time

Digital Home Leopard coverage: Time Machine

Last night, I finally got around to hooking up my external hard drive and started using Time Machine. And while I had hoped for a bit more options, it's one of the nicest additions to Leopard.

By default, Time Machine is set to off. But as soon as you hook up an external hard drive and flip the Time Machine switch on in the new System Preferences pane, the system will start backing up your hard drive in twenty minutes after you first set it up.… Read more

Open sourcing the New York Times

What do you get when you cross one of the world's premier news sources with open-source software? Increasingly, you get The New York Times, plus a dose of confusion from the development community as to why a newspaper would want to share source code.

New York Times senior software architects Jacob Harris and Derek Gottfrid say they've received a mixed reception from the community, because some people just can't understand why a print media company would jump feet first into the open source philosophy. But open source software use isn't new to the Times, says Gottfrid. "I've been here a number of years, and open source has always played an integral part in everything we do."

Recently, the team has experienced growth, according to Gottfrid, in that custom applications developed in-house are "shifting from a proprietary posture. As we were building out and replacing old infrastructure, there were some gaps, so we wrote additional code. And some of those things we're open-sourcing. It's a small, humble effort."

Oddly, it's an effort that hasn't been much appreciated within the open-source development community, for some inexplicable reason. Developers have been slow to grok the reasons behind the newspaper's development efforts. But, according to its developers, Jacob Harris and Derek Gottfrid, it's clear:… Read more

Reports: Time Machine needs wires

If you want to use the Time Machine feature in Mac OS X Leopard to set up automatic backups, you'll have to find a networking cable.

In the advance marketing material for Leopard, which goes on sale later today, Apple had promoted the ability to connect an external USB hard drive to an AirPort Extreme wireless router (Airport Disk) and use Time Machine to wirelessly back up the hard drives of Macbooks scattered around a home. Time Machine, one of the more universally liked features in Leopard (click for CNET's review), is designed to make backing up and … Read more

Update on Phoenix New Times jailings

It isn't often legal nightmares are resolved quickly. In fact, anything pertaining to the law tends to drag on tirelessly.

But for the two executives at Village Voice Media who spent a night in jail last week, their legal woes were abated before the weekend arrived. On Friday afternoon, I wrote about how Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin were incarcerated after they published details in the Phoenix New Times about a subpoena they received. Hours later, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, dropped all the charges against Lacey, Larkin and the paper.

Dennis Wilenchik, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, was removed from the investigation by Thomas the same day. Wilenchick has denied any wrongdoing, stating that "his investigation was not 'grossly mishandled or mismanaged,'" and he will not stand to have his reputation tarnished.

While it's not entirely clear what prompted the county attorney to drop the charges and remove Wilenchick, The Arizona Republic points out, that "Thomas' announcement came just hours after the State Bar Association confirmed that it had received multiple complaints and had launched an internal investigation into Thomas and special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik for their actions in the New Times case and an unrelated one."

… Read more

A cartoon clock to make you perennially late

Apparently taking a cue from wristwatches that are impossible to read, clock makers are increasingly devising timepieces for the wall and table alike whose most notable feature is their indecipherability.

But Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara has taken a less sadistic approach in designing his non-numeric clock, creating 84 drawings that correspond to particular times, Luxist says. Well, at least it's appears less sadistic with its whimsical figures; it could indeed prove even more maddening than other unreadable clocks in the long run, depending on how well one remembers what each illustration indicates. And that would undoubtedly add considerable insult … Read more

Set camera clock to GMT for better geotagging?

Tell me what to do here, folks.

I encountered a rat's nest of problems with geotagging recently because I'd left my camera clock to local time on a vacation eight time zones away. Some have suggested to me that I change my camera clock to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the closest thing the planet has to an absolute time zone reference point, as an easier way to embed location information in my digital photos.

I've been reluctant to make the GMT switch because I didn't want a photo I took at, say, 8 p.m. California … Read more

Power Downloader plays a free RTS game

After spending the morning hours organizing his documents and case files, Power Downloader decides it's high time for a break. Though he's happy with his organizational progress so far, Power knows that he can't spend all of his time working. After all, a little relaxation and time out from a project often helps to recharge both the body and the mind.

To make the most of his downtime, Power Downloader decides a little gaming is just the thing to help him relax. With nothing new to play on his computer, Power decides to check out the top … Read more

New York Times drops internet subscription service

There are basically only two business models for media distribution: advertising, and charging for access. Print media typically uses a combination of both whereas online media for the most part has relied exclusively on advertising. One of the few exceptions was the New York Times and their TimesSelect service. For $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year, visitors could read articles by columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman. It might come as a surprise, but apparently this offer didn't manage to seduce enough people to keep TimesSelect alive.

… Read more

'The New York Times' drops online subscription service

The New York Times has finally given up on the Web-subscription model, announcing Monday that the newspaper's online site will no longer charge for any content.

The decision comes two years after The Times began charging $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for Internet access to premium content, such as pieces by columnists and archived stories, according to a story that appeared in the paper.

The Times said that the subscription service met targets, acquiring 227,000 paying subscribers and generating $10 million a year.

Executives at the newspaper seemed to suggest in The Times' story … Read more