If you need sometimes to send someone listing of the contents of a folder (directory) on the hard disk of your Mac, certainly, for that purpose you can use the terminal or a free program written by P-Edge Media named FolderLister. Just run the application and drag the selected folder on its icon in the Dock.

The program can be very useful especially when we need to obtain the listing of folders with a large number of files and subfolders, such as our music collections in iTunes.

a piece of my iTunes collection (with the option “show subfolders” turned on )

The program can be downloaded from: http://www.p-edge.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=1

Reading the articles that waited to be opened for the last couple of days I have found the one published by the local office of Gazeta.pl (website of the leading Polish newspaper) about the plans of the local Lodz authorities to connect to the Internet all of the households in Lodz and surrounding towns and villages. According to Gazeta.pl in Lodz district there is 851000 households, and only 138000 (about 16 percent) is connected to Internet – in Lodz in major (against the small towns and villages usually not connected). Local authorities want to provide the Internet to about 90 percent of households in Lodz district in the year 2013.

The city itself has relatively good Internet coverage. There are at least 4 major ISPs, there are hotspots in some parts of the main street (Piotrkowska) of Lodz, many restaurants and pubs have hotspots as well. The new town square at Manufaktura (revitalised factory of Izrael Poznanski) is also well covered with the wireless access.

More about the plans of local authorities: http://miasta.gazeta.pl/lodz/1,35136,6220921,Cale_Lodzkie_z_internetem.html

Starting on this Friday (23.01.2009) one of the three leading Polish mobile providers Era GSM will offer all of the mobile phones (offered by that operator) will be on demand available without sim lock. The unlocked phones will be available both in the pay as you go and pay monthly plans. This is the first Polish mobile operator/provider who decided to limit the devices to only its own network, but to enable to use their favorite mobile phones with the sim cards of other operators. It is seriously the beginning of the revolution in the mobile services in Poland. Era is one of the two operators that offers iPhone 3G and there is no information about possible exclusion of the iPhone from the sim free offer. Thus Era is going to be a mobile network that offers unlocked iPhones. I am going to check it by myself this Friday.

More about that in Polish

YouTube decided to introduce the download functionality. Download option is limited to the Barack’s Obama Changedotorg channel for the time being. According to Arstechnica.com the download functionality will be available more general in the future. I wonder if Google will introduce it to the all channels and all publishers or limit it to the publishers who will pay for that. Meanwhile the number of YouTube download applications is rather big.

..or “the rubber” that protects your MacBook topcase from cracking. I am not sure if the title and the first phrase sound as good as in Polish, but both small protectors are made of rubber – condoms and the small rubber beads that protect my MacBook topcase from cracking. I have mentioned just “one blog post ago” that I have discovered the small crack on the topcase “…in a place where the inset of the screen frame touches the top case”. The topcases of the MacBooks White (and Black) are made of too weak plastic, moreover, it is not placed entirely on the plastic chassis of the MacBook and the inset of the screen frame pushing the topcase, just a bit off the place where it touches the chassis in relatively the weakest point of it. As I mentioned before, I intend to send my MacBook for the repeair that is guaranteed. However, for the forthcoming months I have to work on it, so the alternative solution is needed, and this is those small rubber beads sticked to the screen frame, that protect the incests of touching the topcase, keeping it in some distance. The whole idea is described (in Polish) in the article published on the site of the biggest Polish Mac/Apple user web magazine: http://www.myapple.pl/artykuly/81201-pekajace-macbooki.html

Here are the photos:

the crack:

and the solution:

As you know I got two Macs – an iMac 20′ C2D and a MacBook white. I have been quite happy with both of them and I find the Mac OS X very user-friendly, no need to mention the stability, safety and so on. Both machines look great but there is a scratch on that picture.

About 3 weeks ago I was busy burning the dvds with the film from the wedding of my wife’s cousin. I had to burn about 10 copies using the internal iMac Super Drive. After the end of the burning process of the 7th disc, it stuck inside the drive. My iMac went crazy trying to eject it. I tried all methods of force eject (during the reboot, and using terminal) but without any success. I would have stand the disc stuck in the drive if it had been mounted permanently, but my computer tried to eject it every time I turned it on. I had to use a piece of cardboard to push the disc inside to stop the ejecting madness and to force the iMac to mount it. I have even tried to use the tweezers both the ones for the stamps and the hand made ones, made of the piece of aluminium from the old 3,5′ floppy disc… without success.

