TidBITS#766/14-Feb-05
=====================
If you've been wondering just what podcasting is, read on for Andy
Affleck's look at this latest of Internet phenomena. Also this
week, Glenn Fleishman explains a visual, Unicode-based security
exploit that hides deceptive pages behind apparently innocuous
URLs. Adam chimes in with a cautionary tale about troubleshooting
bad hardware and a tip about how iPhoto users can better work with
Ceiva digital picture frames. In the news, Mac OS 10.3.8 is out
and our servers are moving late this week.
Topics:
MailBITS/14-Feb-05
Don't Trust Your Eyes or URLs
Sometimes It's Just Broken
Ceiva and the Mac
Podcasting: The People's Radio
Take Control News/14-Feb-05
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/14-Feb-05
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-766.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2005/TidBITS#766_14-Feb-05.etx>
Copyright 2005 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
<http://www.tidbits.com/terms/> Contact: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------
This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
* READERS LIKE YOU! Help keep TidBITS great via our voluntary <------ NEW!
contribution program. Special thanks this week to Thomas Knoff,
Scribner Messenger, and Arthur Greenwald for their support!
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html>
* SMALL DOG ELECTRONICS: Mac OS X & iLife '05 - $189 <--------------- NEW!
Apple Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, & adapter - $155!
Free Gift with iMac G5 Purchase; Cinema Display Sale
Visit: <http://www.smalldog.com/tb/> 800-511-MACS
* FETCH SOFTWORKS: Is maintaining your Web site tedious? Use <------- NEW!
Fetch, the original Macintosh FTP client, and you can record
AppleScripts that automate repetitive uploads and downloads.
Get Fetch now at <http://fetchsoftworks.com/>!
* Dr. Bott, LLC: WiebeTECH makes the most innovative storage <------- NEW!
products available. Desktop, mobile, RAID-level storage, or
even if you want to cram as much space in your G5 as you can,
WiebeTECH makes it happen. <http://www.drbott.com/>
* Web Crossing: Did you know Web Crossing supports Podcasts?!?
We can only guess what you'll podcast, but we're sure it'll be
cool. Podcast tutorials, reports, or entertainment, using RSS,
from blogs or discussions. <http://www.webcrossing.com/tb-205>
* Treat yourself to something better! Matias brings you: <----------- NEW!
Tactile Pro Keyboard: <http://tactilepro.com/index.php?refID=5>
Laptop Armor cases: <http://laptoparmor.com/index.php?refID=5>
iPod Armor case: <http://ipodarmor.com/index.php?refID=5>
* StuffIt Deluxe 9 from Allume Systems improves on the Mac's
essential compression utility! Now featuring faster performance
and improved Finder integration and data management options.
Upgrade for only $29.99! <http://www.stuffit.com/mac/deluxe/>
* Circus Ponies NoteBook: Never lose anything again. NoteBook <------ NEW!
lets you take notes, clip content, and share information. Find
anything instantly with automatic index pages. One-step Web
publishing. Free 30-day demo! <http://www.circusponies.com>
* Nisus Writer Express 2.1 -- over 30 new features including
tables, User-Defined Styles, footnotes/endnotes, and more!
Celebrating 20 years of Macintosh development with Express 2.1.
To buy or for a 30-day demo: <http://www.nisus.com/in/tidbits/>
* Bare Bones Software BBEdit 8.0 -- More than 100 new features <----- NEW!
and improvements including Text Factories, Codeless Language
Modules, a Documents Drawer, and much more! To download a
demo or to purchase a copy, visit <http://www.barebones.com/>.
---------------------------------------------------------------
MailBITS/14-Feb-05
------------------
**TidBITS Servers Moving 18-Feb-05** -- Both digital.forest, our
primary Internet host, and Technical Editor Geoff Duncan, who runs
our database servers, are moving, and (not-quite-coincidentally)
our servers ended up scheduled to move at roughly the same time.
