waider

The smell has been variously described as "new car smell", "musty", "rotting carpet" and even cannabis.
"My entire room smells bad and I have had to resort to a few air fresheners just to be able to work on it," one report read. (link; my emphasis)

"Otherwise my mom'd, like, totally freak. She's such a square, but I know she was a flower child in the sixties," continued Chad, before returning to his marathon Second Life session.

I've finally given in and run up Firefox on the Mac.

Why?

Because I can no longer access either my online banking or my motor tax renewal forms with Safari. Who'd have thought I'd be driven to open-source technology by a bank and local government?

Right now iTunes seems to have decided that I've got no network connectivity, despite the fact that everything else seems happy with my network. It simply says "iTunes could not [do requested network thing]. An unknown error occurred (-4). Make sure your network connection is active and try again." And, well, my network connection is active. I mean, I'm posting this to livejournal, right?

Anyway. In searching online for potential answers, I came across the following whiny snippet in the middle of some guy bitching about his error -4: "I've wasted a good 45 minutes and I'm really stressing out. I have to be at work at 10 and wanted to download some TV shows." Seriously, dude, if you're stressing out because you can't download some TV shows before work, you need to reconsider your priorities in life.

updated to add: the problem appeared after I'd rebooted into whatever jumbo update Apple just rolled out ("security fix: people may have been able to reboot your mac remotely") so perhaps said update broke iTunes and iTunes alone in the networking realm. Whatever's busted hasn't been fixed by restarting iTunes or restarting the Mac. Time to file a bug, I think.

update to update: the iTunes feedback page has iTunes versions up to 7.6.1. Mine appears to be 7.6.2 (9). WTF?

If you plug in your iPod while the screen is locked, upon unlocking the screen you can see the dialog box that tells you your iPod is corrupted. Ejecting and replugging cures the alleged corruptedness.

Actually, I'm not sure this is irony, but that's a whole other discussion. Anyway, as noted to wisn just now: I spent an amount of time fiddling with calendars on my Linux laptop, including hacking up a bit of CGI that would show the current day in the center of a page with the current week, current month, etc. in progressively smaller boxes around it (actually quite a neat UI if I'd ever gotten it working right). Now that I've got a MacBook with iCal on it, I barely use the calendar at all.

It appears that my Mac can crash my wireless router/gateway. Which is a piece of crap I got from someone for free, but it's still not exactly an ideal situation.

Wait, where's the feckin' ~ key?

I has a MacBook.

The Dave Matthews Band says:

Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above.

Hi Dave And His Band, how about y'all quit kowtowing to Microsoft media formats, instead of asking users of what is probably the dominant media player to do something awkward? Ideally, you know, by simply not using inane copy-protection schemes, but heck, by using Apple's DRM instead of Microsoft's? (yes this is all rhetorical, in particular since I pretty much gave up buying CDs several years ago)

The story of Audion (a Mac MP3 player) is very well written. Specifically, the bit where they get an email from Steve Jobs. Also some nice phrasings like "On the other hand, there would be giant money hats."