Apple news blog

Apple has sent a memo to store managers with ways to respond to questions that customers may ask prior to the 3G-iPhone launch. There are now TV Shows in the Australian iTunes store! Many, many, many thanks to Neal Campbell for making …

In an additional concession to the proposition that Apple may be winning the OS war, Dell will offer cases in seven colors, a significant change to the company’s predominantly industrial look. Gizmodo has nice before and after …

Those of you who visit here as guests, or who have the “Hints1″ theme selected in your preferences, have probably noticed that we’ve got a slightly revised appearance as of, oh, about five minutes ago. New logo, new story title colors and topic icons and text, and some links to other Macworld sites in the header are the most visible aspects of the changes we’ve made.

Going forward, we’ll probably be tweaking things a bit more as we move to the just-released Geeklog 1.5 — hopefully including a CSS-based theme that eliminates (or greatly reduces, at least) the use of the <table> tag in the current theme.

-rob.

Amid reports of a surge in orders for all flavors of Apple gadgetry, anticipation of the iPhone 3g’s July 11 debut has the Apple Retail division preparing for the onslaught and chipmakers such as Broadcom and Marvel hoping happy days …

Despite some recent reports about an early Firmware 2.0 release, one reader points out that Apple’s iPhone 3G press release pinpoints July 11th to be the day of the 2.0 software launch:

iPhone 2.0 software will be available on July 11…

VPN in Mac OS X Server (all versions, I think) allows users to have as many sessions from as many different computers as they want to the VPN server. I didn’t like this, so I tried to find a way to restrict them to only one session. I tried looking at plists, thinking maybe Apple had some hidden option for this, but I couldn’t find it. I then dug around in man files for vpn and pppd and such, and found something of interest in pppd’s man page:

/etc/ppp/auth-up
A program or script which is executed after the remote system successfully authenticates itself. It is executed with the parameters:

interface-name peer-name user-name tty-device speed

Note that this script is not executed if the peer doesn’t authenticate itself, for example when the noauth option is used.

Great! All I need now is some code and a way to find out which users are currently onlin…

I have a couple of machines that are using Time Machine to back up to a Time Capsule. Backups go fine, but restores have been painful. When I open up Time Machine, it appears to hang. Navigating to a particular date and then to a particular file takes a long, long time — it’s slow to the point where I usually end up Force Quitting it, thinking it was hung.

After some research, I discovered that Intego VirusBarrier is responsible for the slow down. As you navigate, it must be actively scanning the Time Capsule backup. It is not noticeable on USB drive Time Machine restores, but it’s very noticeable on Time Capsule over the wireless network.

I disabled real time scanning and the restore flew. One can list the Time Capsule directory (mountpoint) in VirusBarrier’s exclude list, but that could be considered a security risk. A safer bet would be to just temporarily disable real…

Recently after switching from Mac OS X to Debian, I found I needed to restore a couple files from the Time Machine backup that I kept. The drive works just fine as an HFS+ mount, but I couldn’t figure out how to retrieve anything within. When Google didn’t yield the answer, I began to explore on my own.

It turns out Apple does a couple slick things with the file system to make incremental backups work, including hard linking to directories, which isn’t allowed in Linux. So for anyone that needs to access their Time Machine from something other than its associated Mac, here’s how you do it…

[robg adds: The following details were reproduced (with minor editing) using the author’s original blog post, with his permission.]

1. Mount the drive. On linux, it should automount if you have gnome-volume-manager installed. If you don’t see it in /media, then run nautilus and check the deskt…

   

   

In looking through the polls we’ve posted here over the years, I was shocked that we’ve never asked about music collections. That oversight is fixed with today’s poll, which asks how many songs are in your iTunes Music library. Note that we’re interested just in Music, not Movies, Audiooks, Podcasts, etc.

To cover a wider range of music collection sizes, the poll also uses a non-linear spread of answers. Smaller sizes are separated into 500-count buckets, which increases to 1,000-count and then 5,000-count buckets for the medium and larger collections. While this means you can’t read the results in a linear fashion, it will show more detail for those with larger collections — otherwise, this poll would’ve maxed out around 10,000 songs, which I know a lot of people are well over.

Yours truly? 3,920 songs, and not growing very rapidly at all — so far this year, I’ve only added 14 so…