If you remember, in August I lost four years of notes because, with just 30 days warning, when I was in holiday, and WITHOUT SENDING AN EMAIL TO THEIR CUSTOMERS, Catch shutdown their service.

Now, we get to know that they shutdown because acquired by Apple, and probably they were too busy counting their millions to send a warning to their customers. Bastards.

All computers have an internal clock on the motherboard. The clock is very simple and has no support for time zones.

Windows assumes that it's the local time. If it's 12:30, it assumes that it's 12:30 in your time zone.

The rest of the operating systems instead assumes that the time is in Coordinated Universal Time, which is definitely a much better choice: knowing that this is a standard, is a breeze to change time zone or daylight saving time change.

For example, if you have two Windows on the same computer, both have no way of knowing whether the DST is set, then would both change the time for DST, causing endless problems. However, if the base is UTC time, there is no way to be wrong; = UTC +2 Daylight Saving Time, Standard Time = UTC +1

So, we set Windows to use UTC as the time base:

We can create a new text file with Notepad and write this text:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
“RealTimeIsUniversal”=dword:00000001

after saving, change the file extension to. reg and run it. That's it!

Or you can use Regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation and create a new 32 bit DWORD entry called RealTimeIsUniversal and set it to 1

Otherwise, you can download the REG file that I created for you

I did some shooting in HD and I edited it with ease with iMovie '11.

Once I edited my video, I exported it and I was shocked: lots of compression artifacts, terrible to watch in HD! In the shadows, the faces of people, there were those huge ugly pixels.

How the hell is this possible??

I went immediately to see the original recordings, and those artifacts were not present. So I went to see the files that iMovie creates as intermediaries for faster processing, and those were perfect.

So, I think, I've chosen a low compression bitrate. I choose an absurdly high bitrate and I got with a 1 gigabyte-per-minute video. With the usual compression artifacts.

Out of curiosity I import the project in Final Cut Pro X, and export it with the same settings

I get a small file, without those ugly compression artifacts.

Here is a comparison of the same frame with the same export settings from iMovie and Final Cut Pro X:

Here is the original video

My conclusion is that iMovie intentionally reduces the quality of exported video to avoid a professional use...

A few days ago in Google Play appeared iMessage for Android.

It's not a fake app, it actually works: the problem is how it works.

Since Apple doesn't allow chat between other brands' devices, messages are sent to a Mac Mini located in China, and then sent to the final destination.

The app is free and doesn't show any ads. They don't have a way to make money from this app, yet this "Daniel Zweigart" pays at least $100/month to house his Mac Mini in an internet datacenter: how he could pay for it?

There are two ways:

1. he is a philantropist and does it for the glory
2. it's a smart way to steal your Apple ID

Now, if your Apple ID, is "fake" like mine, registered without a credit card just for downloading the free single of the week from iTunes, there are no problems.

If your Apple ID is real, stealing the password leads to problems like those:

• They can buy apps for thousands of dollars, especially if those apps are made by their "friends"
• They can see all your iPhone photos
• They can block your iPhone just for fun, making a nice $600 decoration for your shelf
• They can reset your iPhone, losing all your data
• They can delete all your data from your Mac, as happened to that Wired journalist who lost years of personal photos
• They can see your passwords if you were crazy enough to sync the keychain on the cloud
• They can see your iWork documents, if you saved on the cloud
• They can send spam to your iMessage friends
• They can impersonate yourself and scam your iMessage friends
• and so on...

Ps: works perfectly on BlackBerry 10, but it's not available on BlackBerry World. If you want to download it, connect your Google Play account on barinstall.com

In a few hours the Apple WWDC, the annual developer conference will start.

Will be anounced iOS 7, maybe an iPhone 6 or 5S, but my eye got hit by this banner.

It just says: "X"

No 10.9, no other felins , just a wave.

In my opinion, since all the felins name are ran out (they can't name it "Cat", after having it named "Tiger", "Lion", "Panther"), what will happen is a "perpetual version" of OS X, called just "X".

No annual updates, new features will gradually appear.

"But in this way they won't make money by selling the operating system!", you might say.

