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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I recently hit level 40 with my Blood Elf character in World of Warcraft, and let me tell you, now that I have a mount, it is such a pleasure riding around the World of Warcraft on a giant purple chicken and having 14 year old Alliance players make clucking noises at you!

Until now, the only character I’d had reach level 40 was my Paladin. As a Paladin, I had my mount given to me as the reward for a quest, so I’d never gone the normal route and purchased and trained for a mount and I realized I didn’t know what I needed to do. Being a Blood Elf doubled that confusion as most of the mount guides you’ll find by Googling don’t cover the Burning Crusade expansion pack.
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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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My copy of The Burning Crusade showed up today, thanks to Amazon. The expansion went live last night at midnight, with some people in more… urban… areas being able to find their local game stores open at midnight dispensing Burning Crusade goodness. When I quit World of Warcraft just shy of 1AM, a grand total of 12 people on the Gilneas server had made it through to Hellfire Peninsula, the new continent.

The normal package includes four CDROM’s, a manual, two guest keys and the user’s key printed on the first CDROM sleeve.

Beyond the Dark Portal	Fel Soldiers marching to the Dark Portal
View of the Dark Portal from the other side

Some facts about it:
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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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Mac users with Tivos have long been left in the cold when it comes to downloading video from their Tivo to their Mac. Series 2 Tivo devices let you hook them up to your local network with a USB ethernet or wireless adapter. Once hooked up, they can make their daily calls to Tivo HQ over the Internet instead of using a phone line. You can use Tivo Desktop to share music, photos or even videos from your computer to your Tivo. But only Windows users have been enabled to download video in the other, much-treasured direction, from their Tivo to their computer, so that they can hoard video files like digital packrats.

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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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Do you have a comics lover in your life who you’d like to get a holiday gift for, but haven’t got a clue what to get them? Read on, true believer.
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