Quick question for the Mac folk out there.  For those of you who use Safari, are you noticing it crashing a lot recently?

I’m wondering if I’ve managed to bollocks something up on my own, or if it’s just an issue from Apple’s side.

The RIAA, apparently determined to make itself into a self-caricature, is now arguing in court that it’s illegal to copy CDs you legally bought onto your computer for your own personal use.

P.S. Moe Lane: “I guess that I won’t be buying that iPod, then.” (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

Does anyone have any favorite podcasts that they would recommend subscribing to?

Just curious.

P.S. This is actually primarily Becky’s question (though I’m certainly interested in hearing people’s suggestions, too).

I haven’t mentioned this before, but Apple has been very, very kind to me recently. To put it into a brief version, I had an issue where connecting an external monitor to my MacBook Pro caused the system to go into complete deep-freeze mode. At that stage, only a hard restart worked.

Well, I went through several stages of phone support, up to and including reinstalling Tiger. Alas, no great success was found. Finally, I found a workaround that worked on a message board, and pretty much let it go. However, in the interim before this, I actually wrote a letter to Apple, explaining the problem and requesting some assistance in resolving it.

Shortly after sending the letter, I received a nice email and a phone call from a fellow in Cupertino (I assume), who reviewed my case, and explained what was being done from Apple’s perspective on evaluating the glitch.

These calls and emails were frequent over the period of a couple of weeks, and I explained the workaround I had found that was a satisfactory interim solution. Finally, when I installed the 10.4.11 final update of Tiger a couple of weeks ago, the problem was gone completely, without the workaround.

Frankly, I hadn’t really given it any more thought until I received a call from my guy in Cupertino. He explained that the engineers were still working through the issue, and was just giving me a status update. I explained that the problem seemed to be gone after installing 10.4.11, so it was cool. I thanked him for his help, and thought that was all.

Until a few days later, when he called and said, “By the way, we want to send you Leopard.” So, Friday morning, the FedEx guy showed up with my Family Pack box of OS X Leopard. I’ve now installed it on my MacBook Pro and the missus’ MacBook, and it’s pretty sweet.

However, now I get to the main point of my post. I’m really looking for some direction from a website about utilizing the cool new features in Leopard. I’m interested in some tips/tricks, etc. for using Spaces, sharing between computers, the new features in Mail, etc.

Anyone with helpful tips would be a tremendous help. Thanks.

I love Google Maps. I swear, whenever I think of something they could do to improve it, they do that very thing within three months. It’s like they can read my mind. Latest example: they’ve changed their "customize your route" feature so that it doesn’t create an extra "stop" at the arbitrary point that you drag the cursor to. Instead of a big ugly yellow pause-sign thingy, dragging & dropping now just creates a little white dot, and the driving directions are continuous. You can still manually create an a multiple-stop trip, of course, by using the "Add destination…" link or by typing to:[wherever] as many times as you want in the "End address" box. But you don’t have to create faux-stops just to customize your route from Point A to Point B. Brilliant.

For all the Mac folks out there who have already upgraded to Leopard, please note that Apple has just released the 10.5.1 update.

Cheers.

Oh yeah, for those of you like me who are still languishing in Tiger-land, they’ve also put out 10.4.11, which I have to suspect is the last update for Tiger.

Unbelievable:

Allan Wood (a baseball megafan who has written a book about Babe Ruth) purchased over $280 worth of digital downloads of baseball games from Major League Baseball, who have just turned off their [Digital Rights Management] server, leaving him with no way to watch his videos. MLB’s position is that since these videos were "one time sales," and that means that Wood and everyone else who gave money to MLB is out of luck — they’ll never be able to watch their videos again.

MLB shut down the DRM server because they’ve changed suppliers, and now they expect suckers to buy downloads of games in the new DRM format. Anyone who does this needs their head examined — using DRM itself is contemptible enough, but using DRM this way is just plain criminal.

