One of the things I like about the newer
nanos,
minis and the
2nd gen iPod
shuffle is the hardiness and durability of the anodized
aluminum casing. My
video iPod is scratched all to hell, and is in nee
d of serious plastic (acrylic) surgery; either that, or a good rub-down with so
me expensive restoring cream. Now I take care in bringing it with me so I don't
make the condition worse.
On the other hand, my
shuffle goes with me everywhere. Since I am not
as afraid of it getting scratched up like a vinyl record at the beach, it gets
a good workout, jangling along with the junk in my pocket, swinging around on a
lanyard or just bopping around with the owner the whole day just clipped to hi
s shirt front. All in all it's a tough little bugger; I've heard of stories fro
m
shuffle-owning friends where the pods inadvertently go through the l
aundry and come working like new, and sparkling clean to boot.
Sad to say, it's apparently not that durable, cosmetically speaking - while the
case seems tough as nails, after a few months of heavy use, it's the label on
the back of the clip with the Apple logo that starts to look bedraggled first.
Since it's just painted or layered on, this isn't surprising. It's bound to get
scratched off eventually, but it's a bit depressing to see when it starts happ
ening:
It doesn't look too horrible in the picture - the lighting washed out the scrat
ches a bit too much - in real life the scratches look a lot worse, believe me.
I bought a set of rubber casings for it soon after I got the shuffle, but while
it covers the main body of the little iPod, it leaves the whole clip bare and
wide open to nasty shirt buttons, coins and keys in pockets and to the element
s in general.
Apple, take note.
Just a little reminder to take care of your 2G iPod
shuffle a little b
etter if you have one or get one in the near future. It's not
that ind
estructible.
The usually helpful people at SubRosaSoft are known for making really nice software that saves a
nd salvages files and other lost data. They even make device-specific file reco
very utilities for music and photos like iPods and digital cameras. You want yo
ur ass saved, go to SubRosaSoft.
But I think they went a bit too far with their latest product - your ass is gra
ss if the wrong people get a hold of this nice, expensive little trinket.
It's called MacLockPick, and it's exactly what it implies - a lock pick for your Mac. SubRosaSoft def
ines it as "a valuable tool for law enforcement professionals to perform live f
orensics on Mac OS X systems". The valuable data in the Apple keychain and in o
ther password and critical data locations are apparently open for looting and r
ifling if you had the right tool and a running Mac for a target, even a sleepin
g one. By default, the keychain is left open by the OS and leaves the informati
on it's supposed to secure free for the taking. The data include passwords, log
ins, buddy lists, email details, serial numbers, bookmarks, cookies, etc.
The MacLockPick is a USB flash drive that you insert into a running Mac. Once j
acked in the software runs and does the dirty deed quick. It does not write any
thing to the Mac, and leaves no trace it was ever there; it resets everything b
ack to the state it was in before the pick was used. It just saves the data it
gets into the drive, and disappears into the night (or a pants pocket) like the
thief that it is. Included readers can access the purloined database on Window
s, Linux or Mac OS X. It's something James Bond might have on his Aston Martin'
s keychain.
Scary thing, if you ask me. Cool, yes, but this goes a bit overboard, don't you
think? SubRosaSoft restricts sales of the pick to law enforcement people only.
(Sure. Like the way guns are supposed to be?) Perhaps the biggest restriction
for the MacLockPick is the price: US$500 for the stick. But hey, all a pirate
needs is one, and pretty soon it's all over the damned place.
I predict the next biggest selling product will be physical locks for your USB
ports. All I know is, no one's coming near my Mac with a flash drive from now o
n.
Was reading an opinion column on MacNewsWor
ld over my oatmeal this morning and was struck at how my fanboy-ism te
nds to tint my Apple glasses too rosy sometimes.
I wrote a 
Until yesterday, when they b
ribed me with the Thinkpad.
It's not a big chunky beige box with a cheap monitor and plasticky mouse and ke
yboard. It's sleek, jet-black and fancy with three magic letters on it that any
one, even Mac fanboys, would respect: IBM. And it's a notebook that'll let me w
ork anywhere and won't take up valuable real estate in my tiny office. Hmmm.
