What do you do with your old Macs when you upgrade to a new system? Many folks sell their old computer on eBay or locally, but that’s something I’ve rarely done. I mostly either keep them as “B-team” units, or hand them off to other family members.

My Mac laptops are tools of my trade, and I would feel pretty vulnerable if I didn’t have a spare — or two — on hand, with the most likely candidate for understudy usually being the machine most recently replaced as No. 1. For example, when my WallStreet PowerBook’s processor died without warning in August 2002, the 1.5-year-old Pismo PowerBook 2001 I’d acquired nine months earlier got promoted to No. 1 workhorse without my suffering even a day of computer-less downtime.

Even if you don’t depend on your Mac for your livelihood, it’s worth considering how much inconvenience and/or expense you’d incur if your No. 1 machine failed, needed to go in the shop or sent away for repair, or got stolen. Hanging onto old computers as “spares” is, of course, much easier if they’re laptops. Storing retired desktop rigs eats up more space than many will find acceptable.

If you don’t want to bother with the hassle of selling or storing your old machine and have no family members or friends who would be interested in taking it off your hands, either to use or as a parts mule, another potential disposal route, if it’s in respectably good condition, would be to donate it to a school, church, youth drop-in center, a day-care, or other institution that would appreciate it.

On the other hand, if the reason you’re replacing the computer is that it broke, and it’s really not worth fixing (be realistic, even if the old unit has sentimental value) try to find a disposal mode that’s environmentally responsible, rather than just tossing it in the garbage. Techno-trash has become a major global problem. For example, the average CRT monitor can contain up to 8 pounds of lead. Nova Scotia, where I live, has an environmentally sound electronics recycling program run by the government.

Apple has had free computer and iPod recycling programs since 2001. U.S. customers, who buy a new Mac through the Apple Store or Apples retail stores, can receive free shipping and environmentally friendly disposal of their old computer. U.S. and Canadian customers wanting to dispose of used computers or monitors at any other time may also use Apples recycling program by purchasing $30 prepaid shipping labels to send used units to Apples recycling partner. For more information on what is options are available to you, read up on Apple’s recycling initiative.

In some communities, there are also organizations that refurbish old computers for distribution to the less fortunate, either domestically or in developing countries.

So, to post the question again, what do you do with your old Macs?

Have you ever wanted to copy or convert your personal collection of DVDs for backup or easy viewing on your Apple TV, only to be thwarted by CSS encryption? I feel your pain, and so do the good folks at Metakine. Lucky for us, Fairmount is here to help, and it’s free!

CSS, or Content Scramble System, is an approach used by most DVD manufacturers as a way to prevent unauthorized copies and unlicensed playback of DVD content. Unfortunately for consumers, this kind of digital rights management can be cumbersome for those who want to take advantage of their fair use rights. Fairmount makes setting aside this type of DRM extremely easy.

Fairmount works together with the VLC Media Player to decrypt your mounted DVD and replace it with a unencrypted disk image. It’s really simple to do. With a DVD mounted, just launch the Fairmount application and it will automatically and transparently hand off the decryption to VLC and then begin mounting a new decrypted image of the disk.

Once the DVD is decrypted, and the new disk image is mounted, you can then save the video files on to your network, convert them for playback on other devices, or burn the image back to a disk. The decryption is very fast and the exchange with VLC happens completely in the background. You even get a nice animation as the mounted DVD is smeared over with cream cheese, “Bagels are good!”

If you’re planning on burning the image to DVD, the Fairmount download comes bundled with another application from Metakine called DVDRemaster which will let you do just that. If you’re just interested in converting files for viewing on your Apple TV, iPhone, or iPod, I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend an excellent and free application called HandBrake.

Fairmount, VLC, and HandBrake are all free applications released under a General Public License. DVDRemaster is available in both standard and pro versions for $39.99 and $49.99, respectively. Netflix subscriptions now start as low as $4.99 a month.

Over at GigaOM Pro, Michael Wolf poses a really interesting question: When will television have its own App Store?

Todays TV application marketplace is in a similar place today as Apple was in its pre-App Store state: lots of competing software platforms, a growing number of connected devices (but none dominant) and a fairly small number of apps.

Read the full article and get involved with the discussion on GigaOM Pro ?

While I live and play in the land of Apple, where rainbow-farting unicorns frolic in the meadows, I work in a Windows world. While being a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Apple Pundits dictates otherwise, I don’t view Microsoft as the Great Satan; a computer is but a tool to do a job. While I believe OS X is far superior to Windows, I’m not going to think a great injustice has been done if you make me use Windows.

However, a perfect storm of circumstances have required me to work remotely a greater than average amount of time. Since I am rarely within arm’s reach of my MacBook, my boss was gracious enough to let me use it as my primary computer. With all the discussions on what Apple has to do to get accepted in the enterprise, I found the faults actually lay more on the Microsoft side.