Techdirt says "it’s really amazing how far Major League Baseball goes towards pissing off its fans." More broadly, Wired says this is "a perfect example of why DRM is bad. Those who imagined the worse case scenario to be DRM systems failing or disappearing were wrong. The truth is far nastier: DRM will be disabled by content providers any time they please, destroying your media collections whenever the pleasure takes them."

It would be like if Steve Jobs woke up tomorrow and decided that all downloaded music from the iTunes Music Store would no longer work. Which, as a technical matter, he could do, and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, unless you’d previously burned those songs onto a CD, so that you could rip them back onto your hard drive as DRM-free MP3s — which would be a "circumvention" and thus a violation of the DMCA, by the way. God bless America.

Of course, as a legal matter, Jobs might be contractually obligated not to do that… and so, IMHO, is MLB contractually obligated not to do what it’s doing, unless I’m misreading (or misunderstanding the significance of) this line from the FAQ that was in place at the time of the original downloads, according to the Joy of Sox:

7. Do I have to obtain a license every time I want to watch the downloaded video?

No. When you first try to play the video, a license will be distributed to you and stored by the player. Unless manually deleted, the license will exist forever and will be used when you try to watch the downloaded video on that machine. If you watch the video on a different machine, another license will be required.

I haven’t looked this up on Westlaw or Lexis, but I’m pretty sure "forever" means something different from "until we feel like changing our minds."

Prediction: MLB will back down on this, because if they don’t, they will face a class-action lawsuit, and they will lose.

(Hat tip: Kat Palmore.)

NOTE: Nothing in this post constitutes legal advice. I am not your lawyer — I am not anybody’s lawyer, yet — and you are not my client. If you are considering whether to sue MLB, you should get a lawyer, and not rely on anything I’ve said here. (Thank you, CLE ethics class. Heh.)

UPDATE: As expected, MLB has backed down. But Wood is not satisfied, because they have already reneged on a 20-hour-old promise to be "pro-active" and contact those customers who were screwed over by their actions. Instead, only those customers who discover the problem themselves will be told how to fix it. Wood writes, "This problem was caused solely by MLB, and it’s up to MLB to solve it
– by taking the lead and contacting the customers who are currently
being defrauded. They should have the decency — and good business
sense — to publicly announce that a huge problem exists and that they
are working to solve it." But they’re not doing that. Also:

These new downloads will still have DRM protection, so customers will
have to go to MLB.com for a license, as they always have. I asked if,
since MLB allows customers to receive a license at only three
separate computers, that as people upgrade or replace their machines
over time, they eventually could be left with no way to play the files
on their fourth computer, the MLB rep said "Yes, that’s a problem."

And MLB has no proposed solution to it.

Two questions for y’all. First off, does anybody know of a consumer-level (let’s say under $400) digital camera that has a maximum exposure (for low-light, long-exposure still photos) of greater than 15 seconds? Like, 30 seconds, maybe? I love the Canon PowerShot line, but they all seem to max out at 15-second exposures, and for Iridium flare photography, I really wish they could do 30. I’m probably not immediately in the market for a new still camera, but I’m just wondering.

Second, more important question: I need a new video camera. My Sony DCR-TRV140 is out-of-warranty and broken (it gives me the dreaded C31:23 error, and the Internet home remedy of "whacking" the camera doesn’t work for me), and I want a functional digital camcorder before the baby arrives. So I’m wondering if y’all have any suggestions.

To be clear, I’m looking for a reasonably inexpensive consumer-level camcorder — not some sort of super-advanced, super-expensive pro-level monstrosity that has eight thousand features I’ll never use. Also, if my new camera were a Digital8, that would be ideal, since that’s the format that all my previous tapes are in. However, I realize Digital8 is a proprietary Sony format and thus limits my options considerably, so I’m certainly willing to consider a switch to MiniDV or some other format — though then I’ll have to figure out how to play my old Digital8 tapes (maybe by buying something old and cheap off eBay?).

