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A while back, there was a technobabble article discussing the pros and cons of flash and silverlight. Times-they-are-a-changin’ and the battle ground between these technologies has completely changed. So here’s where we’re at today…

Let’s start of will a quick recap of these technologies. Basically all of this stems from the limitations html has previously suffered from. In order for webpages to have this level of interactivity and presentation, you’d need a plugin to get your browser to do it. So this is where flash is coming from. It’s meant to address the limitations of html.

Microsoft, as per usual, identifies a money-making technology and makes their own version. That’s silverlight. Like flash, it’s a plugin that lets your browser do video, animation, and higher interaction experience.

Now, HTML is a standard and the folks on W3C and other standards committees have identified that most web sites want this functionality standard and available. And I agree, you shouldn’t need to install plugins just to watch videos, see animations, etc.

To summarize the pros and cons in the previous technobabble article, flash is the big fish in the pond. It has full support in windows, mac, and linux - along with several other platforms - even the Wii. However, it’s proprietary and uses its own language (ActionScript) Silverlight, although less-supported, offers a more open solution. It’s XML-based and uses regular languages that most .NET web developers are familiar with. Also, you don’t have to build content in an expensive Flash studio environment.

What’s interesting about the current climate is that flash and silverlight are actually becoming obsolete. As more browsers support HTML5 (which, by the way, is robust enough to play Quake) Flash, in particular is not useless as it is being used in development outside of strictly webpage multimedia, one example was its ability to build mobile apps. Which brings us to…

Apple! There’s a strange history between Apple and Adobe (who purchased Flash from Macromedia a few years back) When Apple was in dire straits in the late 90s Adobe bailed on them and made Windows their primary development platform, as opposed to Macintosh which was known for it’s desktop publishing and graphics strong points. So rumor goes, Steve Jobs got pissed about this and now has this vendetta against Adobe. Apple has definitely grown big, especially in the cell phone space. For Apple to not support Flash and even go so far as to restrict development of apps via flash is a real low blow, if you think about it. But the official stance is simply that Flash is too closed, slugish, and proprietary - and the shift is towards HTML5.

In my humble opinion I do see HTML5 as an attractive future for a lot of web interactivity and presentation. Having said that Flash is far from dead, and is constantly evolving. With leaps forward like Adobe Air, it’s hard to just dismiss Flash as obsolete and irrelevant. There are still things HTML can’t do - all this geo-spacial stuff on mobile devices and ipads, as one example. If Flash is smart they will stay ahead of the curve.

So what’s next? Who knows! I’m sure HTML5 will be embraced, ESPECIALLY since IE9 will support it! Flash will probably still be used because quite honestly it’s easy, and so pervasive. Apple won’t support it in the iPhone OS, and hopefully Adobe doesn’t strike back with Photoshop and Creative Suite not being ported to the Mac. (Probably not because that’d hurt everyone) But it’s a real interesting game being played right now, so stay tuned because it’s far from over!

Some users complain that iTunes is somewhat limited to how music is managed, and to complicate it further iPods will seemingly only operate with computers they are set up to sync with. This technobabble article will go through some easy steps you can take to get music off your iPod without using iTunes.

Normally, people use iTunes to copy music on and off of their iPods. To prevent unauthorized music redistribution iTunes won’t work with someone else’s iPod on your computer. These restrictions are unfortunate - but this is the sacrifice Apple made for making deals with record labels to sell their music online. Regardless of why or what - if you legitimately have music (say, something you wrote) on your iPod - wouldn’t it be handy to be able to plug that iPod into you’re friend’s computer and share your work?

Navigate your iPod

The iPod works like a USB hard drive. iTunes even has a setting to enable disk use. So when you plug your iPod into your computer you should see it (Windows users will see a drive in My Computer, and Mac users will see the icon on the desktop)

View hidden files

The folders that actually store your music are hidden on the iPod. So first, make sure you are seeing hidden and protected files. Window users can check out the control panel -> “folder options” for this. For mac users, hop into terminal and try this:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Yes, Apple is TRYING to make it hard to get at it Oh, and if you want to hide hidden stuff again try:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

Access your music

Now that you can see hidden stuff, you should see a folder called iPod_Control in your iPod. Inside this folder is another folder called “Music” which contains all the songs on your iPod. Unfortunately, iTunes renames the files with short codes - but the real names of the songs are retained in the MP3 tags. If you copy these files to your computer there are various organizational utilities on the web that will help rename them back, based off the ID3 tags. Hop on google and look for mp3 organization or renaming utilities.