No problem, just ask the marketing department to think some dumb reasons to block old Macs, like they just did with the 2007 Mac Pro ($8000): it can't run OS X 10.8 officially, or with 2006 iMac that even can't run OS X 10.7. In this way, instead having people buying a $20 annual upgrade, they have to buy a new $1500 Mac every 4-5 years.

Update:

My prediction was wrong, it was announced OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Yet we don't know price and which models are supported.

Analyzing the access logs on my web server I found a new browser: CriOS.

In the beginning I thought it was some exotic operating system or some crawling bot, seeing that it had a very low share... then I discovered the truth: it's Chrome for iOS!

In fact, the user of Chrome for iOS is:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/534.46.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/19.0.1084.60
Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3

Microsoft has done a video to show their new Xbox Live games on Windows. Here it is:

While I was watching it, the music was familiar... I already heard it dozens of time while I was editing one of my videos... do they use a Kevin MacLeod track? No, the track is short, they had to repeat it (poorly placing it, you can hear the overlap). No, I can't believe it! They used THAT jingle!

Yes, it is! They used the Apple iMovie audio library, this file: /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple/iLife Sound Effects/Jingles/Half Dome Long.caf! (Listen and compare)

An accidentally way to confirm the fact that there isn't a single decent video editing software on Windows... (for me Adobe is dead, after what they did to me last month... but I will talk about this another time)

As you might know, Apple updated iTunes, making it simpler, and removing a lot of useful features, like the "find duplicates" menu.

There is a rumor that says that they will add it back soon, but I think they removed for another reason: the duplicates are found and removed automatically.(Unfortunately just from the library, but not from the hard disk). Here are my findings.

Using dupeGuru I found about 160 duplicates, but, none of them can be found in iTunes, even if they are in the hard drive.

Look: I have two identical copies of the same song on my hdd (same artist, same bitrate, same duration, different album), but when I search it in iTunes I can't find it.

It looks like iTunes found duplicated songs and removed them from the library (without removing them from the hard drive, though).

Maybe that's why tools that scan the iTunes library file won't find duplicates, while tools that ignore the library file and scan the folder will find a lot of them. I arrived to the conclusion that iTunes will "hide" songs if it thinks that it's an exact duplicate.

More proof. I got two identical songs from iTunes Store in 2010 (The same song in two different albums) One of them is on the HDD but can't be found in iTunes

Or, again:

But, when there are too many differences, like 1 second in duration, or an "à" that become an "a", the entry is kept:

That's why Apple "removed" the "find duplicates" menu: it's done silently and automatically - no need to search for them. (Though, the file gets "lost" in the HDD, wasting space...)

Yesterday I was making a video, showing Sony, Capcom, SEGA, Tomy, etc.. addresses, so I thought it would be funny if I added a small title "Achievement Unlocked" once I shown the address on the map.

I made a title template to be used with Final Cut Pro X. 

You can see an example of its use in this video.

Unfortunately, there is a little problem. It looks like it's not possible to insert sound effects in a Final Cut Pro X title or generator, so you should insert the Achievement Unlocked "ding" manually. The mp3 is included in the zip, you just have to insert when the title is displayed.

Download it now

Copy it  in /Users/yourname/Movies/Motion Templates.localized/Titles.localized

For a better effect you should use the font used by Microsoft in the XBOX: Convection Regular. There are two ways to get it. One is buy it for $49. The other way is...

A while ago, Microsoft released Halo Waypoint, an app to follow the latest news from the Halo World.

For promoting it, they placed on the official website this image (already replaced):

I don't know what you think about it, but I find it very hilarious!

Have you ever seen a company that places their own phone with competitors phones, keeping it in a corner, half hidden, maybe too shy for a direct match, with the competitor names written in a BIG WHITE font, and their "Windows Phone 7" in grey, much smaller, as a remind to its lesser success??

Of course, after that someone let them know the problem, they switched the image with an inverted one, but it's still a big gaffe.

I'll continue to criticize: when the Nokia Lumia 900 was launched, there were rumours about the upgrade path to Windows Phone 8. Current devices won't be upgradable, the rumor said.

Of course if it was true, the sales of the Nokia Lumia would have been hurted a lot, so, Microsoft promptly denied the rumour, promising the upgrade.

What happened last week? Windows Phone 8 was announced and the upgrade won't be available.

A great way to thank faithful customers, right?