Amazon is offering a nice discount on iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08 for Macintosh. This is the best price I’ve seen on them, and Amazon ships them for free.

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Wes Anderson, writer and director of “Bottle Rocket”, “Rushmore”, “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”, has made his own entire genre of quirky, dry films filled with eccentric characters. His latest film, “The Darjeeling Express”, looks to fit in perfectly, and is due out in limited release on the US on September 28th.

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At least, semi-officially. The store is now in “public beta”.

Click through here to check it out.

Salient points:

• Tracks are encoded as 256Kbps VBR MP3 files, without any DRM restricting your ability to use them
• Most songs are 89 or 99 cents, compared to $1.29 for iTunes Plus
• If you buy an album, you must download it using Amazon’s MP3 Installer. You can download individual songs with or without the installer
• Amazon’s MP3 Installer will automatically add the song to iTunes or Microsoft’s Windows Media Player
• Downloaded songs should be compatible with any iPod, Zune or other MP3 player or device
• You should be able to burn downloaded songs to CD if you want
• At this time, I believe that only EMI and Universal are offering MP3
• DRM-free is not a license to scatter them far and wide across the Internet. When you buy, you agree to terms and conditions governing the use of this music.
• Of course, you can’t get a refund on an MP3 after you download it
• Amazon gives you a free sample song - Energy, by The Apples In Stereo - in order to try out the downloader
• On my test download, Amazon’s MP3 Installer downloaded the file and installed it into iTunes without any interruption in what I was currently listening to
• It appears that you cannot re-download a song once you’ve downloaded it (you can with the free song - because it’s free)

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Riding on Acela from Penn Station in New York to Boston, I left iStumbler running on my MacBook Pro and observed the various wifi networks it saw.

About a third of them seemed to be using default SSIDs like “NETGEAR”, “linksys” and variations on “Belkin”, as well as default Apple Airport SSIDs.

About a third of them seemed to be open, requiring no WEP or WPA identification. I can’t say whether they would have had any other access protection.

There were some great names that made me smile, like:

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Shiny Things is now running on Dreamhost. It was running on a server shared with a couple of other projects, and in order to reduce the memory footprint on the server I decided to move it elsewhere. Dreamhost is well-regarded and offered a good environment and excellent price for hosting it, so I decided to take it there. Moving it required only about 10 minutes of work and downtime. If you tried to access it during the move, I apologize for its unavailability.

If you’re interested in Dreamhost hosting, you can use the promotion code BFR50 in order to get $50 off various hosting plans that they offer. That gets you a discount and me a kickback.
[tags]dreamhost, shiny things, server, move, promotion[/tags]

NBC and Amazon have made the pilot episodes for NBC’s new series “The Bionic Woman”, “Chuck”, “Life” and “Journeyman” available for free download. By free download, you can download them to a Windows PC and watch them on it or on TV via the TV out on your computer - or you can download them to your Series 2 Tivo (I don’t think they have Series 3 support yet). Links to the shows and an explanation of how to get them on your Tivo (it’s easy and it’s officially supported, no hackery involved) are after the cut.

NBC recently had a well-publicized kerfluffle with Apple over the iTunes Store, resulting in NBC deciding not to renew their contract to carry their TV shows on iTunes. Given that Apple can’t guarantee that those shows will be available for the whole season, they’ve decided not to offer any of NBC’s new fall programming (they wouldn’t be able to offer season subscriptions to shows).

There’s a lot of finger pointing. NBC says that Apple was inflexible in its pricing. Apple says that NBC wanted to raise the price on shows and wanted them to try to detect and prohibit pirated video and music from being loaded on iPods (which I can see no reasonable technical way to do other than requiring everything to be authenticate and DRM’ed, which is definitely well beyond “reasonable”).

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I’ve run into this in a few places and use it myself. It doesn’t do anything useful, but it is pretty.

There’s a hidden option on the Dock which will display the icons for hidden applications as translucent images instead of the normal opaque icons. It’s a very pretty effect and is slightly useful to let you quickly know why you don’t see your Safari window.

In order to set the dock to do this, you’ll need to open a terminal window (from Applications | Utilities) and type in the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true
killall Dock

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