For those of you that have a cd/dvd burner and Mac OS this is a application you must have. I purchased a DL/DVD burner last year and the app that came with it was Toast 6 lite. While this is a decent app I felt I needed the best there was and that is Toast Titanium 7. I did a search on google and found one link that worked. Oh yeah and the new Serial Box is out for the month, use the serial you find in there.

Toast Titanium 7.dmg (57.6mb)
serial-box-2006-01.sit (12.0mb)

I just read a post on Wired.com about these nifty gadgets and how the German government is getting away with using these cameras in public places. The short story is that the Austrian government passed a law in which police can monitor public places with out having a court order. They are using stand-alone networked cameras manufactured by Axis Communications. This pissed off local civil liberties groups who brought up the famous question ‘who will watch the watchers’. Any way I found these cameras to be ‘pretty darn nifty’ and decided to look into the cost of having one. The cheapest one I found on ebay is the indoor fixed camera model ‘Axis 206’ is $250. If you want to go with a cheap outdoor Axis camera then you may want the ‘Axis 211’ which typically goes for about $700. You can also go with the ‘Axis 211A’ which is an outdoor camera with audio but this model is about +$150 more than the base 211 model. The neat thing about these cameras is the ability to access them through out a network and not have them hooked up to a computer. I guess you could go with a webcam but you will need a computer to manage the images. I would so love to have one of these to play around with at home. Look up some of these cameras on Google to check them out.

I just upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress. I am getting used to the changes and the looks of the Dashboard and such. The Wordpress team has changed things such as a larger font when writing a post and added the ability to upload files when writing a post, instead of having to switch tabs to upload a file.

Gigaparts Question of the Dec 31, 2005
——————————————————————————————————————Question: Pin two of the TS-480 microphone jack is for .
Answer: 8 VDC——————————————————————————————————————

Although some may like Dashboard in 10.4, I never really use it and I find it a waste of resources. Here is how to turn it off.
Launch Terminal and enter these two commands
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock

To turn Dashboard back on enter these into terminal
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
killall Dock

I knew about invisible files from past experience with unix. An invisible file in unix typically starts with a “dot” and I thought this was the case for OS X, but I was wrong. While you can hide file in OS X by starting the file name with a “dot”, it is not the ONLY way. There are three ways to create a hidden file in OS X. One way is to use the “dot” prefix for a file name as previously stated. Another is to enter the file name into the “.hidden” file in the root directory (This file is not created in version 10.4 installation but it is still supported). The final way to create hidden files is to activate the “invisible bit” for the file. This can be done in a Terminal window with the help of XCode’s developer tool “SetFile”. I learned all of this after copying my fiance’s songs off of her iPod and realized they are hidden files. I used the SetFile command to turn off the invisible bit. Here is how I did it:

Launch Terminal and enter defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles Yes (Shows all hidden files)
Open the /Developer/Tools folder in the Finder. Locate SetFile and drag its icon to the terminal window. The Directory path for SetFile (/Developer/Tools/SetFile) should appear in the Unix command line prompt.
Type: -a V . Leave a space after the upper case V.
Locate the file that you want to make invisible. Drag its icon to the Terminal window. Its path should now be added to the same command line prompt.

You should now see something like
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v /Users/homedirectoryname/Desktop/MyDoc
To reverse the process you use the same command but use “V” instead of “v”

Finally relaunch Finder by entering the command killall Finder into Terminal

A more complete guide to hidden files in OS X