 9th.

Security Update 2005-009 Available

Available via software update

Updates these components: apache_mod_ssl, CoreFoundation, CoreTypes, curl, iodbcadmin, OpenSSL, Safari, sudo, syslog

Follow-up on Rogers and Shaw iTunes issues

Looks like they were attempting to block or slow down P2P traffic.

From listener Robert, "This started early October when Rogers and / or Shaw started implement a new filtering technology to throttle down Bit Torrent usage. Apparently BT traffic took up 80% of their traffic and they weren't too impressed. This new filtering software looks at the packet headers and then decides based on its contents to let it pass or not."

MacCast One Minute Tip #7 - Resetting the PMU

Play OneMinute Tip

www.oneminutetip.com

Apple support web site

www.apple.com—support

Follow-up on Mac Disc Utilities

From listener Neil

Disk Warrior from Alsoft. It only does 1 thing, It can rebuild the disk Directory better than any other app. It can't suss out physical problems like bad blocks, it can't do things like repartition and it doesn't defrag your drive. All it does is take directories that are damaged or not ideal, and rebuild them clean. It works really well, has been around since OS9 days, and is easy to use. It's the first thing I reach for.

Alsoft - DiskWarrior

Drive Genius from ProSoft Engineering. This is the Swiss Army Knife of utilities. It can do an awful lot of things, including basic disk repair, as well as advanced stuff like re-partitioning of disks and low-level disk sector editing. It can also defrag and clone a disk. It is relatively new however, and the interface is not intuitive. I've found it great at some things (the repartitioning on the fly is awesome), not so great at others. Promising, but not there yet.

ProSoft - Drive Genius

TechToolPro from Micromat. This has disk repair functionality too, but it is also the only utility that does hardware checks. It can check a drive for bad sectors, and it can also check other hardware too: it can check RAM, onboard video etc etc. You can defrag a drive with Techtool, and it will also allow you to recover files from a damaged volume, although you might want to use a specific file recovery tool like Data Rescue for that. It's been around for sometime, but I question just how useful the hardware tests are, because I've yet had to have it find a bad piece of hardware, even when more in-depth tests using Apple tools do find bad RAM etc. I use TechTool in cases where I want to check for bad blocks on a drive, or if a client insists that I defrag the drive, as unnecessary as that is.

MicroMat - Tech Tool Pro

Getting iTunes/iPod videos to play in sequence

From listener Trent

If you play podcasts or video podcast from the Podcast section they play and then stop after each episode

You can use playlists to get around this in iTunes.

1) Create a playlist (smart or otherwise) and add video content to the playlist.

2) Set the album art area to Now Playing instead of Selected. (this step is important)

3) Set playback settings (fullscreen or whatever you like) and hit play or double click the first track

These playlists also work on the iPod and will be in Video Playlists in the Video section

Review: IceLink Plus by Dension

Play review from Will Jones

www.DensionUsa.com

Mac music, so easy a 12 year old can do it.

Here is proof Macs are easy

Play comment from Yoni

Play clip of Metallic Line

Talk about Intel Macs

Listener Ryan and many others want to know.

Will the new machines be able to run any of the power pc apps that I'm running on my current machine?

The latest updates of OS X Intel added Rosetta support for applications that rely on Velocity Engine. Previously, Rosetta did not support AltiVec, which includes Velocity Engine.

Will software vendors continue to make/support PowerPC apps?

Will the Rosetta translator come bundled with all mactels?

What about new Intel software?

Does the new processor mean that all Windows programs will work on the new macs?

Will Apple continue to make PowerPC based Macs?

An endorsement for SoundTrack Pro

Play comment from Gregor

Latest version of PEAK has some great RMS normalization features I am interested in

www.bias-inc.com

Macs and the threat of Viruses

There are no known viruses or spyware for OS X.

Macs are NOT immune from Viruses. Programs if you want to have a "preventative" plan

McAffee Virex

www.mcafee.com

Norton Anti-virus

www.norton.com

ClamXav (free open source)

www.clamxav.com

Intel based macs will NOT be more (or less) susceptible to viruses.

Encouragement to experiment with drag and drop

Listener Steve discovered dragging videos from Itunes 6 to move them out of iTunes

iPhoto and iTunes are really media management software

Also experiment with drag and drop in other areas.

Drag from a web page to mail

Drag a link out of Safari to the desktop

Drag a folder or document to the Finder toolbar. Command+drag it out.