Last fall Apple released their new Aperture photo processing software to a lukewarm response. Generally people felt it was overpriced for what it did, and that it suffered from being a 1.0 release.

They’ve just released Aperture 1.1, made it a Universal binary so that it will run on Intel Macintoshes at full speed, and provided an (accidental) way for you to get a huge discount on it, at least until supplies of cheap copies of Aperture 1.0 disappear. 1.1 is supposed to be a free update to 1.0, available via Software Update.

Here’s how to do it:
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If you’ve ever (cough cough) just happened to accidentally download a TV show or movie via Bit Torrent or some other mechanism you may have run across some video that Quicktime gave up the ghost on, saying it lacked the proper codec.

DivX is a highly compressed video format also known as MPEG4. For some reason, Quicktime doesn’t include DivX support… I’m sure someone knows why. You can buy a DivX Codec for Quicktime or you can use the free one from DivX Labs…the catch being that it’s only supported Power PC Macintoshes thus far. And unfortunately, Rosetta provides PPC emulation for entire applications, not for pieces of them…so Rosetta can’t make a Power PC application plugin work with an Intel application.

Fortunately, DivX Labs has recently released an updated, Universal Binary, version of their free DivX codec for Quicktime.

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As part of getting some old PC’s ready for eBay, I wanted to run some thorough diagnostics on them. In particular, I wanted to test disks and memory.

Most hard drive manufacturers provide diagnostics specific to their drives on their web sites, but memory is another matter.
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I’ve been cleaning up some old computers for sale on ebay, and one of the problems I’ve been running into is software that’s bound to a particular machine, like Windows or Office, whose CD Key I no longer have. I’d like to do clean reinstalls on these machines, and I need the CD Keys in order to do that.

I keep a file of serial numbers, but some of my notes are… cryptic. I might have known what “my office computer” was three years ago but I don’t now. If I ever need to do this kind of thing again, I’ll use computer serial numbers instead of cryptic notations.

I found a utility that will help.
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