TidBITS

We’re getting ready for our next big live event, which will cover upgrading to and using Mountain Lion, with TidBITS editors Joe Kissell and Matt Neuburg presenting. Let us know which days of the week work best for you! Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

After implementing iOS Restrictions settings to display only age-appropriate movies and TV shows on the iPad his five-year-old son uses, Agen Schmitz discovered the movies he had encoded himself were not filtered out because they didn’t include MPAA or TV Parental Guidelines ratings metadata. And there’s no way to add those ratings to a video file via iTunes. Here’s how he used the iDentify shareware app to protect his son from the evils of Louis C.K. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

If you’ve ever wished you could control your Apple TV with the same remote you use for your television, you’re in luck — it’s easy to do. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Notable software releases this week include Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.2.3, iPhoto ’11 9.3.1, and Audio Hijack Pro 2.10.4. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Two quick ExtraBITS for you this week: news of Apple withdrawing from, and then immediately rejoining, the EPEAT program for environmental stewardship; and the strange story of a Russian hacker who figured out how to trick iOS into allowing free in-app purchases. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

With users complaining after an announcement that the Dropbox Public folder would disappear from new accounts, Dropbox subsequently said that new users would be able to turn the Public folder on if they so wished, and that the Dropbox API would be extended to support developers who wanted to rely on the Public folder. All’s well that ends well. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

After being disappointed with the performance of his Internet connection, Adam Engst spent several weeks getting a new cable, upgrading to a higher service level, and swapping cable modems before Time Warner was able to provide the bandwidth he had been promised. It’s worth checking your Internet connection and making sure you’re getting what you’re paying for — read on for Adam’s advice on the best way to proceed. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

We’ve started using the online collaboration tool Trello for TidBITS, Take Control, and various personal activities. It’s more interesting than other task management tools we’ve tried because it doesn’t force us into specific ways of thinking or working, but lets us configure our own approaches. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Notable software releases this week include Keyboard Maestro 5.3.1, SpamSieve 2.9.2, Hazel 3.0.9, and ClamXav 2.3.1. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Apple’s App Store weathered a few storms last week, with what might have been a Trojan horse sneaking through the approval process and a problem that caused all new and updated apps downloaded for a few days to be corrupted. Our linked articles have the details, along with a pointer to Mozilla’s announcement of Thunderbird going into maintenance mode and Glenn Fleishman outlining his working methods at Macdrifter. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

What better day than Friday the 13th to check that your backups are actually working by restoring some critical files? Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.