It's a nice machine, despite what my gut instincts scream out. The Thin
kPad T43 has been an Editor's Choice of PC Ma
gazine (the Philippine Edition of which I used to edit), and is consid
ered one of the emerging classic business machines with surprising longevity. T
rim, compact, stuffed to the gills with frills. From a little lamp at the top o
f the screen to light the keyboard in dark work areas to a biometric fingerprin
t reader on the deck. From dedicated keys for flipping between webpages, a rock
er switch for scrolling up and down, a hard-wired blue key for model-specific s
upport called "Access IBM", that red little eraser-nubbin in the middle of the
keyboard, to great battery life - it's even got a surprising snappiness to it.
But still.
Anyways I'm taking the plunge and using the ThinkPad as my work machine startin
g today, and give my Albook a well-deserved break. I will also take this opport
unity to do the big thing: live with the enemy, and see how it really is. We Ma
c heads scoff and mock (it's fun, right?), but we do it from a safe and sanitar
y distance. In this age of detente and convergence in the OS world, I'
ll see for myself how it really is, and I'll chronicle the experience slowly, i
n bits and pieces, over the coming months in Mac-A-Doodle.
I got the ThinkPad up and running tonight, downloading shareware and configurin
g the thing, tweaking the settings, getting the wifi to run, putting up firewal
ls and running anti-virus software and ad-and-spyware blockers, and rebooting c
ountless times and getting confused and mixed up - but still becoming pleasantl
y surprised a couple of times despite myself. I'd forgotten how fun this mess c
ould be. Already I have a bunch of stuff I'm itching to say, but we'll save it
for the next entry in this series, which I'll call The Big Experiment.
All I can say now is, I composed this post entirely on the newly set-up ThinkPa
d, and it ain't so bad.
But we'll see, won't we?
Contrary to concerns that, for the iPhone, Apple wil
l also start collecting small payments for software upgrades, feature enabling
and add-ons that used to come free (like the two bucks they charged to enable t
he 802.11n feature in shipped Macs), it ain't true. You can re
st easy.
All later software upgrades and feature enabling for the forthcoming iPhone wil
l be free of charge. More importantly, "new software features and entirely
new applications" will likewise be free. As if we needed another reason to
buy one when it comes out. Early adopters rejoice!
Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer announced this for the iP
hone (and the Apple TV) during the quarterly conference call d
one yesterday. "We hope the result will be to surprise and delight our iPhone c
ustomers," he said. Which is about as far as he went; in true Apple fashion, no
word on what these free features and applications will actually be.
Great. So release it already, durnit!
Steve Jobs
and Jonathan Ive are in the top ten of the shortlist for 
Iâm just amazed at the inherent paradox and Escher-loop oddness of this particu
lar torrent I found this morning on 
If you're sick of looking at your iChat window day-in and day-
out, give it an overhaul and make it look more like iTunes wit
h this free app called iChat Borderless. It replaces four
.nib files in Resources in the iChat folder. Currently works with
English OS X installs only. Doesn't really do much, but it's easy on the eyes.
Grab it 
Apparently, those who have extra disposable income can now buy gold iPo
ds. The similarity to an actual gold ingot is incredible.
Now I've seen everything.
Available from 
It's a little plastic thing that you set into the receptacle of a regular dock-
enabled accessory, then you just slot in the shuffle onto it. Simple and ingeni
ous, really. And it features a little switch that shifts you from audio pla
yback to charge/sync depending on your need. Now the wide, wonder
ful world of iPod accessories is open to shuffle users.
Imagine an 
A security researcher sent instructions to a security engineer on a zero-day vu
lnerability in Safari and together worked for 9 hours on an ex
ploit to hack into a Macbook at a hack-a-Mac contest the engin
eer had joined.
Dino Dai Zovi, a security researcher who has found flaws in Ma
c software in the past, fed info to Shane Macaulay, a security
engineer who had joined the two-day "PWN To Own" Mac-hacking
contest at the CanSecWest Security Conference at Vancouver yes
terday, to win one of two MacBooks that were being given to the first people wh
o can hack into them. The Macs were current and up-to-date with all security pa
tches, but had no special security software on them outside of what came with <
strong>OS X.
