We are told that there is a curse -- May you live in interesting times. It has been an interesting week. My plan, as always at this time of year, has been to buy food, shut the gates and to stay indoors. This week a book review on the highly useful Troubleshooting Mac OS X, by Dr. Smoke.

Dr Smoke's Troubleshooting Mac OS X

The problem with any book like this, and with utilities like Alsoft's Disk Warrior, is that people buy them when it is too late.

I have both.

We have made some comments in recent weeks about Microsoft's new Macs are expensive campaign and they are still churning these out, but on the way they are following up with other sources and no less on online source than the Register is calling them out on this. They take Microsoft and Roger Kay to task for a piece he wrote and they put out with some dubious comparisons that Rik Myslewski IN the Register says is "simply put, an embarrassment."

He goes through the PDF bit by bit and shows how a totally misleading impression is being given here. He admits, and we have always said this too, that if you want a cheap PC, they are there for you; but the Mac is not a cheap PC. He compares it a Mercedes E class against the common PC as a Fiat Topolino. He claims the 13" Sony Vaio Z model VGN-Z698Y/X is S Class Benz and that is $4,399.99. No one ever mentions this usually when comparing Macs and PCs. And that Sony has to run Windows too.

Rik Myslewski's piece, that extends to 2 pages, is definitely worth a look particularly with the real comparison that he comes up with on the second page that fairly demolishes Kay's disingenuous attempt. On the other hand, The Macalope suggests that refuting such false stuff is not worth the effort. Microsoft has a terminal credibility problem.

Popgun is somewhat more realistic as he was a Windows user and made the leap to Macs a while back. He comments on the selective way Redmond are going about these comparisons in the ads and what they leave out. He is not going back for a number of reasons he outlines and he adds, "I’ll bet my blood pressure dropped ten points when I switched to the Mac."

My blood pressure has not been all that low this week.

Anyone taking this podcast may guess that my comment on "interesting times" has a significance this week with the way the city has lurched towards anarchy. This period of the year always sees me locked behind my garden gates, so I am already in siege mode. As well as writing, surfing and email, I watch a bit of TV usually, but this year, I have been channel surfing. I normally don't like reality TV, but a number of Thai TV channels have kept me transfixed with their feeds. I also switch to the BBC to catch their bulletins, but have been really disappointed by some of the omissions in what they have been sending from Bangkok. There are at least two reporters, plus cameramen, but I have only seen Alastair Leithead in the streets, while Jonathan head reports from his safe eyrie in the luxury Erawan Hotel.

Neither of them reported about the gas tanker that was parked by demonstrators for several hours near a block of flats where thousands of people live, nor of the complaints by the residents who then had firebombs thrown at them; nor did I see on the BBC reports the way those same residents welcomed the soldiers when they did come in and remove the protesters; nor was there film of bomb-squads defusing devices left on abandoned buses that were loaded with gas tanks. 20 buses were destroyed in the violence in various ways and several more were damaged. I was able to find this out through my sources here.

We heard about and saw film of the soldiers using guns -- soldiers do that -- but did not hear about the restraint that they were showing, or the approach they took -- after much provocation -- of water cannon first, tear gas (this seems to be OK for the UK of course) And guns were fired, mainly into the air and some live rounds were used.

Early on the BBC did have comments from one of the protest leaders, who is facing a charge of lèse majesté from things he said at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok. It is surely a coincidence that Head is also facing charges stemming from that incident too as well as two others. He also upset some people with one of the comments he made on Monday and I winced when he said it.

I did send the basic content of some of those comments to the BBC, but I guess my submission was one of the over 300 rejected. I guess if I have an outlet like this, I can use it.

It was only after the disgraced former PM appeared on CNN and belatedly the BBC that Abhisit made a phone call, although a government spokesman had also been interviewed briefly.

I watched Thaksin three times and it was a mirror -- memorised like a student presentation -- with the same phrases repeated like a mantra. I have undergraduate students who can use English better. One wonders how he was able to write his PhD. And this was touched on in the book, Thaksin: the Business of Politics in Thailand back in 2004.

He also claimed, erroneously, that several people had been killed. Sadly that came true on Monday night here, when demonstrators attacked people in one of several communities that had objected to their continuing presence. Not the politicians, not the military, but the ordinary people do not want this. Thai TV channels reported this several times, but not the BBC. As it ends, perhaps those organising these people have finally realised they do not have the support they claimed.

And the BBC? A number of the questions I have from what I have just said [written] are still unanswered. Maybe the news room has begin to take lessons from the insipid team at Cluck.

At least Thailand was mentioned on the BBC weather forecast this week: it is normally hidden behind the presenter's left arm.

