The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
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Tickets Available  •  Fun Will Be Had

Linked List: January 24, 2008

Thursday, 24 January 2008

Cancel Your Friday Afternoon Appointments 

Friday afternoon, the Layer Tennis season finale features two simultaneous matches:

The games begin at 3 pm EST, noon PST. Update: Match previews are up from Baldwin and me.

How To Set an Apple Touch Icon for Any Site 

Simple but very clever bookmarklet from Drew McLellan that uses DOM script to add (or override an existing) Apple touch icon for use in creating web clips on the Mobile OS X home screen. (Cameron Hunt offers a variant with presets for Delicious, Flickr, RSS, and more.)

A Rookie Guide to Digital SLR Cameras 

Solid introduction to digital SLR photography by Mike Davidson.

Apple Releases the Leopard Edition of the HIG 

Brandon Walkin:

Apple has released their updated HIG with well thought out Leopard specific information such as making 512px icons, system provided images, transparent panels, and window-frame controls.

I haven’t perused the whole thing yet, but so far I agree with Walkin that it’s a good update, finally codifying some design patterns and control styles that have been implicit standards for years.

TED Talks: J.J. Abrams: The Mystery Box 

Wonderful talk by J.J. Abrams at TED on his love for “the unseen mystery”.

How to Open Multiple Inspector Windows 

Great tip from Cory Bohon: hold down Option when switching tabs within an inspector to open a second inspector instead of switching the view of the current one. The current iWork apps have a New Inspector command in the View menu, but this shortcut is more direct.

Peter Sichel on Why Time Machine Doesn’t Support USB Drives Attached to AirPort Extreme Base Stations 

Peter Sichel (of Sustainable Softworks) in a comment at MacInTouch:

There is an option to have Time Machine show other network attached disks:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

But Apple is hesitant to enable this as the default since it places the integrity of interrupted Time Machine backups at risk. So Apple is in a difficult spot with respect to supporting 3rd party NAS devices.

I heard a similar explanation from a few people at Macworld Expo last week, albeit regarding AFP, not USB — more or less that the AFP implementation in current AirPort base stations isn’t robust enough. Backups seem to work, but fail when you attempt to restore from them.

YouTube: How Camera Lenses Are Made 

Captivating video from the Discovery Channel; starts with a block of optical glass, ends with a full lens assembly.

Extending iTunes Rental Times 

Christopher Breen found that a rented movie played from an iPod, then paused, will let you resume playing after the 24-hour playback period has expired. It’s a shame that Apple hasn’t explicitly documented the rules for this.

NSURLConnection Crashing Epidemic on 10.4.11 

Daniel Jalkut:

If you’re a developer and your application uses WebKit or NSURLConnection, chances are you’ve noticed an increase in crash reports, too. Always on 10.4.11, always involving NSURLConnection. If you’re a user running 10.4.11, chances are you’ve noticed that network-enabled applications seem to be a bit more flakey and crash-prone.

The fact that the bug seems to be fixed in Leopard makes me think that this is a bug whose source was identified and fixed. Now the question is, will Apple ever ship a 10.4.12 containing a fix? Or will those users be stuck in crash-ville forever?

Michael Tsai dittos the bug. Maybe they’ll sneak a fix in as a security update? Somehow I doubt we’re going to see a 10.4.12 release.

OLPC Without an XO 

Chris Hanson:

If you want to try the OLPC operating system, but don’t have an XO-1 laptop, it’s become extremely easy to just grab a virtual machine image and boot it in VMWare.

MacBook Air Attack 

The Macalope, responding to PC World’s Mike Barton’s “MacBook Air Amiss: Time to License Mac OS X?”:

Good question! Like “I Have Stubbed My Toe And Find It Painful: Time to Commit Suicide?”

Half Million Private MySpace Photos Show Up in Massive BitTorrent Download 

Kevin Poulsen at Wired News:

The creator of the file says he compiled the photos earlier this month using the MySpace security hole that Wired News reported on last week. That hole, still unacknowledged by the News Corporation-owned site, allowed voyeurs to peek inside the photo galleries of some MySpace users who had set their profiles to “private,” despite MySpace’s assurances that such images could only be seen by people on a user’s friends’ list.

Macworld Expo 2008 Photo Set on Flickr 

My photos from last week’s big show.