On April 20, the second day of the contest, the rules were relaxed after no one
was able to do it the day before, and Macaulay was able to hack into one of th
e Macbooks using Dai Zovi's help. The hack was accomplished by having a CanSecW
est organizer surf to a malicious website using Safari, upon which they used th
e zero-day security hole in the browser, a tactic familiar to Windows hackers. Macaulay is now the proud owner of the Macbook he hacked.
This comes (coincidentally?) on the heels of 
True. At lease the case was.
The Apple I, circa 1976, was made and designed by Stev
e Wozniak in Palo Alto, California. Only 200 were made, and sold for U
S$600 fully assembled as a circuit board, but to get it to work you needed to p
urchase a case, power supply, keyboard and display. Its CPU was a MOS 6502 runn
ing at 1kHz. It came standard with 4kb memory. It was discontinued a year later
when the Apple ][ came out.
Today, maybe 30 to 50 units still exist. At an auction in 1999, one sold for US
$50,000.
Humble beginnings, and the start of something good.
In related news, Ap
ple at the same time also issued an update to Aperture, the ph
oto post-production tool that some folk say Apple has abandoned. Apparently not
. Aperture 1.5.3 improves performance and reliability, and fixes some
niggles. This one is a bigger suck-down: 129.5 megs. Available via Softwar
e Update or 
I think it's an indic
ation of the level of heat being generated by Apple's forthcom
ing iPhone that accessories are coming out this early even if
the product is still essentially vaporware. Engadget and 
Apple came out last week with a 
This is a blog for discussing Macs and all things Appl
e. It is a site partial to the hardware and software created by Apple, and all
things and products related to it. It does not claim to be anything else, objec
tive or otherwise.
This blog is not related in any way, shape or form to Apple, Inc. All things me
ntioned and discussed here are solely the opinions of the blogger, and he is no
t responsible for other opinions and ideas expressed by guest bloggers and comm
enters on this site.
My love affair with Macs began with a dalliance in the early 80s with an 
Later I'd get a Z
80 card and a 64k memory expansion card so I could ru
n CP/M, which is a command-line operating system that wasn't m
ade by Apple (strictly speaking, I wasn't using Apple software, just the hardwa
re - later I'd live and breathe Appleworks, but in the early d
ays it was Wordstar and dBase and Vis
iCalc). CP/M was the ancestor of MS-DOS, and CP/M its
elf grew up to become DR-DOS, if I'm not mistaken. I'd later g
raduate into a Apple //e, and then an Apple //e-Enhanc
ed, (which was silly when you come to think about it - the e
in //e stood for "enhanced" already) - and a color composite monitor a
nd more colorful games like Centipede and Karateka, and then,
finally, a Macintosh.
My //e still lives and breathes, by the way, a 25-year-old gee
zer. I love that thing.
Seemed appropriate to talk about my roots, at this juncture. Great to put thing
s in perspective; there are so many proud, chest-thumping newbie Mac fanboys wh
ose earliest memories start with the Aluminum Powerbooks. Man,
you don't even know the half of it, you young whippersnappers. *grumble* <
/em>Let's just say, if you've never wrestled with system extensions to get your
Mac running, be careful in flaunting your Mac pedigree.
More reminiscing as my memory comes slowly crawling back.
Hi! If you just s
tumbled upon this nth Mac blog by a fanboy, welcome.
I'm still fixing it up, but come on in and feel at home. You can watch me mix t
he cement, nail the frames, brick up the walls, paint, decorate. It'll be a mes
s for a while, but you can hang out, by all means. Kick back, smoke 'em if you
got 'em. You can just watch, or help out. Or kibitz, snipe or contribute. Whate
ver. I don't mind in the slightest. Would love the company, if you must know.
Been wanting to do this for a while, and I had some free time between articles
just now. I used to write up a storm about Macs in my user group's forum, and i
n a couple of other sites and group blogs - but this time it's just me, warts a
nd all. I'll be doing most of the Mac doodling here from now on. It'll be opini
onated, of course. Whaddaya expect? But it'll be fun, shooting the breeze about
the Macs and other Apples. Sketching and noodling and doodling and canoodling.
Sometimes I'll be serious, but not that often.
Anyways, my name is Adel, and I'd like to welcome you to Mac-A-Doodle. Come by often, ok?
Mac Doodler 