One disclaimer to get out of the way: As far as our IT group is concerned, my Mac is unsupported, unsanctioned, and likely an unwelcome presence. Therefore, Mac users who are actually able to call their IT groups for support may have a different experience.

File, Print and Email

One of the enterprise-related slides in Apple’s recent WWDC keynote talked up its file and print services. I can attest to this. Getting connected to our HP color printer on Windows usually involves ritual sacrifice with two goats and a chicken; on OS X it showed up as a Bonjour printer and, boom, it worked. Apple also talked up file sharing — no, not that kind of file sharing; the kind you do in an office with servers. I’ve found connecting to Windows servers can be touchy. Some times it works, some times it doesn’t, and some times when it doesn’t, my domain account gets locked out. Fun times.

For email, I use Microsoft Entourage to connect to our Exchange webmail server. I connect to that rather than our internal server to make it easy for me to check email when I’m not on the corporate LAN. Unfortunately, the only way I can do global address lookups is to use this AppleScript utility. Also, because of this, when I send out meeting invites I can’t see Free/Busy information. No biggie; I can use webmail for that if I need to.

Were also still on Exchange 2003, so none of the Exchange enhancements in Snow Leopard will help me out.

Microsoft SharePoint

I’m a tech writer for a large organization that uses Microsoft SharePoint as its document repository. Because it’s a Microsoft product, it pretty much refuses to play nice with any browser that’s not Internet Explorer. As a result, I can only perform the most basic of tasks. I can upload and approve documents, but I can’t edit a document directly on the server as I can if I’m accessing the library on Internet Explorer and a Microsoft SharePoint-compatible application. It’s kind of a pain downloading and re-uploading documents when the changes are relatively minor. Later this year, Microsoft is planning on adding the ability for Office 2008 to interact directly with SharePoint, so that might help.

I’m also responsible for some of the site administration tasks, and those only work under IE as well. If someone clicks on the “request access” link, I can give the proper access from the email I get. However, if I need to grant a user account access without that email, I need IE to perform that task — this has to do with how I choose the user in the browser; clicking the link in e-mail auto-populates some fields that don’t render properly. So far, the only way I can fully manage SharePoint is to run XP under Parallels.

Instant Messaging

We use a proprietary IM application that is PC-only. While employees can add my AIM account to their buddy lists, any group chat requests that originate on the corporate side don’t come across to Adium. Once again, the only solution is Parallels.

Visio

Like a lot of tech writers, I use Visio for my diagramming. I also like to embed the diagram as a Visio object in Word so it can be updated in-place without the source document. Simply put, there’s no way to replicate this functionality on the Mac. The closest I can come is using OmniGraffle Pro to create a Visio document. I’ve run into some serious compatibility issues on the Visio side during the conversion — curved lines and some fills get mangled.

Mac-PC Word transfers

With Word 2004, the only issues I ran into were Word documents with embedded Visio files. Now, with Word 2008, I haven’t noticed those problems. My standard template is somewhat complex and I’ve had zero issues going back and forth between the platforms.

Conclusion

While your experiences with Macs in the enterprise may vary, the more entrenched your organization is with Microsofts enterprise products, the harder your integration will be. While Microsoft is showing signs of realizing people use browsers other than Internet Explorer, making its products fully accessible by non-Microsoft operating systems is going to take a sea change within the company that could take years to even get started.

For me, the biggest issues are interacting with SharePoint and the lack of a true Visio application for OS X (and the ability to embed Visio drawings into Word 2008). While Im looking forward to Microsoft improving SharePoint access with the current version, Im hoping the next full release of Office has greater interactivity with Microsoft back-end products.

Right now, though, using my Mac in an enterprise environment means running Windows in a virtual machine to do some core tasks. That’s hardly an ideal situation.

You may already be running Firefox 3.5, if you grabbed it early from Mozilla’s FTP servers, where it’s been available for a little while now, but if not, head over to Mozilla.com to update. I’ve been using the Beta and the Release Candidate versions for some time, and aside from the usual incompatibility with a few add-ons, I can tell you that 3.5 not only works great, but also packs some useful new features.

For most users, the first thing you’ll notice is how much faster Firefox 3.5 is compared with the previous version. There are a lot of reasons for the speed improvements, but one of them is the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that is much more efficient when dealing with resource-hogging web apps. There’s a great post over at WebWorkerDaily that goes into more detail about how that works and what it means.

My personal favorite new feature is the ability to tear off tabs and move them to new windows, something which I used to have to use a plug-in to accomplish. I can’t count how many times I need to do this on a daily basis when I’m referencing something for an article, or for debugging code and HTML.

