Insanity Part 2.0

Proto for Mac OS X :: Firefox Add-ons

Awesome new theme for Firefox 3 Mac users – only works for the latest nightly builds. Much more Leopard-like than the default theme. It’s hoping to be included as the default theme for OS X Firefox builds, but it’s only a preview at this point.

Apple Making Deals for Web Video Rentals – New York Times

MacWorld 2008 could be very interesting indeed…

Here’s my wishlist/realistic expectations out of an Apple rental service:

• 48 hour or 5 day rental after first playback, with a 2 week hard deadline. 24 hours is possible (this is what Movielink does), but that kind of sucks compared to a BB rental.
• Unlimited plays within active rental period.
• Plays on any of your authorised iTunes, iPod, iPhone or tv device. This is the stuff that vertically integrated market dreams are made of! Authorisation limits will be kept the same as currently (5 computers, unlimited iPods).
• $4.99 US for SD/HD. There’s a possibility of tiering here (e.g. $4.99 for SD, $6.99 for HD) a la iTunes Plus at release. This also matches a typical Blockbuster store rental but beats it on convenience and speed terms (assuming you can start playing midway through the download).
• Purchases can be made through either iTunes Store and tv, and will sync back and forth to either. I wouldn’t expect iTunes Wifi Store just yet but that would be an interesting twist.
• No DVD burning. Duh.

There was a rumor running about a while ago, suggesting that to get this Fox deal Apple will raise the price of movie purchases. This sounds reasonable to me, and I could see this tradeoff being done. It’d be a hard lump to swallow though, so who knows.

The June Financial Times rumor put pricing at $2.99 for 30 days, but I have a feeling that through negotiations the movie studios probably managed to squeeze out a little more because that’s a long time period and a really low price. Remember that the real competition is Blockbuster and Movielink. That same rumor also mentions a transfer to only one device, but I think it’s important to note that right now iTunes doesn’t have any restrictions on how many devices you can copy to, and for the sake of uniformity I’d hope they won’t change this. In order to restrict the time limits it might be necessary though.

If they offer an HD service for the tv, this could be the start of a tiered service like with the original iTunes Plus. You might have to turn on HD in your preferences (or HD might be exclusive to tv owners only) before you can buy it; otherwise it’s all SD 640×480 for the iPod crowd. Call it iTunes HD or something. Keeping it exclusive to tv might be an appealing lure for that device – not like anyone with a 320×240 iPod is going to enjoy HD anyway.

Usual disclaimer applies: complete prognostication and fabrication on my part, with no knowledge of any real information other than what’s been printed in NYT, WSJ, MacRumors, and the like. I wouldn’t be trading any stocks based on these guesses.

Updated (2008/01/12): Recent rumors have the price and rental period pegged at $3.99/24 hours. That time period is shorter than I was wishing for, but it’s pretty realistic and not too bad. The price is actually lower than I was thinking and beats out Blockbuster retail, so that’s a plus.

Steam rating – Valve Developer Community

In case anyone was wondering what the Steam Rating meant on your Steam Community page.

Buy.com – Low Price Guarantee

Something I ran into this week while ordering a bluetooth headset: Buy.com’s “Low Price Guarantee” is nearly all but useless. See below:

When requesting a price match, please be aware that prices will be compared on the following criteria:

• Price comparisons include the product price plus shipping & handling charges when calculating the competitor’s total price in comparison to Buy.com’s product price and lowest priced shipping method for that item.
• Our Low Price Guarantee does not apply when you use coupons, rebates, promotional offers, free shipping, or product-bundle pricing on the order.
• Our Low Price Guarantee does not apply to membership pricing.
• Our Low Price Guarantee is limited to up to three (3) of the same product, shipped to the same address.
• The Low Price Guarantee is subject to change at any time.

In short, if you use free shipping on your order, such as their equivalent of Amazon’s super saver shipping, nuts to you if your order pricing changes after it ships! Compare that with Amazon’s policy:

Amazon.com Price Guarantee

Amazon.com’s prices for released items will change from time to time based on a variety of factors. If Amazon.com’s price for an already-released item decreases within 30 days after we ship the item to you, we’ll be glad to refund the difference in price if you contact us. Please click one of the buttons on the right, and be sure to have your order number handy so we can assist you.