We expect the downtime to be somewhere between 90 minutes and 3
hours during the morning and early afternoon on 18-Feb-05, Pacific
time, but given Seattle traffic and the general orneriness of
machines that haven't physically moved in years, that's just an
estimate. The move also means our email will be down and no
TidBITS or Take Control Web pages will be available while the
machines are in transit. We know the downtime may be stressful
for some readers, in that case, just take a few deep breaths
and reflect upon how much more stressful it is for us! [ACE]
**Mac OS X 10.3.8 Update Released** -- Apple has released Mac OS X
10.3.8, a minor bug-fix update to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Changes
include faster DNS resolution that should enable certain Internet
applications like iChat and Mail to open more quickly, more
reliable restarting after power failures, fixes to DVD Player
to improve compatibility and display performance in certain
situations, a fix for PowerBook G4s that would wake from sleep
with an unresponsive black screen, a change that may reduce
"jumping cursor" problems on laptop trackpads, and theoretically
more reliable fan operation on certain Power Mac G5s (although
some MacFixIt readers report increased fan operation after
the update). The problems addressed by 10.3.8 are sufficiently
specific that if you haven't run into them, updating is a
relatively low priority; there's no harm in waiting a few days
and checking MacFixIt and MacInTouch to see if any widespread
concerns have appeared. The update, which is available both via
Software Update and as standalone downloads, is 28 MB for users
of Mac OS X 10.3.7 and 103 MB for the combo update that can
update any version of 10.3. [ACE]
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300569>
<http://www.macfixit.com/>
<http://www.macintouch.com/>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosxupdate1038.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosxupdate1038combo.html>
Don't Trust Your Eyes or URLs
-----------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The clever folks at the Shmoo Group, a bunch of interesting
security folks who punch holes in assumptions about what's
secure on the Internet, have discovered a simple way to fool
most browsers into believing that they've connected to a secure
Web site when they've been spoofed into connecting to a rogue
location with a different name. It's ironic, but Internet Explorer
is entirely exempt from this spoof. Opera, Safari and KHTML-based
browsers, and all Mozilla and Firefox browsers suffer from this
weakness on all platforms.
<http://www.shmoo.com/>
<http://www.shmoo.com/idn/homograph.txt>
In brief, the Shmoos found that a poorly implemented method
of allowing international language encoding within domain names,
called International Domain Name (IDN) support, allows a malicious
party to display what appears to be one domain name in the
Location field of a browser while connecting you to another.
Phishing scams have just become more difficult to identify.
This exploit is made possible by a system called "punycode,"
which has been widely adopted according to the Shmoo Group.
Domain names that use characters outside of unaccented Western
alphabet letters via Unicode/UTF-8 are converted into a string
of Roman letters (see Matt Neuburg's "Two Bytes of the Cherry:
Unicode and Mac OS X" for more information on Unicode). This
conversion isn't a problem, per se: it means that domain names
outside of the English character set can be used freely without
confusing browsers and can be registered using simple English
characters for backwards compatibility within the domain naming
infrastructure.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1217>
The flaw is twofold: first, affected browsers display whatever the
encoded version of the character is, which might look identical to
another language's character. For instance, the Shmoos use the
Russian lower-case letter A, which is encoded as "&1072;" in UTF-8
using decimal (base 10) notation, and displays in browsers that
support IDN as a lower-case A indistinguishable from a Roman
lowercase A.
<http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0430/>
The second problem leads from the first: it's possible
to have a legitimate SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) digital
certificate for the punycode-based domain name. Thus, in
an example that the Schmoos posted for a while (now replaced),
you see "https://www.paypal.com/"; in your browser URL field,
and the SSL signals are all there - you get no warnings, the
lock icon is present, and Firefox's Security tab in the Page
Info window says the Web site's identity is verified.
Click View in that same tab in Firefox, and you'll see
the full punycode name of the Web site, however, which is
"www.xn--pypal-4ve.com". Copy the URL from the Location
field and paste it into Terminal, and you'll see the encoded
version in standard UTF-8 format, too, which looks like
"www.p&1072;ypal.com".
I don't know that there's an easy solution to this problem.
It's the result of choice by the developers of the various
browsers to display precisely what a Unicode character looks
like, which is reasonable enough. But at the same time they
use a kludgy, opaque hack in the background to map that Unicode
character to an English character to provide full backwards
compatibility with what was once a U.S.-centric domain naming
system, one that retains substantial vestiges of that history.
If you're a Firefox user, I recommend obtaining and installing
a utility called SpoofStick, which alerts you to what is being
called "homograph" spoofing; that is, the character or glyph looks
like another, unrelated glyph. If you visit the Shmoo site with
SpoofStick installed, you get a big lovely warning.