It is not all bad at the BBC as we will see with some comments I have on on music this week.

For a start it was interesting to see that after the switch away from the standard 99c per track on iTunes -- a price that Steve Jobs fought long and hard to keep -- the new DRM-free tracks at $1.29 are immediately showing a decrease in sales according to Glenn Peoples at Billboard.

This dovetails perfectly into something I have been thinking about over the last few days. As well as making this podcast, I download several each week which enable me to keep up to date with new music appearing in the UK and (to a lesser extent) the US. As a direct result of these podcasts, I have found and bought music by artists as varied as the Lascivious Biddies, Unicorn Kid, Mamas Cookin, Ryan Winford and We See Lights. I would have known nothing of these without the podcasts.

One I came upon fairly late was a BBC podcast by Tom Robinson, whom I saw live at a dance hall called the California in Dunstable. That was in 1978 I think [actually April 1979] but I had been going there for a number of years, from the mid-60s and saw performers like the Yardbirds, Van Morrison who was fronting Them and even Tom Jones as well as a host of others. There is nothing like live music; and young people here are fortunate there is so much available.

Tom's podcast is not only a good intro to what is appearing, but he is one of the most intelligent commentators and worth listening to. His is about the only podcast I listen to regularly several times and sometimes keep them on the iPod for weeks. The one for 6 April not only has some excellent music but an interview with Mark Meharry of Music Glue.

His premise is one that we have skirted a number of times, mainly when criticising the record companies and their outdated thinking. We also mentioned it a week or two ago when Nine Inch Nails made another load of music available for free as part of their publicity for their upcoming tour.

Mark says that paying for disks and for downloaded music are outmoded and refers to the tunes not as product but as content. The music files, which can contain information and create links to the artists are part of a larger picture that helps the performers maximise their content using the tours and merchandising among other methods.

I was interested to hear him discuss the way that some groups think that putting a link to the iTMS is job done as we have grumbled about this several times, most recently concerning a group on an IndieFeed podcast. Regarding those links, he said, ". . . at that point, they’ve lost their consumers".

Many of the groups are somewhat parochial and forget that the world extends past the Statue of Liberty or the Cliffs of Dover. The millions of us out here cannot even buy the music in some cases because of where we live.

Let's be honest here, Thailand has a terrible reputation, and rightly so, at least from the point of view of the record companies -- paradoxically some local record companies use really stiff DRM methods to protect their stuff.

Mike -- and Tom -- make several interesting points and the transcript is on Tom's Fresh on the net site. He also Twitters.

I mention the Twittering as an aside. Despite dumping it a couple of weeks ago, I am having another try, so if anyone who takes the podcast (or reads the text that goes with it instead) wants to try, I am at extensions_th

The following morning, Tom Robinson had sent me a notification -- I must find out how to set this up -- and asked me (how polite) if his feed could follow my postings. Now there is an example that a lot of others might follow.

One of the things that made me reconsider, apart from the way that some companies are eyeing it up as a takeover morsel, is the way A T & T made use of it last week in a major service outage to keep subscribers updated on the situation. Somehow I cannot imagine ToT or True keeping me informed of progress, but it does illustrate a potential. [See this later link too: Mac Observer are very pro-Twitter and relate some good points. particularly about professional use.]

And of course, within hours of me reactivating the account, Twitter was suffering from a worm: while CNET have a report, Twitter themselves have more details of the attack.

I needed something on Monday morning to cheer things up and it came via a story in the Huffington Post about a YouTube video that has gone viral. It starts as a choreographed dance sequence in Antwerp's railway station. Some of the commuters seem to join in but many just watch and feel good. At four minutes it made me feel good too.

Piper Jaffray did a survey among teens and found that 92% have MP3 players, while 86% already have iPods; and I will be looking at the new iPod shuffle next week. 4% have a Zune, but 0% plan to buy a Zune next year, Not one. The pathetic Zune figure is higher than those for Sony and Sandisk. Sony: can you believe that. This company started the personal music player industry and I loved my Walkman that I had in the late 70s, which actually lasted until I came here when it met a violent domestic end about 12 years ago.

Electrical engineers might be interested to hear that a new version of MacSpice -- for drawing circuit diagrams and related ideas -- is now at version 2.10.18 and it is freeware. I got mine from Versiontracker, but I also provide the link directly to the site.

Two examples of how easy it is to have things get upset. I use my FTP program only a couple of times a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays. When I tried this Sunday, the panel that normally appears was bare. I tried to enter details and everything kept pointing back to me not having permission. I checked the Keychain Access and the passwords were correct, so restarted, but there was no change. As we have backups, I uploaded the files I was working on and tried to find out what was wrong.

