Lonnie Lazar - page 19

Ecamm’s Call Recorder plug-in for Skype is an easy-to-install, easy-to-use solution for enabling voice and video call recording in Skype, well worth the $15 cost – a highly recommended plug-in for anyone with a Mac who wants to keep records of their Skype voice and video calling history.

I ran into a situation over the weekend where I had scheduled what I knew would be a long interview, something I wanted to be able to refer to later this week when I’m writing up a profile of my subject for a project I’m working on.

The thought of once again trying to cobble something together using a cassette recorder with my iPhone on speaker had finally become too much to bear: how many times in the past had a conversation been too garbled to interpret, or had I forgot to press the record button until several minutes into the conversation? Once I even did an entire interview having forgotten to put batteries in the cassette recorder, and had to face the ignominy of asking my interview subject to let me re-conduct our whole conversation the next day.

Of course, the simplest thing might be for Apple to enable (or at least approve) a comprehensive recording mechanism for iPhone calls, but since that’s not the case at present – and may or may not be grist for another post – I decided to use Skype for our call once I found Call Recorder and installed it.

Ecamm’s Call Recorder has been around for a while, but gets it right with this lightweight (2.3 MB) plug-in that installs in minutes and runs automatically within Skype – with the advantage of being highly configurable and supporting fully manual operation as well. The current version 2.3.4 also handles recording and archiving of video calls, though I’ve not yet personally done one of those.

Both sides of a voice call are recorded to separate tracks in a QuickTime movie, which can be easily converted to MP3 format and then emailed or posted to a website. Call Recorder can handle completely uncompressed recording for highest fidelity, or compress recordings at a 2:1 ratio or using AAC encoding. Video encoding can be done as JPEG, MPEG-4 or H.264.

For any journalist, podcaster, online instructor, even for business people looking to ensure accountability and corporate audit trails, Call Recorder adds easy, indispensable value to Skype on the Mac.

Of the dozens and dozens of “soft-touch” iPhone cases on the market, the new “Tortoise Skin” line from DRO Concepts just may supplant Incase as my favorite.

Made from a proprietary Silicon-Hybrid Polymer(SHP), DRO Concepts’ rubber-like material provides a pleasant tactile feel while protecting your iPhone3G with the same toughness a tortoise shell brings to protecting its owner. The custom-designed case for both 8GB and 16GB models has a great grip and provides more resistance to tearing and stretching than standard silicon. Intelligent openings offer complete access to all of the iPhone 3G features.

Right in the price-pocket for quality iPhone cases at $20, the Tortoise Skin comes with one D-shield screen protection film (also sold separately for $7) and is offered in your choice of seven understated Pantone™ colors.

Apple’s new 24″ LED Cinema Display suffers the fatal flaw of “ridiculous, terrible glare,” according to Jason Snell, editor of Macworld, who informed his Twitter followers Monday he’s putting his monitor back in the box and returning it to Macworld Labs.

Snell has spent his professional career as a writer covering Apple and, despite the presumed objectivity of his position as the editor of one of the larger, more recognizable mainstream media brands associated with the Cupertino computer maker, likely wouldn’t give up on such a major piece of Apple hardware unless he felt it was poorly executed.

Snell, of course enjoys a luxury many consumers do not, in that he can give his display back to the magazine’s lab and not have to worry about its cost or the space it may take up sitting unused in a corner or on a shelf. Average folk who’ve bought Apple’s new display and discovered after using it for a time that the glare is unbearable have far fewer options for doing anything about it.

What about you, dear reader – how do you feel about Apple’s embrace of the glossy screen on its flagship display? Is it worse in the wild than the glossy notebooks’ display? Would you send it back to “the Lab” if you could?

Last week we wrote about a kind of silly competition going on out there in Mac land between people vying for the title for running the most apps simultaneously on a Mac.

Comes now, Cult reader Jay Pan, who figures all the buzz about people running OS X on hacked netbooks should entitle him to some consideration for managing to get 80 apps going with OS X running on an Advent 4211 ( MSI Wind Clone ), with both Blender and Daz3D launched.

“I’ve been trying to determine Atom’s performances with Mac OS X for some time now, and I think this shows Atom’s netbooks are not so crippled!” he told us.

So what do you think? Is Pan’s record in the same league with the 240 apps running on a Mac Pro 8 core machine? Should the judges create a special “netbook” category for the dubious “Busy Mac” honor?

Follow after the jump for Pan’s hardware specs and list of apps running, and be sure to click on the image above for a larger view.

PhotoCanvas, a new image editing app from Big Canvas, Inc. could make Apple’s eventual decision to enable MMS functionality on the iPhone and iPod Touch a moot point.

While many have decried the iPhone’s inability to easily send photos and graphic images in text messaging, a relative few in the US may be aware of Big Canvas’ flagship application, PhotoShare, the free service that allows users to stay connected with their private or public networks through visual social networking.

