Apple Web Link to Donate for Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief

I found yesterday that Apple web page in US has a link for donations for Japan earthquake and tsunami relief. However, it did show anything in my iTunes after click. Today it works. I placed my little donation through Apple to Japanese people.

AppleTV Updated: iOS4.3?

Today my AppleTV also has an update. It looks like that this one is related to iOS4.3. Not sure what new features are in this update. Here are some photos I took by using my iPhone 4. Sorry for unclear pictures caused by my shaking hands.

I found the new updates when I turned on my AppleTV:




Whats new after the update:


One obvious new item in the main screen: MLB.TV

iOS 4.3 Related Updates

Before iPad 2 release on Mar 11, 2010, I got a massive updates related to iOS 4.3. First was iPhone 4 update, then iPad update. After that, the software updates contain iTunes 10.2.1, Sarari 5.0.4 and Java Mac OS Update 4.0.










The following is the comparison of the used space differences between each before and after(command: df -lak, unit: Kilobytes in 1024-blocks):

Items	Used	Difference(A-B)
Before	...7,492,136
iPhone4 After	...7,946,484	454,348
iPad1 After	8,633,524	687,040
Others After	8,709,448	75,924

Quick and Dirty Tips: 2 Terminal Commands

Terminal is a very useful application in Mac OS. It is a Mac application located at /Applications/Utilities folder. There are tones of command available you can use in Terminal. Actually many GUIs in Mac OK are based on those commands or scripts. The UI is used just for getting information to execute Terminal commands.

Here are two very interesting, I think useful as well, commands. The first one is reboot. Obviously it is a command to reboot your Mac. To execute it you have to use sudo command to do it:

YourMac:~$ sudo reboot
Password:

sudo is a command for supper user. The command reboot requires supper user to execute.

The second command is more flexible. It is shutdown. There are additional arguments you can specify to execute the command. For example, when you want to shutdown, reboot if you want to, force to shutdown if there are some other users on and messages you want to use as a warning notice. As same as the first one, you need to use sudo to execute the command:

YourMac:~$ sudo shutdown -r -k +2 Please get out of this machine!
Password:

The above commands will reboot the machine and force all the users log out in 2 minutes.

Another interesting thing I found is that normally, only the user with administrator privilege can execute above commands. If you are standard user, you cannot reboot your machine by those commands even you know the sudo password. This is Mac OS security issue. You may set standard user with root right, but I could not figure out. I think it is better to keep standard user in its default settings. Personally speaking, I think to use standard user is more secure. You just don't need the administrator rights in most cases if you just use apps such as Safari, iMovie, iPhoto or iWorks.

iTunes 10.2 Update

This iTunes 10.2 update is related to the new coming iOS 4.3 sharing to mobile devices, according to AppleInsider.

The following is the comparison of the used space difference between before and after:

Command: df -lak	Used(Kilobytes in 1024-blocks)
Before	...35,236
After	...70,000
Difference (A-B)	34,764

Epson Printer Update 2.6

This is Epson Printer update 2.6.


The following is the comparison of the used space difference between before and after:

Command: df -lak	Used(Kilobytes in 1024-blocks)
Before	...8,804
After	...2,204
Difference (A-B)	-6,600

iWeb 3.0.3 Update

It has been for a while no update. I found this one two days ago and I did the update this morning.


The following is the comparison of the used space difference between before and after:

Command: df -lak	Used(Kilobytes in 1024-blocks)
Before	...133,484
After	...343,408
Difference (A-B)	209,924