Now that Maciverse.com author Dan is the proud owner of a Macbook Air (MBA for short), he’s also been going without his favorite DVDs. We’ll overlook the fact that he also owns a large HDTV and pretend he would really prefer to watch his movies outside in the shade on a beautiful spring day. Not only does the MBA suffer from not having a DVD drive, it also doesn’t have a lot of space for a movie collection. But don’t let that stop your fun.

For about the same price (depending on the model) as the MBA Superdrive, you can buy a slingbox. This lovely little device connects to your normal Cable/DVD/DVR output and to your network and lets you watch whatever is playing over your network with its SlingPlayer software. Depending on the brand of DVD/DVR/Cable Box, you can even control it from your computer as if you were pointing the remote at it. It can even be connected to an Apple TV. However, it doesn’t have wireless networking capabilities and that might be a drawback if your wireless router is on the other side of the house (or on a different floor). Also, once your movie is over, you will have to get up from your shady spot, go to the DVD player and put in another DVD just as if you were watching in your living room. So it doesn’t give you any type of media library (unless you connect it to your DVR or Apple TV). But all in all, a Slingbox is a very simple way to keep watching on your super slim Macbook Air. We’ll have a few more recipes for turning Dan’s MBA into a movie machine in future articles.

The folks over at AppleInsider couldn’t resist opening up their new Time Capsule to see what was really inside. I think the most revealing discovery is the “server grade” drive is a Hitachi Deskstar drive found everyday desktop computers. In addition, these drives are used in Apple’s xserve line so that must be what Apple meant when it said “server grade”. However, the drives on an xserve unit are easier to replace when they fail (and they do). We can hope that Apple has confidence in Hitachi’s drives or we can by cynical that Apple is being cheap on the drives. Just keep in mind that “server grade” or “server rated” may not mean what you think it means.

I had a co-worker who talked about the “great hard drive crash of 98″, in which his computer drive failed and he lost tons of data. Even worse, he was in the middle of school and most of his projects were on the drive. Could disaster have been prevented? It’s possible.

Modern hard drives ship with SMART, or Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. SMART is like the check-engine light for your hard drive. The idea is to warn you that the drive may fail soon so you can take steps to backup your data and avoid your own personal “great hard drive crash of 98″. One drawback is, most operating systems are weak on reporting of this information, kind of like putting the check engine light in the trunk. But us Mac users have help thanks to SMARTReporter.

SMARTReporter is free software that monitors the SMART status of your drive and can alert you if there is a problem. Unfortunately, some drives crash too quickly and spectacularly for the SMART system to do any good. But if your drive is dying a slow death, SMARTReporter will be able to help.

Apple recently unveiled a software update to Apple TV, calling it Apple TV Take Two. Remember the joke that Microsoft would get it right at version 3 (whatever “right” meant)? Whether that will be true of the Apple TV or not remains to be seen. In the meantime, we can build our own Apple TV Take 3 today with the following recipe.

• Mac Mini
• HDTV (Preferably one with DVI Inputs)
• Elgato Systems Eye TV www.elgato.com
• Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
• External Hard Drive (Optional - But Recommended)

I think you’ll find that the above setup, while more expensive than just an Apple TV, it’s really what people where hoping for when the Apple TV was announced. While the Apple TV is a nice hardware channel to iTunes and its content, the above system is more of a real media center. Not only do you get iTunes, but also Eye TV turns your Mini into a Tivo-like super device for your cable/dish and over the air HD signals. Add to that a mini can play DVD’s you can begin to see the extra value the above recipe brings to the table. By replacing the Apple TV with a Mac Mini, you are able to increase your channel count to not only iTunes, but iTunes, cable/dish, over the air HD signals, your own DVD’s, and all the video content that is available on the web. Much of that content you would be able to store on the Mini or an external drive for later viewing pleasure, or convert it for your iPod/iPhone. Don’t forget though, a Mini can also do everything else a normal can do, and it’s all connected to that big HDTV.

Again, I admit it’s a bit more expensive, but isn’t that what economic stimulous packages are for?

A few days ago my brother-in-law asked me if there was a keyboard shortcut for fast user switching. He and his wife share their iMac and he wondered if there is a way to do it without the extra mouse clicks. Being ever the optimist, I told him I was sure there was and I would look into it.

If that was all there was to it, it wouldn’t be worth blogging about. Turns out, there isn’t a built in keyboard shortcut for Fast User Switching (FUS). Keyboard shortcuts are generally available for accessing menu items of the current window. In addition, there are keyboard shortcuts for Spotlight, Exposé, Dashboard, and other Operating System-ish commands. Although I think there could be room in the OS shortcuts for FUS, it’s not and that’s not as much fun. A little Google-ing brought me to a macoshints.com article where they wrote a little applescript app to do FUS from the Terminal application. Now my brother-in-law is an OK Mac user, but asking him to open Terminal and type in commands would be a big step backwards (not to mention take longer). So I borrowed the code from macosxhints.com site and produced my own User Switcher app.

The app is pretty simple, it opens a small window and prompts you to type in the account name you want to switch to. If you type in a recognized account name, then the login window appears, you type in the password and presto, you’re FUS’d. If the account can’t be found, the app quits. So instead of a keyboard shortcut for FUS, all you need is a keyboard shortcut for the User Switcher app.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut for launching applications, at least not one for that specific purpose. But Apple does have Spotlight, which is a generic keyboard shortcut that can launch any application. All you have to do is drop the User Switcher app into your Applications (or Documents) folder and Spotlight will do the rest. Once Spotlight “learns” where it is, FUS can be as easy as cmd + space + u. Enjoy (User Switcher is provided as is; enjoy at your own risk). User Switcher.app