A report to Fetch, whose software I was using, came up with a Keychain Access solution and what I had missed when I had a look earlier was the Repair facility: sometimes things get upset. I ran the repair and saw a couple of things wrong; then I restarted which accessed the fixed data. All OK and my thanks to fetch.

On Tuesday I was rushing about clearing email and I noticed a menu appear as I was dragging the cursor across the Mail panel. Next thing I know is that the words under the icons had gone. Easy fix here: I must have been touching the Control Key at the same time as I pressed the trackpad control. But if someone, particularly a new user, had not realised and gone back later to find that the icons had changed (it might have been to Text Only which really looks ugly) it might have taken a while to track down.

Shows how easy it is.

Another example of this was in email I had on Tuesday that Mail correctly identified as junk from UPS the American delivery company. An attachment was a ZIP file. Now Macs have a trick called QuickLook, but to see the contents of such a file you need a plug-in from someone in Japan with the name Taiyo, that one of my smart students put me on to. With the podcast page I provide a link to the TUAW site as there are some comments on these useful little bits of coding.

When I highlighted the attachment and pressed the space bar, the contents showed it was an EXE file called UPS_NR1: a Windows executable, which would of course do nothing to the Mac, but someone might have the dubious pleasure if they were not using OS X. This is of course nothing to do with UPS.

Apple has made some inroads in China of late, and it was good to see that they had signed a deal with the distributor, Five Star Alliance (a subsidiary of BestBuy), to put Macs in 40 of their stores.

On Wednesday morning, there were two updates available: for Aperture, now at version 2.1.3; and another update for iMovie (8.0.2). The Aperture update had a number of tweaks to the software while iMovie fixed an issue with projects having a size of 0 KB and another with full-screen mode.

I love the App Store and have bought far too many apps for my iPod touch, but who cares. A lot of them are free, but initially it was necessary to have a credit card to create the account so that we could download free apps. A bit silly really. Apple thinks so too and have provided a detailed sheet on how to create an account without the need for that Visa or AMEX card.

On the other hand, I get cross because of the difficulty of accessing podcasts on the iTMS and the iTunesU which is a rich resource of materials that would be of tremendous value to teachers and students in many countries. You can get to it by switching the country tab at the bottom of the main page, but that means re-entering your details if you want to download apps.

I found an anomaly however, this week, when an Apple feed, on exhibitions that are available on iTunesU, took me right to the iTunesU top page and I had total, easy access. Clicking the Home icon took me back to the Thai App store. Now why can't a simple link be provided to allow this access anyway: the universities and museums provide this stuff for free, for education. I had a look at some lectures on the Printed Picture by the Museum of Modern Art MOMA).

Let's have a look at some rumours and that means iPhone and the Tablet or Netbook that keep bobbing up.

A couple of sites were shocked to find that despite his sick leave, Steve Jobs may have been making some decisions in the last few months. What is the surprise there. If anyone is sick, there is always a chance that the boss will phone and ask for a file, or if a major decision is to be made, you might pass it by an absent manager. So why should expectations about Jobs be different?

Seth Weintraub looks at the tablet rumour, admitting he is sort of obsessed by this, and brings in tales from a number of sources that do point to this sort of device: I must admit I hope so too as it would take the load off my back. And then right at the end, he spoils it by bringing in Steve Jobs and hoping he will be the one to announce this on his return.

This would be a major tactical error by Apple as it would simply return to the idea of indispensability. Steve has been in the background for a while and several good products and projects have been announced, showing that he is not Apple and Apple is not Steve Jobs. They would be wrong to go back on this as if or when something does happen to him, the effect on the share price, which is gaining significantly right now (at just under $120), with more to come.

Along with that rumour, there has been a story floating about for a few days concerning a mystery purchase of chips, by Apple. Cupertino has apparently bought 100 million flash chips from Samsung and along with Nokia and Sony, this is creating a shortage; and shortages mean price increases. No one knows what this order is for, but it could be a low cost device and large numbers.

The BBC reported on Tuesday that the two fatalities occurred in clashes with troops. On a web article on the BBC site later, which draws some conclusions, it is made clear that the deaths were as a result of clashes between local residents and demonstrators. Methinks the damage was already done.

Too Good to Miss?

A couple of weeks ago, along with lots of other online sources, we mentioned the dire warnings about Conficker, a worm that was primed for 1 April. Like the Year 2000 there were reports of disasters looming -- and there was even a movie made, after the event that didn't happen, of course,. Well, now Conficker is beginning to stir and PCs infected by earlier variants are getting updates. On Cnet we are also told by Elinor Mills that Conficker also installs fake anti-virus software. Mac users, unless you have been silly enough to put Windows on your Mac, are unaffected.

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