<http://www.corestreet.com/spoofstick/>
Trust has gone out the window when you follow links in email or
on Web sites. There's no longer a way to be sure that the domain
name you're visiting is the one you think you are unless you check
the URL out in Terminal or have SpoofStick installed.
Realistically, the upshot of this situation is that you must be
even more careful about following links you receive in email to
sites that ask for sensitive information. A message that purports
to be from PayPal customer service, for instance, may look right
and even use URLs that appear to connect to PayPal's site, but
could in fact be taking you to another site designed to capture
your username and password. The likelihood of falling victim to
a spoofed URL on the Web itself is less likely, assuming you start
from a site that's a relatively trusted source. When in doubt,
fall back on common sense and check the URL by pasting suspect
URLs into Terminal to see if they're concealing any unusual
Unicode characters. Hopefully we'll see browser fixes soon:
simply displaying the full punycode-based domain name alongside
its actual representation would at least highlight what's
happening behind the scenes without interfering with navigation
or Web pages.
Sometimes It's Just Broken
--------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
As part of dropping our cable television subscription recently,
I purchased a Mini-DVI to Video Adapter for my 12-inch PowerBook
so we could watch DVDs on our TV (that's right - we've somehow
ended up with DVD drives in multiple Macs without ever having
purchased a normal consumer DVD player for our TV). It's a $20
cable, and seemed like an easy thing to order from the Apple
Online Store, which was offering free shipping at the time.
(Normally I'd order from Small Dog, but I needed an iBook battery
too, and they were out of stock on that item at the time.)
<http://www.smalldog.com/product/12652174>
The adapter arrived, and I plugged it into my PowerBook and
into the S-video cable that had previously been used by the
TiVo to send a video signal to the TV. However, when I woke
up the PowerBook, expecting a picture to appear on the TV,
I was disappointed - just static. Then followed two hours of
troubleshooting, completely rewiring all our video devices
(which needed doing anyway, given that I'd given back the cable
box and could disconnect the TiVo's IR blaster and the external
Supra modem I'd used to replace a blown modem in the TiVo).
But no matter what I did in terms of settings in the Display
preference pane, using different cables (both RCA and S-video),
and adjusting the TV's settings, the best I could coax from
the Mini-DVI to Video Adapter was a highly compressed, skewed,
black-and-white image that was replicated three times.
I asked some savvy friends and all basically said, "It should
just work," although Alan Oppenheimer, who's paying a lot of
attention to display devices now that his company produces the
Envision Internet slide show program, pointed me toward the
shareware program DisplayConfigX, which lets you adjust the
resolution and refresh rates of your video signal to match
your monitor in an optimal fashion. He had good luck with using
DisplayConfigX to drive a large LCD HDTV that wasn't working
otherwise. Unfortunately, DisplayConfigX states fairly clearly
that it doesn't support standard TV output.
<http://www.3dexpress.de/displayconfigx/>
<http://www.opendoor.com/envision/>
Luckily, Contributing Editor Mark Anbinder lives nearby and has
a 12-inch PowerBook, a Mini-DVI to Video Adapter, and a different
TV. So I went over to his house, plugged my PowerBook into his
adapter and TV, and it worked perfectly. I then put my adapter
into the mix instead, and saw exactly the same problem as at
home. Case closed - my adapter was just broken. (As an aside,
troubleshooting by replacing parts of any system is one of the
best possible ways to narrow down the potential causes of a
problem. Keep that in mind whenever you're experiencing trouble.)
The story has a happy ending. Although it's not spelled out all
that clearly on the Apple Web site, you have to call AppleCare
to return a product purchased from the Apple Online Store.
I did so, and after a brief frustration with an automated phone
system that wanted me to say the name of the product I was having
trouble with (the system interpreted "Mini-DVI to Video adapter"
as "DVD Studio Pro"), I finally was able to talk with a tech
support rep. Thankfully, he didn't argue with my testing, and
after confirming a few things on the order, he sent me over to
a customer service rep. She tapped at her keyboard for a minute
or so, and then told me that she would be sending me a new adapter
via two-day shipment and that I didn't have to return the broken
one. That made perfect sense - it was a $20 part, and all Apple
would do is throw it out.
The moral of the story? Sometimes hardware is just broken.