All of my machines are under warranty, so I called the premium Apple reseller in Poland – SAD (orchard in Polish), where I found out that the new corporate is in charge of all Apple equipment warranties – iSource. Nevertheless, before I call them I found out that replacement of the Super Drive in iMac is a process of about 1 or 2 hours. So I asked the man in charge of warranties in iSource, how long it takes. He replied – 2 weeks, he suggested me to contact via e-mail the man in charge of repairs. I asked once again – is it possible to replace Super Drive in couple of hours if I bring my iMac to Warsaw? His answer was – of course – no. The repair (or replacement) will take 2 weeks. I started to think. What if my iMac had been my only one computer and I had no external hard drive? I wouldn’t be able to back up my files (roughly 150 GBs). No one at iSource could assure me that my files won’t be viewed. I have no porn or abusive material on the HD, but I have some personal documents that are private in sens of viewing by the people I don’t know. Computer is a private files storage and they couldn’t guarantee that it would remain not viewed. The only way was to stay with my iMac for 2 weeks at the iSource workshop. This situation forces the customer to spend additional money for the external hard drive device, so the warranty of free of charge repair is not really true in such case. I was also wondering, why such a simply procedure had to take 2 weeks? I cought a rumour that there is only one person in charge of repairs of Macs at the iSource (premium resseler). I am not sure of that, but from the other hand – Macs are a marginal or a drop in the ocean of PCs that is a computer market in Poland. I don’t know if there is so many Macs that brake and the guy has so much work to do. I said to myself that I was not going to left my machine with my files without my supervision and decided to ask someone to help me with getting the DVD disc out of the drive. Finally we made it, but I am not going to use internal Super Drive any more. I decided to buy an external DVD DL USB powered drive and it suits me fine.

I have almost forgotten about that story described above, when I have discovered the crack of the top case of my MacBook in a place where the inset of the screen frame touches the top case. This time I am going to send it for replacement (of a top case). It seems that both of my expensive Macs are far from perfect from the mechanical point of view.

I am going to be very busy and out of the office (my place) for the next month and first weeks of January (trip to Ireland) so I will wait till the mid January. Also, I am going to by new alu MacBook during my visit in Ireland. They are much cheaper than in Poland.

According to the service IDG.pl and PandaLabs (laboratories of Panda Software) recently  over 30 millions of computer users have fallen a victims to the fake anti-virus software. The  fake anti-virus software can exist either as a independent application or the java applets activated by the users after getting the fake popup virus alert on the website that warns them that viruses or trojans were detected and immediate installation of anti-virus software is required. The biggest hoax is the fake anit-virus software offered for sale.

Luckily most of the viruses are not targeting Mac, though according to IDG.pl and Sunbelt Software there is one fake anti-virus software for Mac called MacGuard.

More about rogue Mac Guard on Sunbelt Software

Recently introduced MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops by Apple aroused the discussion about the controversional (or not) change of the look of the Apple products. Polish Mac users discuss it loudly. Many of them criticise the new black – silver design that reminds the last edition of iMacs. Many of them can not accept the look that, as they say, reminds them a typical PC laptops. Another controversion is the glossy screen, that is often criticised in comparation to the mat one. The new MacBooks lack the FireWire 400 port. People are wonder if the Apple is going to abandon this port? What about the FW external devices like hard discs, cameras, recording equipment? For many, the MacBook is well enought, they don’t need the Pro version. In case of new Macs, you are forced by Apple to use a MacBook Pro.

Personally, I can not judge new MacBooks until I see and touch them. They don’t look as bad as many people claims (according to the photos). The only thing that is controversial for me is the lack of FW port.

According to newspapper “Polska – The Times” Polish hospitals are organic bomb. Many hospitals in Poland do not have a sewage treatment plant. They flush hospital sewage straight into the public sewerage network. Biological and organic hospital wastes are full of HIV, hepatitis, mycobacteria tuberculosis, coliform and any other mutations of viruses resistant to antibiotics. According to WHO, there are reported cases of hepatitis infection straight from the sewerage network.

In 1997 the legislation was introduced, under which each hospital had to treat its sewage before flushing it to the public sewerage network, but due to the general poverty of the hospitals in Poland the legislation was limited to the hospitals with infectious diseases ward. So far no one has executed that legislation.

More in Polish

Thanks to the kleeper I have just found out the new excellent service ISSUU.com. He called it YouTube for PDF files and I completely agree with his opinion. The attractive form of viewing PDF files provided by ISSUU makes them attractive at last. They can be viewed straigh from the web via the webbrowser equiped with Flash Player also they can be placed inside the blog posts almost like the youtube videos. Due to the lack of my own PDF files available for free publishing I used the PDF doc created from my photoblog www.kozerawski.com. It is not perfect yet and there is no code for wordpress but the HTML and it changes the size of the embed flash file, so you have to fix it manually. Anywa effect is great.

Just take a look, play with the embed file and then clik on it to see the full size options:

Get your own – Open publication