This Post-Order Price Guarantee is subject to the following restrictions:

• Applies only to products that have already been released. Products that have not yet been released but that are available for pre-order from Amazon.com are not covered by this guarantee, but do benefit from our Pre-Order Price Protection program (see section above).
• Applies only to items sold by Amazon.com, and not to items (or prices) offered by other sellers on our site.
• Item prices that are affected by a promotion such as “Buy one, get one free” are not eligible.
• The price of an item after rebate is not considered to be the Amazon.com price.

Amazon’s system sounds a lot more reasonable to me. Buy.com’s isn’t a deal breaker, but be aware if/when they run some ridiculous sale one week after you bought an item!

As a reminder, Futurama just came out with their new direct-to-DVD movie, “Futurama – Bender’s Big Score“. For a show that thrived and returned off of DVD sales and good ratings, be sure to throw your consumer vote of support by buying your own copy or legally renting it if you intend on seeing it!

With my new install of Mac OS X Leopard, I decided to get my system into a fully updated shape. Most things made the transition fine, some things aren’t going so hot. For instance, Parallels is a lot buggier than I ever remember it being under Tiger.

And then we come to the Logitech drivers. Much-maligned under Windows (MouseWare wasn’t all that hot, and SetPoint is pretty damn bloated), I found the Mac version to be reasonably well done. However, the latest version, 2.3.1, is pretty crappy, at least compared to the old sets.

Logitech bundles (and has bundled) Unsanity’s Application Enhancer without informing the user of doing so. I’ve bitched about this previously, and this has been very well covered elsewhere.

Previously, I could use CMD-CTRL-Eject in order to reboot my computer from within OS X. No more with this new driver set. Couldn’t tell you what changed it, but it doesn’t work anymore. Using it on the built-in laptop keyboard works fine, so it’s not OS X that’s the problem.

Now my biggest complaint: Caps Lock. The S-530 desktop set doesn’t include a light for the Caps Lock key. Somewhat annoying, but not catastrophic. Apparently, somewhere along the way between 2.1 and 2.3.1 Logitech’s decided to put a big notifier on the screen whenever you hit Caps Lock.

Problem is, it’s big, it’s not configurable, and it’s not even all that in-sync with my typing! If you’ve used Growl with the Bezel look, that’s the sort of look that Logitech went with. Except, it’s not actually using Growl – it’s using their own thing and I can’t turn it off or configure it to do something other than take up the middle of my screen for 2 seconds. The same dialog box also comes up if you plug or unplug a Logitech device – as if the Windows XP balloon notifier wasn’t annoying enough.

Thanks Logitech – you make great hardware, but some of your software choices are really awful.

Note to apartment-hunters in Ithaca NY: 301 Bryant Ave has the worst f’ing hot water heater in the world. Here one day, gone the next! No warning!

This probably won’t help very many people, but hopefully the immortality of Google and Facebook (maybe) will take care of that for me.

Just downloaded a Camino nightly build, and I noticed that Camino’s also picked up the Cairo work that’s been going into the Firefox nightlies lately. This is good news for those that like having a Gecko browser but want something a little more OS X-y than Firefox is. Looks like the days of crappy font rendering in OS X Gecko are slowly coming to an end

So I’m sitting here, wondering why my system takes a long time to login and eventually noticing that something call “update_prebinding” is the cause of it. Two instances of this program, in fact, one running under PPC and the other under Intel. The symptoms? After logging in, my system would be doing a whole lot of disk churning for about 5 minutes, inexplicably.

After a quick google search, I happened upon this MacRumors Forum thread (who knew they were good for anything?). The poster describes my exact symptoms and then goes on to say that uninstalling something called “Application Enhancer” fixes it.

Being a frequent reader of Daring Fireball, I remember vague things about Application Enhancer – mainly that it’s not all that good. That’s okay though, because I would never install anything like APE to my system – I’m too careful!

Lo and behold, once I check my /System folder (thanks Spotlight!), I find an ApplicationEnhancer.bundle located somewhere in the depths of the folder. How did it get there? I’ve no clue. My best guess is that some app that I use (yet to be determined) installed it on its own without telling me, and I’m left to pick up the pieces when I’m figuring out why my login times take so damn long.

Just a helpful little tidbit for those of you who might be wondering why your OS X system is taking extra long to log in.

While trying out a new Microsoft keyboard (before settling on my Logitech), I noticed something rather interesting in the drivers:

An option to switch your Caps Lock button with the Control button! Sounds like there’s some old school Unix people working on the OS X keyboard drivers at Microsoft I’ve no idea if this is also present in the Windows drivers though.