Though it’s not as good as having it in your hot little hands, you can now preorder the next version of MacOS X 10.5 (”Leopard”) from Amazon.com. Follow that link to see their page on it. Leopard is due out “in October” with a list price of $129.

Leopard comes in the regular flavor and, for the scrupulously honest of you out there, in a family pack that includes a license to use it on multiple machines (last time around it was five machines I believe but the description doesn’t say how many this time). The family pack is priced at $199.

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Today Apple launched “iTunes Plus” - iTunes Store music that’s not protected by DRM. About a month ago, Apple and EMI announced that they were going to do this, and today it’s finally arrived and we can now see what form it takes.

I think this is a particularly bold experiment by Apple and EMI. It may not seem that way to the average user, but this is EMI taking a chance on consumers not pirating the hell out of their music, and this is Apple taking a chance on selling music that will play on devices other than iPods. Both are risky. Of course there’s been a lot of unprotected music sold already, but this is the first time one of the major labels has been willing to try it. And they’re not just releasing a bunch of dusty old music that no one wants to listen to. Music by Coldplay, Gorillaz, Air, Goldfrapp, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and Frank Sinatra is available - staples of EMI’s catalog - so I have to conclude that they’re sincere and they’re really putting themselves out there.

Here’s how it works:
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Apple is now shipping their new, long-awaited Apple TV. Like many Apple products, they’re shipping individually via Fedex from China. Ours is supposed to arrive on Friday. With any luck I’ll write it up by early next week.

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DasBoot is a free Macintosh utility that turns your iPod or USB flash drive into a bootable drive for your Mac. It also helps copy diagnostic and repair utilities onto the iPod or flash drive.

I checked it out… you need a bootable CDROM and an iPod or a flash drive. I believe that you can only create bootable flash drives on Intel Macintoshes, but you should be able to make bootable iPods on Intel or PPC machines.

Why do you want a bootable iPod or flash drive? Disk repair utilities generally can’t repair the volume you boot from, so if your Mac gets into trouble you’ll need to boot from a different disk than you normally do in order to try to fix it. Even if it’s not a disk problem, have a second device you can boot from is security against installing that piece of software that vomits all over your boot disk and leaves you to pick out the corn from the beans.
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One thing you get used to when using a Mac is the weird little warts in its otherwise beautiful design. Like when Quicktime uses one key sequence to go into full-screen mode and the DVD player uses another one. Or when the space key allows you to click on the default button in some dialogs but not all.

One peculiarity of the Macintosh platform is that there’s no way built-into the system to route the audio input to the audio output. Windows has been able to do this ever since the first sound cards for PCs. It’s a pretty obvious thing to want to do; hook up an audio source to your computer, mix the audio with whatever your computer is generating and send the whole thing to your stereo which can then blast your head off with it. Mac users are denied this simple pleasure.

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I’m not a big fan of screensavers… these days if I’ve been idle long enough for a screensaver to kick in, then I want my monitor off. This one’s very pretty, though, and I’m running it now. It’s from Russell Warneboldt and is free. It requires MacOS X 10.4 or later to run. Instructions follow after the cut.
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Finally, there’s an open source bootloader for Intel Macintoshes. Now you can install three versions of Windows, five different Linuxes, a BSD port and still be able to choose between them at startup. It’s an open source project called “rEFIt” (Intel Mac BIOS is called EFI, so “refit” — “rEFIt”, get it?). If you’re just interested in how an Intel Mac boots and what you’d need to use other OS’s, the rEFIt project has a very informative page on myths and facts about booting Intel Macs.

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Here’s an easy way to keep the weather forecast up-to-date in iCal under MacOS X. I’m sure some version of this will work with Outlook under Windows; I just can’t give you the exact commands to use for it.

iCal allows you to subscribe to calendars - it will periodically check if the calendar has been updated and import any changes. You won’t be able to edit the calendar, but it will always show up-to-date information in your iCal. This is a great way to share calendars with other people or to subscribe to calendars that are published on the Internet. I subscribe to calendars which provide US holidays, phases of the moon, and new movies release information.

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Apple has dropped the prices on some Macintoshes, iPods and accessories today only, Friday November 24th. You can get a brand new MacBook or iMac for $101 off, an iPod nano for $21 off or a regular iPod for $31 off. They also have deals on car chargers, earphones, speakers, Office 2004 Standard Edition, .Mac, Parallels, the Airport Express base station and more.

Shipping should be free on most orders.

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I recently picked up one of the new model Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro’s, and decided to try the new glossy screen. I was hesitant; I was worried about glare and whether it might make it more difficult to read the screen in bright light.

To the contrary, the glossy screen is fantastic. I find the display more readable than ever. I do see reflections in it at times, but my focus on the things on the display just tunes them out. The only downside is that it seems to pick up fingerprints more easily.