And unfortunately, when that happens, you can waste hours trying
to figure out exactly what's wrong. But kudos to Apple for
solving the real problem quickly and efficiently once I knew
what was wrong.
Oh, and the new adapter? It arrived, I plugged it in to the
PowerBook and the TV, and it just worked. Like Macs are
supposed to.
Ceiva and the Mac
-----------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Maybe this is old hat to those in the know, but I've just
discovered a neat workaround in my annual quest for an iPhoto
export plug-in that would upload photos to Ceiva picture frames.
For those who don't know about Ceiva, it's a digital picture
frame with a built-in modem. It regularly calls home to Ceiva HQ
and downloads new photos to display on the frame the next day.
Anyone with the correct username and password can upload photos
to Ceiva's Web site so they can be downloaded the next day,
so the Ceiva is a great way to share digital photos with elderly
relatives, and my family has purchased Ceiva frames and service
(it requires a subscription) for my grandparents.
<http://www.ceiva.com/>
As much as my grandparents all love their Ceiva picture frames
and adore getting new photos from members of the family, almost
everything about Ceiva makes my teeth hurt. The picture frame
is tiny compared to any computer screen; it's annoying to have
to pay for what is essentially another Internet account; it's
nowhere near as visually interesting as the Mac OS X screen saver
with its Ken Burns Effect; and most frustrating, the Ceiva Web
interface, even though it has improved over the years, is one
of the clumsiest I've seen. The poor interface makes me feel
particularly bad, because it means that I don't upload photos
to my grandparents' frames nearly as often as I'd like.
However, in October 2004, Ceiva added a new service, which, while
it's designed for people with camera-equipped cell phones to send
photos to Ceiva picture frames directly from their phones, also
makes it far easier for Mac users to email pictures from within
iPhoto. The trick is that (after logging in) you must click the
Send from Cell link on the main Ceiva page, then turn on a unique
CeivaMobile email address for every album into which you wish to
send photos. After that, it's a simple matter of selecting up to
10 photos in iPhoto, clicking the Email button, specifying Medium
(640x480) as the photo size, and then sending the email message
that iPhoto creates.
<http://www.ceiva.com/ccare/hlp/hp/help_ceiva_sender_mac.jsp>
This process may not be quite as elegant as an iPhoto export
plug-in could be, but it's easy once you've set up a nickname for
the special CeivaMobile address. And even if Ceiva isn't as cool
as .Mac Slides, it doesn't require a .Mac account to populate,
nor does it require a Mac to be left on all the time to display
the photos.
Podcasting: The People's Radio
-------------------------------
by Andy J. Williams Affleck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Few buzzwords surrounding Internet technologies have moved into
the mainstream more quickly than "podcasting," but because of
this speed and an only tangentially related name, few consumer-
level technologies have engendered more confusion. So what is
podcasting?
Quite simply, podcasting is creating an audio file (traditionally
in MP3 format, though other formats can be used as well) and
making it available online for other people to listen to. If
that were all there was to it, you would probably say "So what?
That capability has been around for years!" and you would be
correct. What's different now is that there are simple ways to
subscribe to specific shows and have the audio files automatically
downloaded to your computer and placed into your MP3 software -
likely iTunes on the Mac - and, thus, if you wish onto your MP3
player - probably an iPod - without any effort. Simplifying and
automating that task has made all the difference.
Right off the bat, I want to clear up one common misconception
about podcasting: it has essentially nothing to do with the iPod,
and you do not need an iPod to listen to podcasts. If another MP3
player was the cool toy everyone had to have, podcasting would
have been given a different name.
But look how far podcasting has come in a short time! Since this
summer when there were only a handful of people putting their
audio files online for others to hear, thousands more have taken
to the virtual airwaves and begun producing their own shows.
"Podcasting" was coined in September 2004 as a term, and by
December it had already gotten mention in major newspaper and
news magazines. I can't remember ever seeing a new technology
go from grass roots to appearances in the legacy media that
quickly.
Already there are over a thousand different people (no one really
knows exactly how many) producing their own shows. Topics, when
they exist at all, run the gamut from music to food to movie
reviews to podcasting itself. Many are simply audio versions of
weblogs where the content may only be interesting to a small
circle of friends (and sometimes even that's a generous
characterization).
