Apple is making it harder and harder to get your hands on their precious movie files, but it's possible. You just have to know a few tricks.

So the iPad is pretty spiffy but I can see a couple potential downsides. One main difference between the iPad and an iPhone is that you'll tend to use an iPad for longer sessions, so lots of things that you could overlook when using an iPhone for a few minutes at a time will become larger issues when using an iPad for hours at a time. Multitasking, for one. I can see browsing on this thing for a while, but eventually I'd want to listen to some streaming music (I know you can load your own music, but sometimes I want to hear music I don't own) or have my instant messenger running. On a related note, I think it will be absolutely awesome for reading long things, like books and magazines, but not so good for long browsing sessions. I tend to browse by starting with Slashdot or TUAW or Daring Fireball, reading down the list, and opening many tabs in the background to read later. I don't think you can really do that on an iPad.

I had to use Time Machine to recover my 10.6 Mac. Two little issues:

1) Quick Look didn't work. It would open up the big grey rectangle but not show anything--pictures, movies, PDFs, Excel files, nothing worked. I was at 10.6.1 and 10.6.2 was out but installing that update (and all the rest available at the time) through Software Update didn't fix it. A tip here http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10398867-263.html suggested downloading and installing the combo update (also for 10.6.2) and that cleared it up. ("Combo Update" is Apple's term for "everything since the last .0", so the 10.5.8 combo update can be run on any system, 10.5.0-10.5.7, and it'll work.)

2) The system folder "/private" was visible in the Finder at the root level of my hard drive. Not a big deal, but since I never need to go there there's no need to see it all the time. Running "sudo chflags hidden /private", as suggested here http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=648139 did the trick.

When you plug in your iPhone and click 'backup' in iTunes, here's what happens.

Apple has made some nice updates to the Camera app in iPhone OS 3.0. Specifically, they've fixed two things that I really wanted them to fix.

Just a few notes about taking apart an Intel Mac mini.

• Basic info is at ttp://www.tuaw.com/2009/05/10/installing-windows-7-rc1-on-your-mac-for-free/
• You can use a Mac to download, but you must use Firefox (not Safari) to get it. It will use Firefox as a download manager.
• It downloads pretty quickly. I got it in less than an hour. Depends on your Internet conection, of course, but at least MS has this hosted on a good server.
• Along the way, you'll be given a key (serial number.) Print/save this number right away--the next time you click 'submit' or 'continue' or whatever it will take you to another page.
• Get the 32-bit version
• Good news--it's Windows 7 Ultimate!
• It's a "Release Candidate Customer Preview" so it should be pretty close to what gets released in terms of performance, stability, and features.
• Space needed: it's a 2.36 GB download, 4.96 GB installed into a VirtualBox disk image.
• Very first thing: install the guest additions.
• One down side: it may take some time to start up. On my 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro (which, to be fair, has been on for 44 days and has many apps and a ton of Safari windows open) it can easily take over 5 minutes. Once it's up and running, it's fine, but evidently it takes some time to read and boot from a 5 GB compressed disk image. :-)

Random thoughts...

(Mostly negative, good things are in bold.)

Number one: tabs across the top? Don't like'em. The rationale you hear is "but that makes the URL box part of the page, which makes sense." But then it also makes the bookmarks bar a part of the page, which it isn't... so it's B.S. Why don't I like it? 1) I have no problem with the concept of the URL box. I've been on the WWW since 1995. I don't need any hints about what this box does. And for me, it makes perfect sense to see the tab directly connected to the page's content. 2) It looks cluttered. And when I want to grab the title bar to move a window, I now have to be careful where I grab it lest something undesirable happen. [Later] The more I use it, the more I dislike it. With a few cascaded windows open, and multiple tabs in each, it really looks messy.

Over the years I've amassed a collection of old software and machines. This is just my list of what runs well where and why, and occasional other notes about apps.