Apple, the Mac and Blu-Ray

Now that HD-DVD has officially lost the HD format battle, and Blu-Ray has emerged the victor, many Mac sites are speculating that Apple will soon implement Blu-Ray playback support into its system and start selling Blu-Ray drives in its computers.

I’m not sure Apple will implement Blu-ray playback into OS X any time soon.

One thing most people don’t know is the requirements to get the license to playback HD stuff on computers. The rules require that the playback device makes sure that the chain from the computer’s DVD drive, to the RAM, to buffers, to the graphics card, to the cable, to the display are all encrypted. That is all in order to close the ‘Analogue Hole’.

Did you know that Vista checks for chain encryption integrity for every frame when it’s playing HD contents? That’s 30 times every second (talk about paranoia). Try to buy a Vista system that can play HD stuff and see what onerous requirements you’ll find. You’ll have to buy specific graphics cards, specific monitors etc…

For Apple to implement Blu-Ray playback it has to do a lot of work to be compliant; and the requirements would put quite a burden on the system. I believe that’s the reason that currently, with iTunes rental service one can get HD rentals on the AppleTV only and not on one’s Mac. The AppleTV is a closed unit with an HDMI connection, meeting the stringent requirements for HD playback. Many people don’t expect this, but if you connect the AppleTV to your HD TV using the component video connectors instead of HDMI, the AppleTV won’t display rented HD contents in HD, you’ll get an SD version of the rented movie.

I’m not sure I want Apple to implement that kind of crap into the system that I use every day, in order to do something that I couldn’t care less about.

I mean really, does it make any difference if the stuff is true HD on a computer screen considering that the largest one currently is is 30″?

I would guess that Apple would implement Blu-Ray as a storage device on the Mac in order to take advantage of the huge capacity that it provides, and would leave HD playback to downloads and the AppleTV.

My printer died R.I.P.

After a long and hard service for 14 years, my LaserWriter Select 360 died today

They sure made them durable in those days.

I bought the printer in 1994 for $2300 Canadian and it’s been working every day ever since (about 5 days a week). Daily print run of about 15 pages minimum. That’s 50,000 pages over its lifetime at minimum. It had 11 toner cartridge changes.

So, any printer recommendations? It has to be laser and it has to be networked to a bunch of Macs, all running Leopard.

Changing the system’s default settings for html files (safe)

With Leopard 10.5.1, Apple’s developers changed the default status of html files downloaded from the internet from ’safe’ to ‘Unsafe’.

While this may make sense from a security standpoint, for somebody like me that processes hundreds of html files downloaded every day, it’s a big annoyance.

I filed a bug with Apple, asking for a workaround. I was hoping that they would implement a preference somehow to enable me to either override the default settings or allow me to specify trusted servers.

Tonight, three months later, I received an answer and the workaround that I was looking for.

I turned out that you could have a user specific file to override the system’s default settings. The file is not there normally, so you would need to create it. It is:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist

The contents of the file need to be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>LSRiskCategorySafe</key>
<dict>
	<key>LSRiskCategoryContentTypes</key>
<array>
	<string>public.html</string>
</array>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Hopefully that helps somebody else with this type of problem.

If you need to change the settings of other file types, here are the system-declared file types:

System-Declared Uniform Type Identifiers

For each type you add another <string></string> item to the above array.

For example, for jpeg2000 files you add:

	<string>public.jpeg-2000</string>

Right below the other <string> line.

For more info on how this works and other variations, you can go to this page:

Modifying Safari Safe Files

Has Apple met its match in Rogers?

It’s now February 4th, 2008 and the iPhone has been out in the US for more than seven months already.

Here in Canada, there is no mention of it yet. Not even rumours that it could be coming any time soon. I believe it will be a very long time before Canadians could buy an iPhone legitimately and use it in Canada.

This is due to the nature of the Rogers company in Canada.

For those outside of Canada, Rogers is one of the telecom giants in this country. It is a cable and cellular provider and it is the only cellular provider in Canada using the GSM system. So that makes it the only company that can have the iPhone on its network.

And for those fortunate enough to never have had to deal with Rogers, Rogers is one of the worst companies here in this country. When they were my cable providers, they had the worst service, worst customer service and they jacked up their prices regularly. It’s hard to believe, but when I was with them, they jacked up the price of the good channels package by $1 every four months. The package was basically any channel other than the local ones and it started at $8.95. Four years later the price for the package had reached $21.

I had vowed to never deal with them and I changed from their cable service to Bell’s satellite service, which while isn’t the greatest, is still better than Rogers. However, Rogers went and bought my cellular provider Fido, the only other cellular provider here with GSM. So now, I’m back with Rogers involuntarily. Bell’s cellular service sucks, so it’s not even a choice.

So now with Rogers the only cellular provider able to carry the iPhone, the chances of the iPhone coming to Canada, on any reasonable terms, are almost slim to none. Rogers doesn’t have any incentive to give Apple any good deal and doesn’t have any incentive to give its own customers a reasonable deal on its data plans.

Why would it want to? Nobody else can have the iPhone currently and Apple can’t offer the iPhone advantage to anybody else in the country at this time. So Rogers can take their sweet time to get the deal that serves them best.

However, if Rogers stay stubborn, they may lose big time.

I heard whispers that Telus (the third cellular provider in the country) is in the early stages of switching from CDMA to GSM; mostly to get the iPhone.

Let’s hope that this rumour is true and that it happens fast enough to get the second generation iPhone. It would be sweet. It would allow me to get an iPhone (without having to buy one and crack it) and move away from Rogers at the same time.

iPod Touch fails to connect to Airport Extreme 802.11n

Over the holidays, I received an iPod Touch as a gift, and let me tell you, that little sucker is extremely useful as an internet device. Keeping tabs on my sites where I could find Wifi is great.

However, a couple of days ago, it stopped being able to access the internet through my home wireless network. My wireless network is created by an Apple Airport Extreme

First I thought that the Touch had a problem. I reset it few times to no avail. And then I discovered that I could connect to an open Wifi point in the neighbourhood; which made things really frustrating. The Airport Extreme had been, up to that point, the best Wifi system I’ve tested.

A couple of days worth of search on Google netted no solution whatsoever.

Out of desperation, I started messing with the Airport’s settings. Lo and behold, changing the Wifi channel from automatic to ‘Channel 9′ fixed the problem.

Update: As it turned out, the airport needed restarting the hard way. After multiple instance of losing contact with the Touch, I unplugged it for 5 minutes and after plugging it back in, I haven’t experienced any problems with the Touch going on the net.