Here’s a brief list of some of the highlights of the new version to whet your appetite (and more here):

• Private Browsing and Clear Recent History features.
• Location aware browsing via geolocation.
• Gecko engine 1.9.1, with many rendering process improvements.
• HTML5, downloadable fonts and other new CSS property support, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.
• Open video support, meaning that you won’t have to download any plug-ins or use external viewers to watch web video content.
• Improvements to session restore, anti-phishing and malware, the Awesome Bar, and browser customization.

Check out the full Release Notes for 3.5 from Mozilla for a complete list of new features and additions.

My 3GS has given me (relatively) little cause for complaint since I got it, though there was the one little replacement issue for what I thought were Wi-Fi problems. Turned out to be a persistent issue that hopefully will be resolved with a firmware update, but it’s more superficial than anything else. What I haven’t experienced, and what some people are reporting, are overheating issues with their handsets.

A few users are reporting serious heat build-ups in their phones, with temperatures high enough to even prevent putting the phone to one’s face, according to PC World reviewer, Melissa J. Perenson. The problem doesn’t appear to be widespread, which could be due to it being a hardware defect in only a select few phones, or it could even be due to usage patterns. Perenson was basically doing as much as possible to incur heat, by playing games and browsing on Wi-Fi while the device was plugged in.

The PC World report comes on the heels of photos posted at French blog Nowhere Else which claim to show significant discoloration on the rear surface of a white 16GB iPhone 3GS. Apple Support Discussions also exist with users claiming to have overheating issues. Over at QuickPWN, they’re pointing the finger at iPhone OS 3.0, not the 3GS hardware specifically. Just to be clear, no one is reporting actual hardware failure as a result of heat, just temperatures so high that they make using the phone uncomfortable or almost painful.

Even if usage is to blame, as most people’s experiences seem to suggest, that’s no excuse for the devices to overheat. Apple is pushing the gaming abilities of the 3GS, after all, so it has to expect device owners to be using the iPhone for gaming for extended periods of time. And Wi-Fi web browsing is hardly undue wear and tear.

Like I said, I’ve yet to experience any heat issues, and I use my 3GS with my recently purchased Mophie Juice Pack Air to really push the battery life to the max. It does get rather warm when I flick the charging switch, but the front surface remains plenty cool enough to hold against my face without discomfort. Admittedly, I’ve yet to do any marathon gaming sessions, which was pretty standard practice on my 3G, but I plan on doing some later today, so I’ll get a chance to see if that incurs any temperature spikes.

Some are already talking wide recalls, but I wouldn’t be so sure. Apple will definitely try to resolve any outstanding quirks the 3GS may have via a software update before resorting to a much more expensive product recall. And the percentage of users reporting this problem is still small, though vocal, but that could just be because most people don’t use their iPhone for prolonged, intensive tasks, or while charging.

Let us know if you’re having heat problems below, and what seems to be causing your issues.

Born in the early-middle of the Baby Boomer generation (1951), I’m one of the folks O’Reilly Radar’s Mark Sigall is talking about in a recent essay contending that an Apple assault on the tablet computer market is “inevitable,” since such a device would be so symbiotic for we Boomers, who, now aged 53-73, constitute a whopping 70M+ demographic cohort in the U.S.

Aging Baby Boomers

How so? For the same reasons that aging Boomers are unlikely to embrace the palm-sized iPhone en masse, Sigall suggests, observing that a bookish-sized tablet device — call it the Boomer Tablet — would be tailor-made for home Wi-Fi setups, obviating mobile access costs associated with iPhone, which he says constitute a significant barrier for a generation programmed to keep mobile bills within a tight spending range. Good point. We Boomers missed the Great Depression, but enough of its residual trauma rubbed off on us in our formative years from our parents and grandparents that we’re inclined to balk and bridle at the extortionate highway robbery service fees cell and wireless Internet providers impose on smartphone users, leaving some of us bemused at younger generations’ seemingly passive willingness to cough up whatever is charged without very vigorous price-resistance.

Diminished Motor Skills & Visual Acuity

Sigall says tablets are a shoo-in for Apple because a larger form factor device can provide Boomers with a bigger viewing screen and a more forgiving keyboard to ease input. The generously-sized multi-touch input methods and shortcuts help us Boomers work around our diminishing motor skills and fading visual acuity, which make the concept of plugging away on tiny keys and peering into camera-viewfinder-sized screens on mobile devices, like the iPhone and iPod touch, unappealing.

Indeed, I think a substantial factor in of the appeal of PC “netbooks,” compared with smartphones, is that while they’re still small and underpowered, they beat the whiz out of handheld devices for computer-type tasking. They actually have real keyboards that one can type on conventionally without the angularities of touchscreens that you have to squint at or view peering over your eyeglasses.

