News for Wednesday, 25 January 2006

One of our readers has just reported to us that the French border
police have spotted and seized containers filled with counterfeit iPods.
This may explain there are so many "wild resellers" offering fake
iPods in the streets and subways of Paris.
The police have started an investigation, so we may now get less,
rather than more, information on this topic.
PS: thanks to daBoss

One of our forum members, fpoil, has given to us his defect Airport Express station. We are currently investigating what could be the reason of its failure.
It is rather impossible to open the station without damaging the case. So if Apple decides on of those days to initiate a repair program it will be rather expensive since it will imply an exchange.
We also take this opportunity, to send another call about this issue.
After looking to all the reports of defective AirPort Express station sent to us, it seems that they all come from users living in countries having an electrical system based on 220V.
If we are wrong with this hypothesis we would like to receive records from unlucky users having a defect station while living in a country with 110V electrical system.

Laurent, one of our readers, has reported to us an incompatibility issue rather annoying between the Secure II software found in USB key from Lexar and MacOSX.
Indeed, once the software is installed on the Mac, it becomes absolutely impossible to play any DVD (backup or movie DVD). After inserting the DVD, the following message appears (the inserted disc can not be played on this computer)

To be able to play movie DVD again you need to erase a system extension named
"LexarFilterScheme.kext".
This bug has been reproduced with other computers, and remains mysterious.

ATI has officially launched yesterday its Radeon X1900 XT and XTX. With those 2 new models, ATI is again leading the "fastest graphic card" race, in front of nVidia, but the Chameleon will for sure fire back.
However, ATI did not mention any new Radeon Mac Edition, so the Mac users did not get any new ATI GC for more than a year.
So, we should concentrate back on flashing PC cards in order to install them in our Macs; and especially nVidia GPU-based models.

Last week nak.journalspace put online step-by-step instructions for accessing the EFI of an iMac Intel.
We didn't write about it, because one of the big downsides of this method is to have to boot from an external source - CD or hard-drive - in order to boot afterwards. According to Ars Technica, it seems we were well inspired not to. Indeed many of those who tried to change EFI's settings came out with a permanently unbootable computer that no reset on earth could revive.
Be careful then, and let bold experienced hackers open the way first.
[Update] A way to reinitialize EFI and the firmware has since been found. All you have to do is to unplug the power cord while simultaneously pressing and holding the power button on the back of the computer. However we still recommand the greatest caution when dealing with EFI settings.