I doth present to thee Menu Master 1.1 Regular Alpha 1. It's got a full on installer now. It should be functionally the same as 1.0.1. It works in panther. It works with all applications I have tested it with except for InDesign. It works with the Application menu so again, you can remove the Block Pop-Up windows shortcut in Safari and stop hitting it every time you try to hit command L to go to the location field. See my previous rant on this.

Please note that the tutorial does not yet work. Funny, isn't it? Otherwise, this release is general public worthy.

I am thinking about getting a PDA. I'm looking for recommendations on what kind to buy and what to look for. Right now I have no use designed for one but that might change. What do people usually use PDAs for?

We wish you a Merry Christmas!

While the USA side of the company enjoys the deserved holidays, Russian side will work until Dec 30, then go on holidays until Jan 4. Me, I will be in the San Francisco for the MacWorld SF

Well, it is no surprise Labels X work in Panther as of current version, except they are not too useful anymore. But if you have used the labeling feature intensively before, and look closely on this screenshot of the Panther Finder window, you may notice something interesting:

Apple has just released a 10.3.2 update to Panther, and I am taking this opportunity to re-post a message from Jason on the MacNN Forums, explaining how ShapeShifter handles system updates:

---cut---
Here's the deal: ShapeShifter is pretty damned future-proof. There are about five different layers of "if it ain't what we expect, don't try to theme anything". So you can generally just go ahead and update your operating system and expect that the very worst that will happen is that you'll lose the ability to use themes.

That's the worst-case scenario.

But here's the general scenario: ShapeShifter will present a message saying that it has temporarily disabled itself when you first log in to your updated OS. The ShapeShifter prefpane will open. When you reapply your theme, ShapeShifter will contact Unsanity's servers (only with your permission) and grab a file that lets it figure out whether anything needs updating. Usually, nothing does and you're up and running again.

So, don't worry about updating your OS while running ShapeShifter. We put quite a bit of thought into making sure that SS won't give you any downtime.
---cut---

The bottom line: ShapeShifter is compatible with Mac OS X 10.3.2, and we'll try to keep it that way for all future upgrades. Worry not (if you ever did)!

We're happy to announce that we've teamed up with Other World Computing to create the first ever ShapeShifter Theme Contest!

The short version: Over $1000 of cash and prizes to be given away to three winners to be announced Jan 26, 2004.

The long version: www.unsanity.com/contest.php

Special thanks to Other World Computing for sponsoring! Check them out for some great holiday upgrades and accesssories!

We have a passion of snagging Unsanity-related domain names (well, OK, I do). So welcome a new member in the family:

www.unsanity.ru

Don't be surprised if it's all black. This is located in Russia, which means it'll prolly only show stuff during office hours (11 am to 7 pm MSK). ;)

On to business. While we are busy working on a new product, FruitMenu update will be out tomorrow, and WindowShade X update is probably not too far away. We also have lots of stuff in the queue for the ShapeShifter, but more on that - closer to MWSF. Speaking of which, we will not have our own booth this year, but you will probably be able to spot most of Unsanity wandering around the expo floor. If you see me, feel free to say hi. ;)

The Nicecast 1.0 final has been released. It's a really neat internet audio broadcasting application for the mac. You can broadcast any single audio source (iTunes, DVD Player, Line in, your DV camera with the porn soundtrack playing...) over the internet. Anyone using an MP3 player (such as Winamp 2, 3, or 5, iTunes, Sonique, whatever) can tune in.

It's super easy to use too. (What, would you have rather I said "hella easy"?) Just open it, click the start button and choose copy from the edit menu to copy the server's address then paste it into an iChat message or something. It also supports a bunch of effects like reverb, echo, gain, and the like.

I will have a stream up for a few days. You can listen at http://blasphemy.unsanity.com:8000/playlist.pls (128kbps, max 3 users, it might be offensive or too goody-goody). More streams can be found here.

Does anyone had any idea how to get a Serial ATA drive enclosure? One that outputs to something that is not Serial ATA like FireWire (any flavor) or USB (any flavor). I just need to get the SATA drive connected to the computer but outside the box. The G5 only has room for 2 SATA drives internally but it will have 2 inside but I have three SATA drives.

Update: as a test to check the "theory" presented that says a misplaced heat sensor could have resulted in the hard drive failure I put a ice pack on top of my G5, near the drive location. I just laid it up there. About 20 minutes later the temperature was reading 78 degrees Fahrenheit. That is SOOO not right. It makes me believe the sensor has nothing to do with the drive temperature but instead is measuring the air around the drive bay and the heat sink that is the G5 case.

If it is a heat thing that killed my HD, then Apple would have had a faulty design, correct?

Update 2: I bought an Infrared thermometer ($50 US at Fry's Electronics, in the multimeter section) and it says my drives are running at around 124 degrees. The G5 is reporting 96 degrees. Someone is lying,

I'll be short: FruitMenu 3.2b2

New on the Unsanity LLC offerings list this month, ShapeShifting 101.

