http://duncandavidson.com/blog/restoring_from_time_machine/

In short, Time Machine passed the “Trust, but Verify” challenge with flying colors. I’m pretty happy about that as it means that I can recommend that my friends and family—including my Dad who just bought an iMac not too long ago—can use Time Machine as a totally automatic backup mechanism.

Open letter to the community (PDF)

We will continue to actively develop Qt and Qtopia. We also want to underline that we will continue to support the open source community by continuing to release these technologies under the GPL.

Last May I contacted Dr. Antoni Feldon, a German blacksmith and ancient weaponry builder about a custom project. Dr. Feldon normally makes real, working weapons for museums and universities, but also makes props for Hollywood along with Tony Swatton. Dr. Feldon agreed to forge a pair of custom fitted, steel Batman Begins gauntlets out of bronze and steel for me. Estimated time of completion was 3 months, but no guarantee because of his other projects.

Those gauntlets are now finished and he’ll be bringing them with him to Hollywood in February, where they will be handed over to Swatton, and then shipped to me. Price? I’m not saying. But for real, working, hinged steel gauntlets it’s worth it.

UPDATE: Dr. Feldon says they are in fact bronze, I forgot which metal I specific when I ordered them. They are lined with suede, and weigh about a half pound each.

I don’t know who is surprised by this. Apple broke their version of gdb, or more likely, modified the kernel noexec() function to disallow debugging iTunes, DVD Player, and anything else they want. I didn’t really expect DTrace to have full access to those areas either. That doesn’t mean it’s not completely wrong.

Apparently the problem isn’t that a lot of people want to debug iTunes, it’s that DTrace doesn’t work correctly when iTunes is running, no matter what you are tracing.

Landon Fuller has already written a small .kext that disables the NOATTACH method that the kernel is using, once again allowing full tracing and debugging. XNU is open source, it was only a matter of time anyway before someone figured it out.

http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/macosx/Leopard_PT_DENY_ATTACH.20080122.html

In addition to other changes, the iPhone 1.1.3 update runs userspace processes under the user mobile and does not put preferences in /var/root. This might be the release that developers can begin using when the SDK is out next month.

http://cre.ations.net/blog/post/iphone-113-firmware-behind-the-scenes-changes

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/01/23/macbook.air.usb.details/

The MacBook Air’s USB port has been modified to deliver more than 5v so it can power the SuperDrive accessory without it needing another power cable. This is the main reason you can’t use the Superdrive on any other computer. Annoying tradeoff, but it shows how far Apple will go to help with clutter.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/22/heath.ledger.dead/index.html

Found in his Manhattan apartment with sleeping pills.  Most news outlets are saying he was having difficulty sleeping and being normal because of how far he gets into his roles, but I think his wife recently leaving him has something to do with it too.  This changes The Dark Knight completely.  

Billing software should as a rule be the most rigorously tested code we have, short of the code that runs aircraft and medical equipment. And DreamHost, in their usual juvenile style, try to shift the blame for a billing mistake that charged most of their customers an entire year’s worth of hosting fees. Their response is just surreal for a multimillion dollar mistake. Sure, their system has been adjusted back now, but that doesn’t do much for the bank accounts of a lot of people right now have been slammed with fees. Shared hosting is a jungle anyway, that’s a given, but how much longer can these guys keep overselling before they crack?

The other announcement from the Macworld keynote was Time Capsule, a 500GB ($299) or 1TB ($499) NAS intended for use over wifi with Time Machine. Great for laptops, and not a bad price, especially since it can replace your Airport Extreme Base Station. I use a Linksys WRT54G router with the HyperWRT Thibor firmware, which is loads more featured and configurable than the stock, and even the AEBS. I’ve considered getting an AEBS before, but side by side I just cannot think of any reason to choose it over the upgraded Linksys other than it’s white and made by Apple. Time Capsule is great, but it makes no sense to sell a router in 2008 without a Web interface.

What I wonder though is if Time Capsule is a product intended to replace the axed Leopard feature of backing up to a network volume. You can easily enable this feature with a defaults preference, but it’s not enabled by default. It would be unforgivable if Apple disabled a perfectly useful feature just to boost Time Capsule sales.

Along with the AppleTV Take 2, MacBook Air, and iTunes Movie Rental announcements today, a new iPhone firmware update adds a few new features, including allowing you to manually manage your music with iTunes, instead of just syncing playlists.  I am really tempted to give up my iPhone’s jailbroken state (for now, a hack should be out soon) just for this one feature.  It really annoys me having an “iPhone” playlist in iTunes that serves no purpose but to give the iPhone something to sync against. 

UPDATE: It’s actually the iTunes 7.6 update that adds this, not the iPhone update. I’ll be waiting for a jailbreak.