Catch that thief!

This seems like a compelling application for anyone with a costly MacBook laptop – it’s named Undercover and for $49 a year provides a decent chance of not just catching the thief of your laptop but also, probably more importantly, recovering your laptop and all the data resident thereon.

It’s a software service which is loaded on your MacBook laptop which, if stolen, transmits screenshots of what the thief is doing and sends his picture to law enforcement using the built in camera. All Macs except the Mini now have a built in iSight camera. The thief’s IP address is also recorded when he logs in to the Internet and allows the cops to locate him easily.

The next best thing to loading your laptop with some C4 for remote detonation.

Of course I am fighting the urge to point out that this does not work on Windows laptops for a reason, but I won’t go there. Just take a look at Microsoft’s latest exercise in incredibly poor taste and you will see why no one should care if a Windows laptop is pinched. Purportedly an advertisement for Internet Explorer, this really does confirm that MSFT needs to address changes at the CEO level.

Full disclosure: I never let my disgust with MSFT’s products interfere with investment policy and I do own their 6/01/2019 4.2% corporate bonds. Even Ballmer can’t screw up $22bn of annual free cash flow to service a few billion in senior secured debt interest. The bonds were issued to finance the idiotically overpriced acquisition of Yahoo at $30bn which, of course, failed, much to the relief of MSFT’s shareholders. Yahoo’s market value today is now half of that bid and falling. Still, I suppose those same shareholders can take comfort in the knowledge that there is (or rather, was) a dumber CEO than Ballmer – Jerry Yang at Yahoo.

It just (mostly) works.

A while back I wrote about Apple’s MobileMe service, at the beginning of my 60 day free trial period.

Amazon pricing on MobileMe

The bottom line is that I am sold and just paid Amazon $68 for a renewal. Apple wants $99 – no thanks. The awful review rating of 2 stars reflects the equally awful early performance of MM which was rushed to the market very much un-debugged. Too bad – it’s a fine piece of software.

Syncing across three Macs and an iPhone is smooth and unremarkable, with emails, Safari bookmarks, iCal events and Address Books being synchronized across all machines with no intervention. Email syncing is especially noteworthy as it’s now event rather than period driven. Get or send an email and the changes are immediately pushed out to all your devices. MM still refuses to sync Bookmark Bar bookmarks but that’s about the only thing I can find wrong with it. The wild emailing of expired iCal reminders has ceased and appears stable.

Finally, a newly added feature allows you to drop large files too big for emails onto the Public section of your iDisk for others to download with one click. A great way to share big photograph files.

Sure you can cobble together other ‘cloud’ syncing approaches for much less, but this one is robust, elegant, invisible and (to use that old car sales trick) less than $1.40 a week.

Recommended for those with multiple devices they wish to keep synchronized. I have no experience (and will be garnering none) of use with Windows computers.

Even better

When I first wrote about Helicon Focus some five months ago, an improved Mac version was “….2 weeks away” – the developer’s words, not mine.

Helicon Focus (mine is the ‘Pro’ version) allows you to stitch together a collection of differentially focused images, taking the sharp zones from each to make an overall sharp composite with seemingly vast depth of field.

Well, my version (3.79) has just been updated to 4.0.1 and it does a better job on really tough images.

Here’s the rendering of the 10 images of the silk flower I originally used to show what this magic application can do:

A composite of ten images. 5D, 100mm macro at f/2.8. Helicon Focus Pro Version 3.79

The flower was both very close to the image plane in the camera and at an acute angle thereto.

And here is the composite image assembled from the same ten original images using 4.0.1:

The composite image assembled with Helicon Focus Pro 4.0.1

The differences are clear – in fact the developer used my images to test the new version after I had submitted them for review.

Congratulations to Danylo and his team – it was not for nothing that this journal named Helicon Focus the best application of 2008. And it was worth the wait!

Anyone using the best in digital gear – full frame or medium format – involved in industrial or close-up photography should have this application on his Mac or PC. That and a sturdy tripod to make sure the camera does not move between exposures. Your clients will love you.

What?

Yes, the title does cause raised eyebrows. When did you last use the words ‘bargain’ and ‘Apple’ in the same sentence?

But there’s not other way to describe the Mac Box Set which gets you Leopard, iWork ’09 and iLife ’09 for a very small sum.

If you are still using Tiger (10.4) an upgrade to Leopard (10.5) is recommended. My upgrade was accidental as when Apple finally replaced my first (Tiger) MacBook (bad wi-fi) the replacement came with Leopard. Leopard is no slower on our old G4 iMac than Tiger and offers superior networking between Intel machines, not least the little advertised feature known as Screen Sharing. This allows you to control other like-equipped Intel Macs over the internet with an interactive picture of the remote machine’s screen ported to yours. Ideal for problem fixing on a relative’s machine without the need for panic midnight visits. Further, you must have Leopard with the latest iLife ’09 as iPhoto ’09 will not work with Tiger.

As for the applications, I can testify that Numbers, the spreadsheet app, is finally almost as fast as my ancient copy of Excel from Office X and, at last, spreadsheets can be saved password protected, although you have to de-protect Excel spreadsheets before import. Import is fast and issues clear warning messages for areas where it struggled. In practice, a large, twenty tab, Excel spreadsheets with many complex formulas and some graphs converted fine with only minor formatting issues. It’s now a fully useable product and will see the last Microsoft application on my Mac finally confined to the the trash can where it belongs. No more weekly Excel lock-ups.

iPhoto ’09 adds little to its predecessor. Poorly implemented face recognition technology and the ability to show the location of a photo using GPS if, that is, your camera stores GPS information in the first place. A solution looking for a problem.

As for the other apps, Pages continues solid and easy to use – though there is a learning curve for Word escapees – and I will not be using iMovie, iWeb, Garage Band or Keynote. The latter is Apple’s version of Powerpoint and runs right into Dr. P’s Business Rule #1. No marketers or slide presentations are to be permitted in business meetings addressing strategy. It worked for me for over a decade – once I had the power to enforce this simple rule – and paid back massive dividends. Margins do not come from a spreadsheet and business plans do not originate in Powerpoint or Keynote presentations.

For an even greater bargain, spend $229 for the 5 user family pack. Better still, buy either from Amazon and you will get 8% off and will avoid that legalized form of theft known as sales tax. Starve the Beast!