Avoid iTunes alltogether

There are even utilities out there that will allow you to copy files to and from iPods. This is a common thing for Linux users as there is no iTunes in linux. Some example programs: Amarock, Banshee (those are Linux only) also SongBird which is cross-platform. http://getsongbird.com/

Check out this gallery of old, vintage, classic, and weird gadgets. All stuff I don’t have room for but can’t bring myself to get rid of. (Apple ][, Mac Pluses, Tandys, Commodore 64s and more)

http://tinyurl.com/y9h8yen

This isn’t an article about creating a “Hackintosh” - we’ll save that for later. This was accomplished using just an emulator and an unaltered Mac OS X CD. (This was from the powerpc days!)

Software required: Pear PC, Mac OS X

here’s a quick how-to for installation. It’s kind of an annoying job, but not impossible. Here’s the way it works…

2 gig’s of memory (the intel mac mini takes PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM)

using a putty knife or anything really flat, run along the edge of the case, pressing in the clips and pushing the case and interior apart

pressing the two black plastic clips together, you can slide of the springy airport unit pictured here. i left it attached, the swing it out of the way

i’m not sure what it’s for - but this tiny wire in the front needs to come out. not many “how to” guides tell you about this, but it will need to be taken out

this part is kinda tricky. there’s a huge black plastic housing for the cd rom and hard drive - that whole thing needs to come out. it’s held to the bottom of the computer with 4 tiny scews at each corner. there’s on larger one, so be sure you watch where they come from. if possible, keep the screws in the holes so reassembly will go smoother. otherwise it’s a pain to lay the tiny screws into the hard-to-access holes.

after you’ve unscrewed the four screws you can lift the black housing off. this is where you’d be able to replace the hard drive or optical drive if that was what you were doing. but we’re interested in ram. below is a view of the ram on the board. it is essentially laptop memory. bank 0 is the lower bank 1 is the top. just pry out the metal clips and swing the memory up and out 45 degrees

you’ll notice the black housing with the drives actually plugs into the board almost like a super nes cartridge. use caution with this (well with all of it) get everything back into place, and plug the “mysterious tiny wire” back in - and be SURE to test it out. on my installation i must have not pressed the memory into the board securley because it only recognized 1gig of memory. the “system profiler” will show you the contents of each memory bank so you can assure that they are both functioning. do this before you completely reassemble the computer so you don’t have to do it twice like me!

screw the black housing back in, put the airport unit back on it’s spingy and carefully click the case back onto the computer. and that’s about it!

enjoy the new ram! here’s a few more tips:

* i think mac os x “optimizes” itself for the system it’s installed to. a lower memory system may be optimzed to use more virtual memory rather than ram which now maybe you’d want your system using your memory more for a little extra speed, and relying less on disk virtual memory. in linux i believe this is called “swapiness” i don’t know any way to do this in os x rather than run an installer that “optimizes system performance” but in reality this would be a good opertunity to reinstall a fresh copy of OS X or upgrade to the latest and greatest.

* back up just in case!

* keep the memory in the mac mini paired. in other words, you’ll get more performance by using a 1gig/1gig combo than a 1gig/512mb combo or something. the memory i HAD in there was two 256mb’s paired. now it has two 1gb paired for a total of 2gigs running optimally. when buying memory keep this in mind. the worst you can do is go buy just ONE gb because you’d have to sacrfice 256mb and live with a system that’s running 1.2 gb that is NOT optimized. i’d settle for two 512mb before that! but if you’re spending the money, just max out the machine with 2gb. supposedly that’s the most it’ll ever run.

good luck / be careful / don’t sue me if you break your system