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Items of Note: This episode is being recorded in the latest beta of Ubercaster. If you have any comments or feedback, please let me know.
!!! PLEASE NOTE: Portions of the news section contain some profanity and may not be work safe.
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Tech news:
RIAA’s “abundance of sensitivity” ends harassment of grieving family. Last week, Boing Boing posted about the family of a recently deceased defendant in a lawsuit by the RIAA being given 60 days to grieve before the RIAA went on to depose the dead man’s children in a renewed suit against his estate. In the intervening days, the publicity about this despicable act — suing the family of a dead man — has mounted. Now, an RIAA spokesperson, Jonathan Lamy, issued a statement: Our hearts go out to the Scantleberry family for their loss. We had decided to temporarily suspend the productive settlement discussions we were having with the family. Mr. Scantleberry had admitted that the infringer was his stepson, and we were in the process settling with him shortly before his passing. Out of an abundance of sensitivity, we have elected to drop this particular case. How nice of them.
Lossless downloads may be coming to iTunes. A recent upgrade to the iTunes Producer software used by studios to encode tracks for iTMS distribution may be a good sign for the discriminating audiophile community, as Apple has included the necessary tools to create lossless AAC content that could presumably be uploaded to the online store. While the simple availability of this option certainly doesn’t mean that higher-quality downloads are on the way — for one thing, the so-called Apple Lossless Encoder still lacks the required FairPlay support — Ars Technica points out that Cupertino and Hollywood could both potentially benefit from a less lossy option. Since tracks encoded in this format can be almost ten times as big as equivalent MP3s, widespread availability of lossless music may convince consumers to step up to higher capacity iPods, which would seem to be in Apple’s best interest. As for the music studios, these high-fidelity tracks could presumably fetch more than the 99 cents that 128Kbps files go for, opening a door for the tiered pricing structures that content providers so desire. For now, though, these crystal-clear downloads are still merely speculation, so hardcore audio snobs enthusiasts will have to continue buying and ripping their own CDs for the foreseeable future.
Internet Explorer Loses More Ground to Firefox. While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has lost further market share this year, there has been a significant slowdown in the acceptance of its largest competitor, the open source Firefox browser, according to a white paper released by Janco Associates on Aug. 11. Internet Explorer has continued to lose market share this year, to 75.88 percent share in July 2006 from 77.01 percent in January 2006 and 84.05 percent in July 2005. That comes off its January 2003 peak of 92.39 percent, the paper, written by Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis, says.
Dell to recall 4 million batteries. Dell and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission plan to recall 4.1 million notebook batteries. The recall affects certain Inspiron, Latitude and Precision mobile workstations and XPS units shipped between April 2004 and July 18, 2006. Sony manufactured the batteries that are being recalled, the representative said. Click here to see photos of recalled batteries. If they have one of the affected units, consumers are advised to eject the battery from the notebook after powering down and continue using the notebook with its AC power adapter, the CPSC said. Dell has so far received six reports of overheating units that caused property damage, but no injuries.
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Test a geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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How To: Play Mp3′s within Firefox with a play button
A handy music player Greasemonkey script inserts a play button next to any MP3 file you happen upon on the web so you can listen before you download. The one-click listening is courtesy of a Flash-based music player, similar to the one built into del.icio.us audio bookmarks and MetaFilter Music. After the user script is installed (you need the Greasemonkey extension first), check out directories listing of Kleptones MP3′s to give it a go.
Find the script at: http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/greasemonkey/inline.player.user.js
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Ask A Geek:
Zach asks: I have firefox 1.5 and quicktime 7.1 but when I go to website that need quicktime firefox said I need to download eveknow already have it.
Answer:
There are times when installing a media player such as Quicktime doesn’t let you see movies even after the installation is done. The core of this issue is that Quicktime didn’t install a plugin into the correct spot for Firefox. Firefox does have a plugins folder. In Explorer, navigate to Program Files\Quicktime\plugins and you should see some files listed. Select all files and copy them. Navigate over to Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins and paste the files into there. Restart Firefox and you should be all set.
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Hack: Convert your Boot Camp install to Parallels
Via ArsTechnica
A very persistent and very brave ex-Boot Camp user posted his (rather complex) process on the Parallels forums about how he managed to convert his Boot Camp install of Windows XP over to his Parallels install, thereby enabling himself to get rid of his Boot Camp partition in favor of the virtualization software du jour.
The challenges are as follows:
1. Backup your Boot Camp partition and convert it into a VM .hdd file.
2. Repair your Windows install so that it can work under the significant hardware change
Indeed, those are the two main focuses of the whole thing. The first half involves a fair amount of extra hard drive space, mostly so that you can create a clone of your Boot Camp drive and create a new shared hard drive under Parallels (which you would already have to have installed and running).
The process is as follows:
1. Boot on Windows and clone your drive (I used the evaluation version of Snapshop (http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/)
1.1. You will need lots of disk space for this.
1.2. This snapshot file will have to be made available to a Parallels VM so put is somewhere you can share it through Parallels Shared Folders.
2. Create a new virtual machine in Parallels and install Windows on it. Once it boots, install Snapshop.
2.1 Configure “Shared Folders” to make your snapshop files available to your new VM.
3. Create a new HD for your newly created virtual machine. Make sure it is as big (or bigger) than your Boot Camp partition.
4. Configure the new drive within Windows. For XP, instructions are available here: http://blog.kevindonahue.com/archive…tall_addit.php
5. Once your new virtual drive is available, open Snapshop and restore your Boot Camp cloned drived onto your 2nd hard drive.
6. Create a new Parallels VM that will use your virtual HD that now contains your restored Boot Camp partition.
7. You are not out of the wood yet… If you try to boot the new VM, it won’t work. You need to boot from your Windows install CD and and enter the repair console to repair your Boot.ini file. Instructions on how to do this are here (follow method 2): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314477/
8. Boot (again) from the windows install CD, select setup and repair the windows install as per the following instructions: http://www.theeldergeek.com/replace_motherboard.htm
9. Reboot (again) your new VM, install Parallels tools
10. Now if you want to get rid of the Windows selection screen at boot time, you will need to edit your boot.ini file to remove the entry that links to your boot camp partition. Instructions on how to do this are here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022/EN-US/. In many cases, all you need to do was to delete the last line.
11. Now you probably open the Add/Remove programs control panel and remove the Mac drivers needed for Boot Camp.
After going through all of this, you will have to reinstall all the windows updates you installed in Boot Camp (the Repair process reverts to the original Windows version) but you should have all your data, applications and settings intact.
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The geek’s view: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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