Dashboard translator can't count

It would seem the Dashboard's Translation widget needs a little work, even for just numbers.

Panasonic announces 9.5 mm Blu-ray burner for laptops

Panasonic has announced a 9.5 mm thick Blu-ray burner, small enough to fit into the MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, it is a tray-load drive, and Mac laptops require slot-load drives. However, slot-load versions should follow soon.

The drive will make an appearance at CES 2008 in January.

Apple blogs make money?

Apple blogs make money? Well, mine doesn't. ;)

However, rumours are that Nick Ciarelli got a fair chunk of change to shut down Think Secret. Think Secret writes:

Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret's publisher, said "I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."

We don't know what the details of the settlement are, but it is believed by some that the settlement included a significant payoff. Just as importantly, Mr. Ciarelli didn't have to release the names of any of his sources.

Now, the voice behind Fake Steve claims he too was offered money to shut down his site. One always has to take these types of claims with a healthy dose of salt (as it's "Fake Steve" after all). However, he at least does bring up one good point that has been mentioned by many others before, which is that the existence of these blogs is evidence of a strong Apple fan base. These are not sites that are determined to harm Apple, and they arguably benefit from the free advertising. Apple's heavy-handed reaction to these sites, however, ironically does harm Apple's reputation.

[Update 2007-12-24]

The LA Times claims Mr. Ciarelli did indeed get paid to shut down his site.

OS X 10.5 Leopard G4 nVidia boot delay bug - Fixed!

Those of you running flashed nVidia PC video cards in your G4 Power Macs may have noticed significant boot delays with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Once the operating system has booted it will work normally, but getting there is the annoying part. The Leopard boot delay is 2 minutes on my Cube, and it's even worse on some other machines, with reported delays of well over five minutes.

Fortunately, the industrious folks over at The Mac Elite have figured out a solution. Apparently, the problem is related to Leopard's handling of GPU temperature diodes, specifically on some recent nVidia cards. The OS will wait until the temp diode is activated during bootup, but until then the boot process simply hangs. A solution to this problem is to deactivate the diode completely in the video card's firmware, and this will allow the boot process to proceed normally. To make that modified firmware, you'll have to dump your own video card's ROM to a file so that you can edit it yourself, or else somebody else has to do it for you.

I flashed my Cube's XFX GeForce 6200 to a new Mac-friendly configuration with such a modified ROM, using nvflash and a cheap Pentium 4 AGP PC running MS-DOS (and a PCI video card so that I could see what I was doing). If you don't have access to a cheap PC, you may be able to use NVFlashUtility, which comes with Graphiccelerator. Be forewarned though, with NVFlashUtility, a misflash or a bad ROM can leave your machine blind, with no video support at all. The MS-DOS PC flash method with a second video card is safer, since if you misflash you can simply flash back to your original ROM.

The boot process in Leopard used to take almost three minutes on my Cube. Now with the modified ROM it takes less than one minute, a three-fold change. The only drawback is that iStat Pro can no longer report the GPU temperature, but that's a small price to pay for great Leopard compatibility.

The iPod touch has iCal event entry now

The latest 1.1.2 software update for the iPod touch adds iCal event entry. Apple is apparently listening to some of the internet banter about the iPod touch's deficiencies. This missing feature alone generated tons of comments at Everything Apple.

Now that this big hole in the iPod touch's feature set has been taken care of, all we need is Google Maps, Mail, and the full set of widgets that the iPhone already has.

Cube supported by Leopard after all... sorta

I have been spending a lot of time testing various different 10.5 Leopard install methods for my unsupported Cube. The Leopard install disc told me my Cube was unsupported, despite the Cube's 1.7 GHz CPU. However, I began to think that was because its Sonnet 1.7 GHz G4 7447A upgrade was reported as operating at 0 MHz, both in "About This Mac" and in the System Profiler (in both Tiger and Leopard).


I'm going to miss those pinstripes.

I contacted Sonnet, and they seemed a bit surprised by that odd 0 MHz reporting, so they suggested I simply rerun the OS X firmware updater to make sure everything was updated correctly. That in turn surprised me, since I never knew an OS X updater even existed. I had purchased my 1.7 GHz CPU upgrade way back in 2004, and the updater I had used had required OS 9. Even when I swapped out a motherboard in the Cube a long time later (because of a broken USB port), I was advised by my online Cube amigos to use Sonnet's OS 9 updater.

Today, I tried Sonnet's new OS X-based firmware updater in Leopard, and... No worky. I tried it again in Tiger. Again, no worky. It went as far as to start the install process, only to tell me shortly afterwards "Programming Not Successful". I went back to Leopard and tried it again. Nope, no worky. And then I just about gave up, thinking I'd have to take apart the Cube, replace the G4 450, remove the Sonnet firmware, and then rerun the OS X updater to install the new one. But I gave it one last shot in Tiger... and it worked! Every one of those glorious seventeen hundred megahertz are now showing up properly.


The new firmware still has the same 4.1.9f1 revision number, which is why I wasn't aware the firmware had changed since 2004.

The main effect of this new firmware is essentially two-fold for me. First, the Leopard installer disc now recognizes my 1.7 GHz Cube as a supported machine. No more installer hacks or Firewire target mode are required. Second, DVD Player.app now de-interlaces properly.


This is a huge improvement over the previous situation, where I had combing galore in DVD Player.app. Here is what a GeForce 6200 and a Radeon 9200 gave me in 10.4 Tiger and in 10.5 Leopard, with a 0 MHz CPU:


It's notable also that in addition, Leopard now provides new and improved DVD de-interlacing support in DVD Player.app, with its new Adaptive Video Analyzation technology.

Enjoy even higher-quality video with Adaptive Video Analyzation technology that applies deinterlacing and inverse 3:2 pulldown on demand.

This feature requires a 1.6 GHz processor... and now my Cube officially has one.

It is clear now that Apple isn't specifically blocking Cubes and other older machines with that Leopard installer. A simple CPU (and perhaps GPU and/or memory) upgrade may be sufficient to get Leopard compatibility. However, for those of you thinking about a CPU upgrade, you should be careful. It seems the experiences in the trenches are hit and miss. There are still some out there with fast enough G4 upgrades to meet Leopard's minimum requirements, but they are still having problems with getting Leopard to install without hacks. Maybe some of them just need a firmware upgrade.