Decent-sized Displays and Real Keyboards

Pushing 58, I find my motor skills hanging in fairly well, albeit with more aches and pains than there used to be. My beef with the iPhone’s keyboard is not so much its size as it is having stubbornly resisted getting bifocals for more than half a decade now since my optometrist first recommended them. I find the compromises of surfing the Web, watching movies and videos, or indeed doing much other than scrolling through menus on a tiny iPhone or iPod display distinctly off-putting. While I’m not personally smitten with the idea of tablet computers, a decent-sized display and real keyboard would make them much more attractive as Internet devices than pygmy-sized smartphones.

So, it makes sense to me. How about you? Especially if you’re a boomer, would a tablet computer appeal more than a smartphone or iPod touch?

The fear of freedom that Zengobi’s Curio offers users has caused me to write and rewrite this post many times over the past few months. I just haven’t known how best to embody its essence. So before I confuse (and frighten) myself more, I’m kicking this post off with my conclusion of Curio: It’s the ideal place to marry disparate pieces of information. Or more accurately, disparate pieces of information, each of which are organized in their own way — think Visio-style drawings, mind mappings, spreadsheets, outlines, etc. Curio is flexible enough to use for just about any data gathering or task organizing that you may be facing.

What Curio is Not

There are many applications on the market that fulfill fairly singular functions. XMind allows you to capture Mind Maps. Keynote helps you create great slides for presentations. Microsoft Office products like Word and Excel assist with creating somewhat formal collections of information. Quicktime can capture video.

Well, Curio is not any one of these things. Just the opposite, it’s all of these tools (and more) in a single package. At this point the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none” may be flitting through your mind. But while Curio doesn’t master the features of all of the aforementioned specialized applications, it certainly does a great job of handling the important functions of each — and then melding them together for a seamless user experience.

Features as Far as the Eye Can See

Covering all of Curio’s features and capabilities is better suited for a book, not a blog. But since I’m writing for TheAppleBlog, and not publishing my own book (or one for Zengobi — unless they’re hiring), I’ll just hit the most compelling points from this vast product.

Knowledge Base – Thinking of a Curio file as a Legal Pad may be a good place to begin. This Legal Pad contains all kinds of information you may want to keep track of — drag anything you want into Curio, create diagrams, record audio or video to embed into your document, snap images with your iSight or take screen grabs. And the list goes on. All of this information is flag-able, tag-able and searchable for later use. I’ve considered (though haven’t had the chance to try yet) using Curio in professional training courses to capture notes in a contextual manner.

Library – All of your content is kept in the Curio Library. So even if you’ve brought something into a Curio file and decided not to use it there, it can be stored in the Library for later use. This is a great way to keep important information available across all of your files.

Project Management/Task Tracking – Who knew Curio could function as a Project Manager? It’s no Microsoft Project, but you can certainly create tasks out of your Legal Pad notes. Those tasks can be assigned priorities and due dates. And then all of it can be tracked from within the Status view of Curio.

Flashlight – The systemwide search capability built directly into Curio is Flashlight…like Spotlight in OS X. This gives users a super simple and quick way to find anything to drag into your Legal Pad and associate with something you’re currently working on.

Sleuth – System files aren’t all you can grab, either. Sleuth is the built-in browser that allows you to search all kinds of web media and sites for things you may need to incorporate into your Legal Pad. Once you find what you want, drag the content of the search results, or the URL, into Curio’s workspace and do what you like with it.

Presentations – Because the content of your Curio file may be so diverse, converting it into a Keynote file for presentation may turn into a minor migraine headache. So why bother? Curio has its own presentation mode, which allows you to take full advantage of all the content you may have included in your notes (whether it be text, images, web links or movies).

Evernote – The go-anywhere note-taking solution (it’s great on the iPhone!) is integrated right into Curio. So anything you log in Evernote becomes immediately available for use directly inside your Legal Pad. Imagine the power of being able to capture ideas anywhere, and have them fully integrated into your note-capturing knowledge base built with Curio!

Extensibility – You can go to the Community part of Zengobi’s site and download different styles, themes and plug-ins to take your Curio notes to the next level.

Conclusion

The free-form methodology of Curio is truly powerful. No matter what kind of information you have, or how you want to mash it up, this is the software that will put it together for you, and make it completely usable and beautiful. But the power comes in the right situation and with the right user. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to decide what that situation is for my own use, and it frustrates me. You can purchase Curio in Standard or Pro versions — $99 and $149, respectively — or if you’re a student, you can get the Pro version for $69. Download a trial of Curio, and check out their Tutorinis (toward the bottom of the page) for more explanation and examples uses. You’re bound to find a great use for this amazingly flexible tool.

If you’re a Curio power-user, please share your use of this tremendous tool with the rest of our readers.