Some people have criticized podcasts on the grounds that it is
far easier and quicker to read a Web page and scan or search for
information than it is to download a huge audio file and listen
to it to get what the creator is trying to say. That's true, but
it misses the point entirely - podcasting is to weblogs what radio
is to newspapers. Podcasting represents a new form of broadcast
media. You can think of it as an audio weblog, but podcasts can
transcend that description. Perhaps a better analogy is with
legalized pirate radio where everyone can have their own station
and show.
Here are some samples of content which would simply not be as
interesting (or, in some cases, even possible) in a text-only
medium:
* Adam Curry has been routinely playing music from a band called
The Lascivious Biddies and has, as a result, gotten them not only
a great increase in CD sales via their Web site, but even an
interview on CBS News.
<http://www.curry.com/>
* I first heard excerpts of Wil Wheaton's books "Just a Geek" and
"Dancing Barefoot" in a podcast put out by IT Conversations from a
reading Wheaton did at Gnomedex 4 in late 2004. I immediately went
out and bought the books.
<http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail220.html>
<http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail221.html>
* Coverville plays only covers of songs in its thrice-weekly show
(the music is fully licensed, so it's legal!) and puts together
some of the most interesting and strange mixes ever heard.
<http://www.coverville.com/>
* Mur Lafferty has been reading some of her essays (published and
unpublished). While these are certainly something I could read in
text only, there's something compelling about hearing an author
read her own works out loud.
<http://www.geekfuactiongrip.com/>
* I ran a series of interviews with singer/songwriter Robert Burke
Warren throughout January on my Podcrumbs show. He talks, plays
songs, and his mother (who was in the room with us) adds wonderful
color to the conversation.
<http://www.podcrumbs.com/>
Interestingly enough, the vast majority of my use of iTunes and my
iPod are listening to various podcasts. I'm watching less TV and I
never listen to the radio (in fact, the few times I do, aside from
NPR, is usually painful). I enjoy the fact that I am finally able
to listen and enjoy content which was not produced by the giant
corporate monoculture, but by regular people.
**Podcasting History** -- The various technical pieces that make
podcasting possible have been around for a long time. But the
synergy that led to the explosion of podcasting began toward the
end of 2000 when Dave Winer and Adam Curry met in New York City.
Dave is the creator of the venerable outliner MORE, UserLand
Frontier, the weblog system Radio UserLand, and the RSS (Really
Simple Syndication) standard which is so critical to weblogs and,
increasingly, news sites around the world. Adam is a former MTV
VJ and founder of OnRamp, a New York City ISP from the early
1990's. Adam wanted to move large files around (at the time he
was thinking about video) and Dave didn't see how it would work.
Downloading large files was always a pain and rarely yielded
worthwhile results. Often you'd spend ages downloading a tiny
postage-stamp sized video which took less time to play than
download.
But Adam had a brilliant idea: look at the speed of your network
connection and how much time that connection is sitting idle
(when you are away from your computer, doing tasks that don't
use it, etc.) You could download vast amounts of data during that
idle time. Dave was sold on the idea and since he was working on
RSS 2.0 at the time, he added the concept of an "enclosure," which
would simply be a URL to a binary file such as a video file. In
this way, programs that supported enclosures would automatically
pick up any new enclosures uploaded to a Web site as part of a
weblog entry and download them in the background, at night or
whenever the user told the software to retrieve enclosures.
And thus, some years ago, everything that was needed for
podcasting was in place. You could create the content, make it
available for others to subscribe, and it could be downloaded
while you were otherwise idle. So, why did podcasting take so
long to catch on?
Before 2004, there simply was no critical mass in terms of people.
Not enough people owned MP3 players, read weblogs, or had the
motivation to create audio content.
In terms of content, Dave Winer himself was one of the first
people to use podcasting. He began recording what he now calls
"Morning Coffee Notes." He also worked with Christopher Lydon,
formerly the host of WBUR's "The Connection" in Boston, who began
recording interviews and making them available in this way as
well. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston,
Dave walked around making audio posts from the convention and
publishing them on his site. There was starting to be enough
content to catch people's attention. In addition, by this
time, the blogging community had not had any major technology
innovation in over three years. As Dave put it, "You're looking
at a community that's hungry for some new ideas."