Recommended for all Unsane Academics interested in pursuing a long term career in Shifting.

Syllabus and other helpful information can be found here:

www.unsanity.com/haxies/shapeshifter/

Please turn in all comments to feedback @ unsanity dot com. ...yes, we do read them! ...getting a reply is another story however. :-P

</cheese>

I had a 120gig SATA Hard drive in my G5. It died. Dead blocks all over. My last full backup on the drive is from October 16th, 2003 (the day I got the G5). The only thing really on that drive that has changed since October 16th is email. My email was last backed up around November 3rd (when I got back from Japan). So I've lost around thirty thousand emails (five to six thousand+ are Unsanity related), all of my spam training, my recent filters, and the ilk. So now, I need to try to recover the data on the drive and need recommendations on how to do it. I will not be checking email until I have recovered what was lost. I've heard dd might be able to do it but I do not know exactly how I'd go about it. I've also heard that freezing a drive might make it work. I've had a lot of help trying to get my data back via different methods from macg.

Funny thing... about 20 or so minutes before the failure or any sign of failure I had just happened to email/contact Alsoft to ask them about a new version of DiskWarrior that would boot a G5. And I had been thinking about backups all day before the incident.

I have tried DiskWarrior, first by booting my AlBook from the DiskWarrior CD then booting my G5 into FireWire Target Disk Mode and attempting to repair the disk from there. Problem was the disk is so badly damaged (the partition map seems hosed, and the Finder and Disk Utility cannot seem to get the names of the first two partitions) that TDM wasn't "forwarding" the damaged drive. I was able to repair the working volumes though.

Does anyone know how I can use dd to copy the data that's still on the drive to another drive? Also, does anyone have experience with these FireWire connectors. What are the chances the bus powered versions will be able to power my drives (so I can do a restore if I can get dd to work.

Right before I noticed the horrible failure I saw some weird long entries in the console:

Dec 2 15:29:21 Stability-64 kernel: disk0s9: 0x3 (UNDEFINED).
Dec 2 15:50:24 Stability-64 kernel: disk0s9: 0x8 (UNDEFINED).

disk0s9 is Blasphemy. It also showed the same errors for disk0s10 (Sacrilege).

I tried running DiskWarrior locally. I let it run for about 16 hours. My log is full of the above errors and errors like this:


DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 2 to 3
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 2 to 3
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 2 to 3
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 2 to 3
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 6106 to 6107
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239469 to 79239470
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239468 to 79239469
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239468 to 79239469
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239468 to 79239469
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239467 to 79239468
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239467 to 79239468


So I thought I'd give Data Rescue a whirl. It would launch then take forever to show the main window with a list of drives. Possibly because every time OS X "pings" the drive there is a 3-10 minute pause until it realizes the drive cannot be read. After I finally got Data Rescue up, I chose the Blasphemy drive and click Thorough Scan. The 3-10 minutes elapsed and I am shown a window that says 0 files recovered and and error message that complains about no Allocation Block Layout file being found and it wants to know the allocation block information. Giving it the information is useless as it found nothing. Doing a thorough scan on a working drive takes about 30 minutes to an hour. The partition and media scans do about the same thing with regards to errors.

Scanning /dev/disk0: Maxtor 6Y120M0 Media (117246 MB).
HFS+ volume, Thorough scan.
Error #5 on logical block #736.
Error #5 on logical block #736.
Error #5 on logical block #736.


Drive 10 was just as useless. Taking forever to scan. Throwing errors in the console:

# ReadCDBlock: attempt to read 2048 bytes at offset 0 failed with an Input/output error
===> TTIOBundle ReadRawBlock err = -4, readfd = 17, blockNumber = 2, numBlocks = 1
Dec 2 15:28:42 Stability-64 kernel: disk0s9: 0x3 (UNDEFINED).
===> TTIOBundle DoMount /dev/disk0s9 err = 16

It did make a pretty report though.

Completely off topic, but last night I snapped a few shots of one of the most gorgeous sunsets I've ever seen. This picture doesn't do it justice. Maybe if I'd taken time to read the manual on my new Canon A80 I could have gotten a better shot...ah well, maybe next time.

But this should give you an idea anyway:

Now I want to learn some photography skills so next time I can do better!

Just a quick post to hopefully save a few of you the time it takes to email us and ask the question: "When is FruitMenu going to be released for Panther!?!"

The answer: "When it's ready!" ;)

But really, we're working on it. We missed our initial target date. (updated) We do apologize for that, but please remember those dates were just estimates. Software development is never easy to put exact timelines on, and is made more difficult given the nature of updating haxies to a major OS upgrade such as Panther.

That said, we do thank you for your support and encouraging words! (maybe just don't encourage us with so many 4 letter words though...hah!)

So much to do, so little time....back to work!