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Test a geek:
–Previous Question–
Flexible diskettes were around long before the personal computer. The first flexible diskette was introduced in 1971. Who introduced it?
IBM introduced the first floppy disk.
–New Question–
Microsoft bought all rights to DOS from who?
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Tech news:
TiVo available in Canada. According to TiVo.com, The TiVo Service is now available in Canada. Canadian residents will be given special instruction to follow when activating service. TiVo does not sell boxes in Canada, so Canadian residents must purchase boxes in the US and import them.
Warner Music says they can cut off iTunes any time. Executives at Warner, upset over Steve Jobs’ reluctance of increasing prices on the iTunes Music Store, have said that they can pull out of their deal at any time. Given that all deals will be renegotiated in January, it seems we may have a war of Apple vs the record labels on our hands.
Google Calendar may be days away from launch. GoogleRumors reports that calendar.google.com now mirrors www.google.com. This is different from a few days ago when they checked and is different from other names, such as example.google.com that return cannot be found messages. Similar behavior was seen before the launch of Google Talk and Google Blog Search.
Google to offer free Wi-Fi in San Francisco. Google has submitted a plan to cover 95 percent of San Francisco with 300kpbs wireless Internet access, at no charge either to users or to the city. Google is one of more than a dozen companies responding to a RFI the city issued last summer. At the time the San Francisco Mayor outlined an ambitious plan to blanket the city, including low- and middle-income residential neighborhoods, with free wireless Internet access.
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How To: Get album art from iTunes.
When listening to songs in iTunes it’s fun to have the album art. Until now, the best way to get the pictures was to go to Amazon and copy them into iTunes. It’s worked but been a big pain in the butt. That is now a thing of the past.
While this solution is nice, it does take plenty of steps. First you must go to the music store in iTunes and find the album you want to get. Once there, you need to right-click the album title and select ‘Copy iTunes Music Store URL”. Now you can visit this website, paste in your URL and click the Submit button. Instantly you’re presented with links to the covers you’re looking for. The nice part about this is that most are high resolution, so they show up nice and big. Go ahead and check it out at http://tpemble.urfbownd.net/itunes.php
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Ask A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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Hack: Completely uninstall iTunes from OsX
The recent upgrade to iTunes 5 has been a pain for a lot of people, including myself. Fed up with how it was acting (or locking up in my case) I decided it was time to wipe iTunes off the drive and start it from scratch. This, though, is one of those Apple programs that just doesn’t delete as easily as most.
Normally to delete an application in OsX, you just drag it to the trash and you’re done. In the case of iTunes, this is much more difficult and you need to delve deeper. Before beginning, I recommend backing up your library XML file so you can have all your play counts, star raitings, and other info without losing any of that good stuff.
So this is what you do:
Drag the iTunes icon to the Trash.
Open the /Home/Library/Preferences/ folder and look for files named “com.apple.iTunes….plist” and drag them to the Trash.
Look in /Library/ folder for an iTunes folder and if you find one drag it to the Trash.
Look in /Home/Library/ folder for an iTunes folder and drag it to the Trash.
Last, in /Home/Library/Preferences/ByHost/ folder look for two files with names com.apple.nnnnnnn.plist and drag them to the Trash.
Open Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder) and in the process list look for iTunesHelper. Select it, then click on Quit Process icon. Quit or Force Quit the process.
Now open the Accounts preference pane, click on Login Items tab, look for the iTunesHelper entry and select it, then click the “-” button and remove it from the list.
Empty the Trash. This should fully remove iTunes and its associated files/folders.
At this point I would recommend rebooting the mac so you have a clean, iTunes-free session. At this point there are no files associated with iTunes on your computer except the files in the Music folder. Be careful if you delete any of this, as your music is stored in there.
Now that iTunes is completely gone you can go on your merry way or download the latest copy to do a fresh, clean install of the program. Any problems you had should now be gone. If they’re not, it’s most likely not an iTunes issue but something related to the OS or another program running.
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The geek’s view: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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