Stan's List

John Gruber of Darling Fireball, found some interesting information while DNS fishing:

“me.com” is currently a placeholder page hosted by MarkMonitor, a company that specializes in brand-related DNS management. Apple uses MarkMonitor for most of its domains, including “apple.com”, and it’s where they’ve parked domains for future use previously. “mobileme.com” is parked at MarkMonitor, too, but “me.com” is a bit punchier, no?

Also, see the “additional tidbits”.

Macworld blog rummer has tuned up more substantial evidence that Apple is changing the name of .Mac to Apple’s online service. Is that evidence Apple intends to make.Mac cross platform? No word of any new features

Today’s MacInTouch DotMac reader report has a discussion about unwanted renewals, describing some very interesting credit card processes today and explains how activation codes enable renewals.

Roughly Drafted has a story about tracking down a thief using .Mac’s “Back to My Mac”. The thief did not reformat the MacBook and thus an admin account that connects to .Mac was still available. This made it easy to see the IP address and even take a picture of the thief sitting in front the MacBook. If you need a reason to subscribe to .Mac this is certainly it. Especially if you have an Apple laptop

If you are running a previous version of Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger), you may receive the message ‘.Mac Sync Client is out of date.’ More …

Some .Mac improvements will cause reduced functionality for prior versions of Mac OS X. For example, Mac Sync will no longer support syncing calendars between a Mac OS X 10.3.x-based Mac and a Mac OS X 10.4.x-based Mac. More …

Due to scheduled maintenance of the .Mac Sync service beginning on October 19, 2007, members are unable to sync Safari Bookmarks or Mac OS X Address Book contacts to the www.mac.com website. We apologize for any inconvenience. Normal service will be restored ASAP. Read more for interim solutions.

Due to scheduled maintenance of the .Mac Sync service beginning on October 19, 2007, you may receive a dialogue asking “What would you like to do for this first sync?

You will receive this dialogue if your MAC has not been registered for syncing with .Mac or have not recently reset your data on .Mac, you can select Merge data on your computer and .Mac.

This KB article is a reminder that while important files (i.e.. Home directory) can be and should be backed up, Apple’s Backup is not intended to back up one’s hard drive. More …

Suppose you wanted to create a backup of part or all of your Mall.app email. You can simply drag email to your desktop, or you could create an “offline mailbox, to which you can copy email to right within Mail.app. This KB article tells you how to set this up. More …

Has the iPhone been responsible for.Mac down times and lack of upgrades? Users have paid in a lot a money over the years. ZDNet’s Alan Graham laments the state of Apple’s .Mac services, “So I’m Starting my own .Mac death clock.” More …

Backup 3.1.1 is available to .Mac members by selecting the Backup icon on the .Mac website and via Automatic Software Update to .Mac members who have already installed a previous version of Backup.

What’s New in this Version

- Backup 3.1.1 is highly recommended for all users of Backup 3. Significant areas addressed are:
- Backup and restore with external drives
- Memory management
- Restore of bundled file types