Dan Chung´s Blog

Rumours abound of a G5 powerbook

This story on The Register website points out that a bit of code on the Apple own website seems to suggest a Powerbook G5 is not far away.  It may just be wishful thinking though.

Potential 'Evil Twin' threat to wi-fi users revealed

According to EWeek Dr. Phil Nobles, an expert on cybercrime, will today give details of how a scammer could potentially set up a fake hotspot and use it to retrieve data from your laptop.  The scammer would set up near a legitimate base station and then send out a stronger signal with the same ID, thus becoming an 'Evil twin'.  Instead of connecting to the hotspot you intended to, you would in fact be connecting to a malicious server.  Nobles will give more details at the Science Museum in London today.  You can read the full articles here and here

If true this could be a serious problem for many photographers who regularly use hotspots, the solutions seem to be based around WPA and other security standards not usually implemented on roving snappers computers.

Apple launch Mac mini and iPhoto RAW support

In case anbody actually missed this one Apple have launched a new mini desktop Mac called the iMac mini. It is basically a monitorless G4 iMac with either 1.25Ghz or 1.46Ghz processor, 256 MB RAM, 40 or 80 GB hard drive, DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, and an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics processor. They will be priced at £339 and £399 repectively. It seems every photographer can now afford to have a desktop and a powerbook!

The latest version of iPhoto, called iPhoto5 claims to have support for various RAW formats, this will be available as an upgrade for existing users, or can be bought as part of the iLife package.

IDE to USB2 convertor

Anyone looking for a cheap and easy way to store their data on hard drives might want to look at this IDE to USB2 convertor.  For under £20 it allows you plug your bare IDE hard disk or CD writer into a  USB 2.0 port and power it from the mains.  When you fill one drive up you can just unplug it and put another into the adapter.  I know USB and Firewire external harddrives are quite cheap now but if you are on a budget or have old disks that you want to recycle into something useful then this convertor is worth a try.