But one final piece of the puzzle was missing: It was still
annoying to move the downloaded audio files onto an MP3 player
manually so you could listen to them in the car, on the train
to work, or while exercising, which are times when radio is
traditionally popular. Adam Curry then wrote and released an
AppleScript script called iPodder that simply went through
the RSS feeds for a list of sites, looked for enclosures it
hadn't already seen, downloaded them, and moved them into iTunes
(and therefore, his iPod). With that last problem solved, it
became obvious that not only was it easy to distribute any
content you created, but an audience could now find and listen
to your work easily. The floodgates opened.
One of the interesting side notes to this story is the fact
that without planning it, Dave and Adam reversed their roles.
Dave says, "Adam is a radio professional and I'm a software
professional, and by this point in time my major contribution
to this was the radio side of it and his major contribution was
the software side of it." Dave believes it was this very reversal
that made podcasting possible. Adam didn't know the rules of
software design and thus could break them, and Dave did not know
the rules of radio and could break them as well. This ignorance
of the "rules" led to the critical breakthroughs which may not
have happened had they not switched places.
(Note: The quotes from Dave Winer come from an interview with
Dave via Skype from January 2005. The interview is about 20
minutes long and contains a wealth of interesting historical
background on podcasting. It is available in its entirety as
a podcast at my Podcrumbs site.)
<http://www.podcrumbs.com/audio/Podcrumbs_2005-02-05.mp3>
**Listening to Podcasts** -- A number of different Macintosh
programs enable you to subscribe to podcasts and copy subscribed
show content into iTunes, where you can listen to them on your
Mac or later send them to your iPod.
First, there are the programs that are designed solely for
podcasts: iPodder (free), iPodderX Lite (free), iPodderX ($20),
PlayPod (free), PoddumFeeder ($5). These tools all help you
subscribe to specified RSS feeds and copy to iTunes any and
all MP3 files they find during periodic scans.
<http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/>
<http://ipodderx.com/>
<http://www.iggsoftware.com/playpod/>
<http://www.ifthensoft.com/poddumfeeder.html>
Next, there are more traditional RSS readers which have added
the capability to manage podcasts on top of everything else they
already do. As far as I know, only NetNewsWire Pro 2.0's public
beta and PulpFiction have added support for podcasting, but
it's only a matter of time before podcasting support becomes
commonplace.
<http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/beta.php>
<http://freshsqueeze.com/products/pulpfiction/>
Finally, several programs for managing iPods directly (especially
in terms of copying notes, calendar items, contacts, news and more
to the iPod) have added support for RSS enclosures. These include
Pod2Go ($12), and YamiPod (free).
<http://www.kainjow.com/pod2go/>
<http://www.yamipod.com/>
Personally, I use a combination of iPodderX and NetNewsWire Pro.
iPodderX manages the podcasts where I want to listen to every
single episode as it comes. Then I use NetNewsWire Pro - which
I also use for all my other RSS feed reading - for feeds where
I listen only to occasional episodes. NetNewsWire Pro makes
it easy to pick and choose, thanks to a convenient button that
downloads an enclosure and moves it into iTunes automatically.
It gives me an opt-in approach to individual episodes.
My advice? Try all the various tools and see what you like.
There's no way to predict which tool will fit your desired
approach to podcast content.
Once you have one of the tools above installed, you can point
it to any number of sites out there to find podcasts. Each come
with some suggested feeds and iPodder and iPodderX both also offer
integrated directories from which you can subscribe to podcasts.
Outside of these, the iPodder and iPodderX Web sites both provide
their directories online where you can find podcasts to sample.
It's customary for people producing podcasts to announce them via
a specific Web site, audio.weblogs.com. At any given time, the 100
most recently posted podcasts are listed there, making it another
excellent way to sample new podcasts.
<http://audio.weblogs.com/>
Lastly, if you don't want to mess with any of the software above
and just want to sample podcasts right in your browser, you can
do that, too. All of the podcasts are presented as simple links
on their Web sites (and on audio.weblogs.com) as clickable MP3
files which Safari will play for you right in the browser.
**Signing Off** -- It will be interesting to see where podcasting
goes. From one standpoint, it truly is the people's radio:
a chance for every person who wishes to have his or her own show
without needing a radio station or being bound by FCC regulation.
A.J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed
only to those who own one." The advent of individuals being able
to publish on the Web meant that everyone could own a printing
press; with podcasting, now everyone can have a radio show.
