Well, Apple is going to pull the plug on lala. (For those of you who don’t know, lala let you stream your music library anywhere on the internet, along with buying $.10 “web songs” that had unlimited online plays.) On May 31st, Lala will cease to exist. Whether or not Apple merges lala’s services in with iTunes is yet to be seen, but for those of you who don’t care or don’t want to wait, I present to you an alternative. Grooveshark (http://grooveshark.com). Grooveshark lets you upload your MP3 library, or stream any song just by searching. And the good news is that (if you don’t mind the not-so-intrusive ad) it’s free! So go and check it out! Also, they offer a $3/month ($30/yr) VIP subscription that offers, among other things, streaming to your phone (Jailbroken iPod OS, Blackberry [excluding storm], Android, and Palm OS) and last.fm scrobbing.

(And no, I didn’t get paid for this post!)

For you eagle eyed readers out there, you may have noticed that we changed our background from the Leopard Server background to the Snow Leopard Server background. I figured we should be up to date on our background!

So, I installed Windows 7 x64, figuring that Apple would allow me to install the 64 bit drivers on my Macbook. I was wrong.

When you insert the (snow) Leopard DVD, it gives you a message along the lines of “you don’t own an expensive enough Mac to use 64 bit Windows”. So, with a little fancy Googling, I found a workaround.

It is confirmed working with the Snow Leopard DVD also.

Open the start menu and type in “cmd”. Right click on the result and select run as administrator.

Then type in:

D:

cd “Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple”

msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi

There! If you have done everything correctly, you should be on your way to installing the 64 bit drivers!

Well, today when I was using my mac, I needed a good utility to Un-RAR some files that I downloaded. Here, I have listed my 5 most favorite un-rarers. To test the power of these programs, I timed the extraction of a 545.5MB Windows XP installation image, which was placed in a RAR. All tests were done on my 2.0GHz Aluminum Unibody Macbook.

5. Jomic

Test Time: 0:37

Jomic is a comic book reader. However, it allows you to extract files from an RAR, and it is quite speedy at it for something it wasn’t designed to do.

4. The Unarchiver

Test Time: 0:30

This program offers a simple interface and a wide range of compatibility, but sometimes fails to do the job correctly.

3. Stuffit Expander

Test Time: 0:34

This program is simple to use and is compatible with several formats, however once in a while it won’t extract a file that one of the apps below will.

2. UnRarX

Test Time: 0:34

This is my 2nd choice, as it is simple, has a good interface, and gets the job done.

1. SimplyRAR (v 1.09 w/ rar v 3.90 beta 2)

Test Time: 0:33

SimplyRAR is my personal favorite extraction program. It resembles WinRAR very closely, and works very well at extracting and building RAR files. The time with the readily available version, 1.09, was significantly slower than any of the other programs, but when I upgraded the rar version inside of the .app package, it sped up to 2nd place.

It was a bright, sunny day in Cupertino as Steve Jobs happily applied the shipping label to the first iMac and handed it to the UPS man. Well, maybe it went something like sweat shop workers in China produced a ton of the things and sent em off on a huge boat over the ocean to the USA. But either way, 10 years ago today the first iMac was opened and used by a consumer. Here’s to the iMac, and it’s wonderful history (and commercials)!

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