For those unfamiliar with Mister Rundgren, Todd made his name back in the 1960’s with a group called The Nazz and later fronted the Progressive Rock group Utopia.
In 1977 he began forging a name for himself as a record producer, working on Meatloaf’s ‘Bat out of Hell’ and the Steve Hillage classic ‘L’.
He is also noted for having produced the world’s first interactive CD-ROM, with the Philips Corporation, and is widely credited with having predicted many of the changes coming to the music business, which later came to pass.
Todd is a strong proponent of the music as a subscription service model. In this lecture, given at The Entertainment Gathering, in December of 2008, Rundgren explains how the major record labels in a pre-internet music industry failed to realise the potential of on-demand services as far back as the 1980’s.
He also talks about how this made peer to peer services like Napster all the harder to catch up with, once the internet became ubiquitous and a new generation of music fans lost the habit of owning physical playback media, like discs and tapes.
Apple’s built-in Software Update is great for staying on top of must-have system updates, but what about all your third party applications?
Manually checking for updates, when you have even just a few dozen freeware and shareware Preference Panels and single use applications, can be laborious to the point where you just don’t bother checking as often as you should.
In steps AppFresh. Integrated with iusethis.com, you can one-click check all your applications and Preference Panes, download and install the latest version right inside the clear and easy to use interface.
Best of all AppFresh is free. It includes an optional automatic updating feature, which will apply updates to applications which are considered stable and move the older version to the Trash (so you can fish it out manually if you need to go back to the older version, later on).
Slow system response and data loss can oftentimes be quickly resolved by repairing Disk Permissions. Without going into too much detail, this is a facet of the UNIX underpinnings of OS X, for which Apple have provided an application called Disk Utility to help perform.
As well as being capable of running while OS X is loaded normally, by opening the program from Applications > Utilities, Disk Utility can also be opened from the Installer Disc which shipped with your Mac, to perform lower level Disk and System repairs.
Insert the OS X Installer Disc into your machine and restart
Once you hear the start-up chime, hold down the ‘C’ key on the keyboard, until OS X starts to boot from the Installer Disc, instead of your hard drive.
Once the OS X Installer has loaded, you should be able to choose ‘Disk Utility’ from the ‘Applications’ menu, at the top of the screen.
In Disk Utility, highlight your main hard drive icon and click the ‘Repair Disk Permissions’ button and, once finished, restart normally.
If you’re still experiencing issues, you could try following these instructions on Apple’s own website, for performing an Archive Install. Or, you might want to try booting in Apple Hardware diagnostics mode.
Restart the Mac with the Installer Disc in the DVD / CD-ROM drive.
When you hear the start-up chime, hold down the ‘D’ key on the keyboard.
Your Mac will enter diagnostics mode and present a screen which enables you to run low level tests on your motherboard, RAM modules and other essential components.
You may find it easier to use a wired mouse, as opposed to a wireless or BlueTooth Apple Mighty Mouse at this stage.
OS X Leopard, on my 20” Aluminium Intel iMac, with 2GB of RAM, isn’t the fastest machine in the world—but it’s capable of being a damn sight faster than it had been running, for the past 6 weeks, after I went through a spate of trying out just about any and all freeware which iusethis.com could throw at me.
Widgets, System menu add-ons, haxies, Dock customisers—They’re all lots of fun, but sometimes you just have to admit you’ve added too much crap to your system, bite the bullet and do a clean reinstall.
As something of an Apple Mac veteran, this usually doesn’t phase me. New-to-Mac users, having recently switched from Windows, on the other hand, while they might not have to do this for several months into Mac ownership—if at all—might still find themselves somewhat worried by the prospect of losing data and / or damaging their machine.
The actual process of reinstalling OS X, however, contrasts greatly with a typical Windows reinstallation. But before you begin, there are a few things you need to do ahead of inserting the Installer Disc, to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, once your newly installed Operating System is ready to run. So I thought I’d share some tips with you on making this whole process as painless as possible.
For those who don’t already know, hulu.com is the legitimate catch-up service for US residents to watch repeats of the previous week’s network television shows, on NBC, CBS, ABC and so on. Unfortunately, for various legal reasons, it is currently not possible for Americans living outside of the US to view the site.
Using a how-to access BBC iPlayer from outside the UK guide, which I posted on my other blog, reader Matt shows us how we might access US TV content using similar methods.
I got hold of a beta test version of Microsoft’s up and coming second stab at getting Windows Vista working right and was (not at all) surprised to see it’s basically more of the same, with a light spattering of yet more theft from Mac OS X.
The text-free task-bar and start menu, now boast two new applications, Stickies.. I mean Sticky Notes and Grab.. ..I mean Snipping Tool. Apart from that, nothing to see here people. Move along.
Just a quick note to say I am aware of the fact that in the E-Mail digest and the RSS feed images aren’t showing correctly. This is to do with the software plug-in for Wordpress I am using to prevent hot-linking and not because the images are actually broken.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 is the latest and so-far greatest update to the ubiquitous image editor. Apart from great new features under the hood, like the ability to speed up many previously CPU intensive tasks, by handing them over to your graphics card, CS4 sees Photoshop enter the third dimension—by adding support for .3DS and many other 3D model formats—such as Google’s .KMZ, used in 3dwarehouse, for creating Google Earth buildings and a myriad of other objects.
Best of all, most .KMZ Google Earth files are free to download and free to edit, using SketchUp version 7 (Mac and PC)
In this guide we’re going to download this model of a Bugatti Veyron, open it in SketchUp, convert it to a file format Photoshop can read and take a look at some of CS4’s new features for editing and saving in 3D.
Everyone who ever wondered how all this stuff actually works, could watch this video and harvest a year’s worth of reading-up material. Brilliant stuff!
OS X Leopard, on my 20” Aluminium Intel iMac, with 2GB of RAM, isn’t the fastest machine in the world—but it’s capable of being a damn sight faster than it had been running, for the past 6 weeks, after I went through a spate of trying out just about any and all freeware which 
Adobe Photoshop CS4 is the latest and so-far greatest update to the ubiquitous image editor. Apart from great new features under the hood, like the ability to speed up many previously CPU intensive tasks, by handing them over to your graphics card, CS4 sees Photoshop enter the third dimension—by adding support for .3DS and many other 3D model formats—such as Google’s .KMZ, used in 