Windows; ripped, remixed, burned

Although I'm a Mac user, I spend some of my day in front of an XP screen. It has its benefits - I don't have to buy any music thanks to Napster, and Google's applications (Google Earth and the new beta Desktop Search) are awesome, but PC-only. But there are plenty of things I find pretty frustrating too.

Which is why its great to hear that some versions of Windows on P2P services haven't just been copied - they've been remixed. There's a great piece over at Wired about pirate Windows disk images available on BitTorrent that include a host of complimentary software or strip away the bloatware to produce Windows Lite.

Not that I'd condone pirating software from a company that makes nearly $500 every second. Not an operating system that, on its own, contributed a $2.18bn profit to Microsoft... just in the second quarter of this year. No no, pirating - and improving - that software would be stealing.

New project? Blogger, Word… and Mac

Blogger has released a plug-in that allows you to post direct from Word rather than having to type your messages into a browser. It's a great leap forward for spelling, punctuation and general usefulness... unless you're a mac user. Because it's PC-only.

So, how about a script that would allow you to do the same from the Mac version of word? I'll add it the in-tray

Sony Ericsson W800i, meet my iMac... progress report

It's taken some seriously amateur scripting to get to a point where I can pump tunes into my Walkman phone from iTunes while screaming 'look mum, no hands!'. When I started out I realised I needed to avoid crashes.

Next step was to script something to get tunes from my Party Shuffle playlist in iTunes onto the phone, creating folders as I went. And I've done it. The script is below, but it's far from finished. Most annoying thing: the need to empty trash to get rid of the music files already on phone. Could lose some important documents I've accidentally 'filed' in the wastebasket… if anyone knows a workaround, let me know.

One final thing - like the sad twot I am, I've changed the desktop background of my phone to match my Mac. That was courtesy of those lovely people at Esato.

I'll post the script here soon.

Mac or PC... is there any difference?

Apple recently announced it was switching Macs from PowerPC processors to Pentiums. As a long-time Mac lover, I found the news disappointing, if inevitable. I thought Apple were supposed to think different. Perhaps too different for IBM, which had its eyes fixed on developing PowerPC as a gaming chip for PS3 and Xbox 360.

And now, to prove that the only difference between Macs and PCs is the position of the menubar, there are copies of MacOS for Intel circulating on Bittorrent. They run on any PC, apparently. Wired have got the lowdown over here.

The good news: cheap Mac clones. The bad news… remember Mac clones?

Sony Ericsson W800i, meet my iMac

The first challenge for Stuffhacker is to get the Sony Ericsson's new Walkman phone working properly with my Mac. The phone is theoretically compatible out-of-the-box, but you have to drag and drop music files into exactly the right location, and put them in artist/album folders - a real pain in the arse for an iPod Shuffle user.

So, I want to sync my W800i with iTunes in the same way I'd sync my Shuffle - just plug it in and hit 'autofill'.

But first off I need to stop the computer crashing every time I unplug the USB cable. Fortunately, the work has already been done for me. Because the W800i is really just a K750i with a different case, a bigger memory stick and a Walkman application, you can use the script found here.

Next up: some serious Applescripting