Video is undoubtedly not far behind.
From another standpoint, podcasting reveals a new marketplace
just opening up. Who knows how and when (or in many cases, if)
people will start to make real money from podcasts? But it's
certain that some people will. And who knows what will happen when
the media moguls become aware of the successes in podcasting? Will
they try to stop it or co-opt it? Is there any chance they could
succeed at either? If the past performance of the Internet is
any indication, I doubt it. But that's all speculation, and as
with Internet publications, and then with weblogs, it's likely
that podcasting will have a very few commercial successes, many
failures, and will in the process contribute a vast quantity
of original content of widely varying quality to the Internet-
connected world at large.
For now, I'm just enjoying hearing all of the different voices
in all their wonderful cacophony.
[Andy J. Williams Affleck is a project manager for a U.S. federal
government contractor and an expert in usable accessibility in
Web design. He's long been fascinated by any tool to allow the
individual to communicate to others, be it newsletters, email,
weblogs, podcasting, or whatever comes next.]
PayBITS: If Andy finally set your mind at ease with regard to what
podcasting is all about, say thanks with a few bucks via PayBITS!
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=andyjw%40raggedcastle.com>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Take Control News/14-Feb-05
---------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
We continue to work on updates, with this week bringing a pair
of small updates to Joe Kissell's ebooks about Apple Mail.
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/news/>
**Ebooks about Apple Mail Updated** -- Thanks to author Joe
Kissell's tireless efforts in keeping readers of his ebooks
up-to-date, we've released minor updates to both "Take Control
of Email with Apple Mail" and "Take Control of Spam with Apple
Mail." Changes in "Take Control of Email with Apple Mail"
include a new sidebar that details how to access Hotmail, MSN,
and Gmail accounts from Mail; a new tip about what to do if Mail
fails to show a new window after you click Reply; and new info
about a bug with rules and color-coded messages. "Take Control
of Spam with Apple Mail" has a few typographical corrections
and a few wording changes to indicate directions that work with
later versions of Panther than previously noted. Everyone who
owns these ebooks is welcome to download these free updates,
but they may not be worth the trouble of downloading because
the changes are so small and so specific. In particular, we
recommend that you don't bother to download the update to
"Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail" unless you've haven't
yet acted on plans to print it. As always, to download an update,
open your existing copy of the ebook, click the Check for Updates
button in the lower-left corner of the first page, and click the
Download link on the Web page that loads in your browser.
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/email-apple-mail.html>
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/spam-apple-mail.html>
Back in October 2004, we rolled both ebooks into a print title,
"Take Control of Apple Mail." The print book already includes the
typographical corrections in these ebooks, but it does not have
the new information. If you own the print book, consult the "Free
Updates" section on page xii of your copy to access these ebook
updates. [ACE]
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321321154/takecontroleb-20/ref=nosim/>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/14-Feb-05
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The second URL below each thread description points to the
discussion on our Web Crossing server, which will be much faster.
**Comparison of Macintosh eBay tools** -- Prompted by our DealBITS
Drawing for iwascoding.com's GarageSale, readers suggest other
tools for working with eBay auctions. (5 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2469>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/327>
**Flickr: The next big thing?** Is the Flickr photo-sharing
service the next best thing since digital cameras? Or is it
just a fad? (3 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2468>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/326>
**Recording with Microsoft Office** -- Microsoft Word 2004's
NoteBook feature includes the capability to record audio notes.
What microphones, aside from the PowerBook's lackluster built-in
mic, work well for recording these notes? (5 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2466>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/324>
**Searching for Apple's generic "apps"** -- Apple's generic
application names, such as Mail and Pages, make it difficult
to search for application-specific information on the Internet.
Readers contribute a few solutions. (6 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2464>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/322>
$$
Non-profit, non-commercial publications may reprint articles if
full credit is given. Others please contact us. We don't guarantee
accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and
company names may be registered trademarks of their companies.
For information: how to subscribe, where to find back issues,
and more, see <http://www.tidbits.com/>. TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017.
Send comments and editorial submissions to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Back issues available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/>
And: <ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/>
Full text searching available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/search/>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
--
If you want to unsubscribe or change your address, use this link
http://emperor.tidbits.com/webx?unsub@@.3c557dc4!u=sfjksldsdfjksdlfsfdfd