I don’t demand a lot from my camcorders, in terms of bells & whistles. For instance, I don’t care at all about digital zoom (only optical zoom matters), and razzle-dazzle digital effects do nothing for me. I just want something relatively cheap that works well. That said, one feature I actually do care about, which most camera manufacturers seem not to care about, is the ease of manually focusing when necessary. I used to have a camcorder where there was a simple, physical button up front, near the lens, that served as both 1) the toggle switch between auto & manual focus and 2) the focus wheel. That was ideal. By contrast, some camcorders these days require you to navigate a lengthy menu and press buttons four or five or six times, just to make the camera focus on something in the foreground instead of the background. That’s ridiculous. I want a reasonably intuitive interface for that essential camera function. Other than that… um… I’m not sure what else I really need in a camcorder. It doesn’t take a lot a fancy-schmancy digital wizardry to take cute videos of a baby. :) But you tell me. What should I be looking at? I haven’t been in the market for a camcorder for like six years, so I don’t really know what’s out there in any detail or depth. Suggestions? Thoughts?

or, I agree with Walt Mossberg. Thank you that is all…

Seems like the rush to judgment against Apple for bricking hacked iPhones with the latest iTunes update may have been premature and, well, completely inaccurate.

Some now disenchanted former members of the iPhone Dev Team (the team that created the hacks that unlocked the iPhone in the first place) are saying:

AnySIM and iUnlock were patched to make a
routine exit with 0 (successful) to unlock the phone. Only problem was
that that routine is NOT only called by NCK but rather by about six
routines total. The other five didn’t expect 00 to be there and were
therefore spammed across your BB during upgrade. In short, the wrong
bytes were patched and now you’re all bricked. No, it wasn’t Apple’s
fault. Rather than figure out how to fix this themselves, the iPhone
Dev Team would rather work on jailbreaking the new 1.1.1 and keep
accepting your donations. We want this fixed — we want them to take
responsibility for their bunk code.

Unfortunately if you want
something done you’ve got to do it yourself. That’s why we’re here.
We’ve got the 1.1.1 jailbreak and are actively trying to reverse the
Dev Team’s damage.

Hat tip: Finis Price, who summarizes the jargon thusly: "it means the original
team’s poor programming created the broken iPhones when Apple’s 1.1.1
upgrade was installed and not Apple’s upgrade itself. It also means
there is hope for any[one] out there who unlocked his iPhone and
cannot use it. … So all of
those 3rd party applications you previously had on your hacked iPhone
are about to come back."

While I certainly understand that folks may want to use an iPhone on some other non-AT&T network, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for folks who hacked their iPhones who might have bricks now.  The iPhone End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) seems to pretty clearly prohibit that kind of activity.  And, you signed on for it, so suck it up.

[NOTE: Second-to-last paragraph added by Brendan.]

Looks like Apple is bumping the minimum system requirements for the new OS. 

"Leopard will now require Macs with "an Intel processor or a PowerPC G4 (867 MHz or faster) or G5 processor." Other system requirements include a DVD drive, built-in FireWire, at least 512MB of RAM (additional recommended), and at least 9GB of hard disk space."

Now, how long do I wait before hopping on the Leopard train?

For those of you who’ve already seen the Britney breakdown of Chris Crocker on YouTube, here’s one for the straight male Mac enthusiast.

Heh.

So I’ll link to iLounge’s article on the subject customers ask is Apple going rotten and encourage people to continue to call Apple out for being @$$#*([$ in all four categories listed.

I'm about to go to DHL to ship my laptop to Apple. As I mentioned last month, my manifesto caught the eye of the “God level” tech support people, and I'll be getting a new hard drive and motherboard.

Is, well, the MacBook Pro.

But really, why would one want to run Windows on it?  I tried XP with Parallels for a little while.  Then I deleted it.

[Hat tip: Insty]