www.santaclaus.com
UPDATE (12/26/02): In case you are seeing this link after December 25th, the above link used to redirect back to Apple’s Santa Switch ads. Now the link is back to its regular page. Santa still uses the easiest, most powerful personal computer on the planet, though. On Dasher, on Comet, on Macintosh. . . !
(Thanks, Lee!)
Tag: Mac
Open source software site, Freshmeat has opened a new section devoted exclusively to OS X.
What is fast becoming my favorite GUI-based FTP client for OS X has an incremental update. Transmit 2.2 was released today, and is the first FTP client for the Mac to support Rendezvous.
New security bug with Windows XP and Nullsoft’s Wimamp MP3 player. Yet more reasons why I love iTunes and Audion. (Thanks, Eric.)
Well, isn’t this a kick in the pants?
Grant mentions purchasing a Marathon Deskmount for his G4. I downloaded the Deskmount installation instructions (PDF), and had a good chuckle. These guys have a great sense of humor, and this has to be the funniest product manual I’ve read in a while. Give it a read, it’s only 8 pages and 2 of those are the cover and the legalese.
We had a similar product in use in our graphics lab, but it’s not nearly as elegant as the Marathon Deskmount, though it doesn’t require modification to the G3/G4 case. I decided that I bang my knees into the G4s we do have mounted this way too much for my liking.
A developer known as “mathew” has released SnowSaver, a freeware snowflake screen saver for OS X. SnowSaver is “modeled on the pretty falling snowflakes animation that Apple has been running on an iMac in the window of the local Apple store. (Theirs is actually a QuickTime movie, and not available to customers. People have asked.)”
Pretty nifty, and despite mathew’s development pains, really shows the power of OpenGL. Well worth the effort, mathew!
Dan was asking if I had any experience yet utilizing IP over FireWire. I still haven’t set it up to play with it, but Ric Ford has posted a Reader Report on the issue, and it includes user experience.
At 400 megabits per second, FireWire is 40 times faster than 10Base-T Ethernet, and 4 times faster than 100Base-T. The only Ethernet spec faster than FireWire is Gigabit Ethernet (1000Base-T), now standard on all Macs, but still an option for many PCs (like FireWire).
Today, Apple released a preview version of IP over FireWire, useful for networking and clustering solutions. It can even be used for temporary connections to the internet using Internet Sharing. It’s interesting if for no other reason than that of future possibilities in networking.