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Apple iTMS TV show quality review

This is an old review I wrote and never posted, but it’s still relevant today. My conclusion is up to date for 2011.

Having just purchased and watched seasons 1 and 2 of The Tudors from iTunes (I missed them on Showtime), I was searching the net for other peoples thoughts on the quality of these TV shows. One review I came across was from AllForces.com, concering iTunes quality vs Bit Torrent. Since their blog post in 2005, Apple seems to have upped the standard of their TV show offerings.

I’m be the first to admit that I’m an Apple fan, with my Mac laptop the primary downloader of these TV Shows, syncing to my iPhone and also viewing the shows via front row on my Mac Mini. It’s the viewing of these on the Mac Mini I will review.

2011-09-03
https://techdebug.com/blog/2011/09/03/apple-itms-tv-show-quality-review/ Tech Debug

Airport Extreme

What a difference a new router makes. I’ve been using the old Apple Airport extreme, 2nd generation, for about 8 years now. It’s been rock solid, and provided wireless access almost 24×7 for the whole 8 years. Lately, things have been getting flakey. Trying to control my Mac Mini Boxee on the TV was laggy – and remoting to other desktops flaky. So today, I purchased an upgrade. I was looking at the Cisco/Linksys offerings as I use a few at work, but when using a NAS device I would have had to reformat my existing HFS+ drives.
2010-11-11
https://techdebug.com/blog/2010/11/12/airport-extreme/ Tech Debug

MacBook vs. MacBookPro

Does CPU speed matter for gaming on a Mac Laptop? The difference between, for example, 2.4 Ghz and 2.6 Ghz will be negligible when running the games. What will contribute to the smoothness and quality of the games the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and to an extent bus speed, CPU cache and RAM. When it comes to RAM, the more the merrier – to avoid the Hard Drive being used to swap applications when your memory is full.
2010-09-19
https://techdebug.com/blog/2010/09/19/macbook-vs-macbookpro/ Tech Debug

Bootcamp 3.0 fixes WinXP BSOD for Multitouch Trackpad

Apple released Bootcamp 2.1 with OS 10.5, which allows you to dual boot to Windows XP/Vista on your Mac. Subsequenet to that release, there was a driver update for the Multitouch trackpad which was suppose to improve souble tapping, etc. However it caused a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) the moment you double tapped, courtesy of applemtp.sys. Many people sent suggestions to Apple to fix this, but it seemed to be falling on deaf ears.
2009-09-23
https://techdebug.com/blog/2009/09/23/bootcamp-3-0-fixes-winxp-bsod-for-multitouch-trackpad/ Tech Debug

Snow Leopard: WWAN using Merlin XU870 ExpressCard

This is the same issue I’ve posted on a couple of forums. It’s seemed detailed enough to be a blog post, so here it is. Under 10.5.8 (Leopard) I was successfully using my Merlin XU870 ExpressCard (supplied by ISP) with Three Broadband (3) in Australia. I did not use the 3 drivers, but used the Leopard WWAN built-in to connect. There was never an issue as Leopard detected the card as a “Novatel Wireless HSDPA Modem”, and I configured the Network Advanced settings for 3 postpaid services as:
2009-09-02
https://techdebug.com/blog/2009/09/02/snow-leopard-wwan-using-merlin-xu870-expresscard/ Tech Debug

iPhone 3GS announced

The new iPhone 3GS was announced yesterday at WWDC. The main changes are in the hardware. The differences are now: 32GB Option 3 Megapixel camera with autofocus Video Recording capabilities with upload to Youtube function Voice Control Compass The other new features coming to the iPhone such as: Cut, Copy & Paste (about time!) MMS and contact send/receive via SMS Bluetooth transfer and A2DP support Data tethering to your laptop (USB or Bluetooth) Spotlight Search Landscape keyboard across all apps Voice Memos will be available on the current iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2G and included oin the new 3GS.
2009-06-10
https://techdebug.com/blog/2009/06/10/iphone-3gs-announced/ Tech Debug

Leopard, Apache2 and MySQL

Downloading MySQL and installing on Leopard is a breeze with the native package. I migrated my database (dump/restore) and recreated my wordpress user, but still kept getting this error: Error establishing a database connection The user could log into the database from the console as shown: ` lantrix@lexx:~ $ mysql -u wordpress -p Enter password: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 19 Server version: 5.
2009-05-23
https://techdebug.com/blog/2009/05/23/leopard-apache2-and-mysql/ Tech Debug

Compiling readline on an OSX 10.5 intel x86_64

I’m stuck with a whole bunch of problems getting code to compile and co-operate nicely on my new MacBookPro. I’m compiling my own PHP, but it defaults to compiling for the i386 (32bit) architecure, which then fails when Apache2 running in 64bit mode tries to use the 32bit DSO for PHP5. Compiling PHP5 as 64bit then fails linking against the i386 pgsql lib, and so on. I really need everything using the x86_64 architecture. How does this all relate to readline under Leopard?

2009-01-02
https://techdebug.com/blog/2009/01/03/compiling-readline-on-an-osx-105-intel-x86_64/ Tech Debug