With a few simple touches users can easily take images captured through daily life and distribute them to all PhotoShare users or to family and friends. After its release in July 2008, PhotoShare quickly became a “must-have” social networking application in Japan, where consumers are already familiar with an always-connected lifestyle, generating over a quarter million comments and photos per month.

Now PhotoCanvas joins a line-up of three other Big Canvas apps that let users personalize photos taken on the go with the iPhone and iPod Touch and, with PhotoShare, enjoy sharing them with others as easily as if they sent them in a text message.

“We are still in the very early stage of a true ‘mobile computing’ era enabled by the iPhone,” Satoshi Nakajima, CEO of Big Canvas told us. “The mobile phone started as a voice communication device, and evolved into a text-based communication device with SMS (texting). This is the beginning of the ‘visual communication’ era, and the large number of photo applications on the AppStore are proof of this.”

Unlike some of the more sophisticated photo editing apps that have shown up, such as Light and Photonasis, PhotoCanvas is a simple, easy to use tool for adding backgrounds, frames, text and drawing to an image, taking the everyday and turning it into something unique for sharing with others, using a few simple taps and strokes on the iPhone’s touch interface.

Creations can be saved to the iPhone’s camera roll and uploaded on the go to a user’s PhotoShare account, where family, friends, and other PhotoShare users can comment and respond to an image, creating an interactive, visual communication experience.

“One of the great things about PhotoShare is people share images in real time – it’s like a visual version of Twitter,” Nakajima told us. “It’s clear to me that the number of users who will edit their photos on mobile phones will eventually exceed the number of PhotoShop users on PC. PhotoCanvas is the beginning of our serious attempt to participate in this innovation.”

PhotoCanvas offers a number of preset backgrounds and photo frames that can be customized with drawing and text rendered in 48 colors and two dozen font faces, all of which are accessed and applied through an easy-to-use, intuitive UI that makes good use of Apple’s mobile platform design.

Available now in the AppStore for $1.99, PhotoCanvas is a great complement to the free PhotoShare service for anyone wanting to add some flair to their visual communication on the go.

Steve Jobs’ worst-case scenario is about to come true.

From the earliest days of the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple sought to assure consumers its mobile devices would not become handheld smut emporiums, and yet the adult entertainment industry began steadily chipping away at such promises almost as soon as they were made.

Comes now Variah, with a brand new mobile “gaming” app exclusively for jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touch that lets users interactively touch, strip and stroke beautiful models to climax.

Apple’s mobile devices are soon enough going to be definitely NSFW, and we’re not talking anything near as tame as iBoobs, either, let me tell ya.

Variah’s UFookMe app not only offers interaction, it also scores players on foreplay technique, the number of erotic surprises they discover and the quality of climax achieved.

The first title, UFookTanya, features porn star Tanya James, a tall, blonde, girl-next-door who definitely reveals more than anything you’ll see in even the AppStore’s relatively risqué apps, such as iGirl or Wobble.

A brave new world is coming for iPhone and iPod Touch users and some of it will be clothing optional. Ҭ

AP Photo/Mark Duncan

One mayor of a small town in Kentucky devastated by a killer winter storm last week ended up using his iPhone to communicate vital emergency and disaster recovery information to the citizens of his community.

“I wish I could say I had some great epiphany I was going to use this to communicate with my citizens, but I didn’t,” said Madisonville Mayor William Cox, who charged his iPhone in his car to keep his messages flowing. “I just got my phone out and started typing, and I haven’t stopped.”

Cox used the iPhone to log into his Facebook account and posted rapid-fire updates to let his constituents know what was going on:

“Will is glad to report that power in parts of the South Main and Grapevine areas is back on. Slowly but surely …,”

“Will asks people with frozen water meters to PLEASE not use a torch or build a fire inside the meter box. This WILL damage the cutoff and meter!”

“Will was just advised by the Hopkins County School System that there is NO school on Monday or Tuesday.”

At the height of the ice storm, more than 1.3 million homes and businesses were left without power in several states, and thousands still don’t have it back. The storm knocked out landline phones and forced some cell phone companies onto backup generators. In many cases, wireless Internet worked when cell phones didn’t get through.

Wonder if Mayor Cox would have reached more or fewer constituents using Twitter?

Thanks to reader JayDee for the tip

Even after 25 years of Mac, Apple is growing like a high-tech start-up, according to Forbes magazine.

An upcoming issue of the venerable business and money magazine places Apple at #14 on its annual list of the 25 fastest growing tech companies of the past year, which is quite a feat for a company as large as the Cupterino computer maker.

To make the list, companies must have latest 12-month revenues of $25 million or more, annualized sales gains of at least 10% over the past five years and a profit over the past 12 months. In addition, a company must have a long-term consensus profit-growth forecast of at least 10%, annualized.

Surprizingly, this is the first time Apple has made the list since Forbes began publishing it in 2003, but even more remarkably, many of the other companies on it are tiny in comparison to the House that Jobs built.

With revenues of $33 billion per year, Apple is 60 times bigger than No. 1 on the list, biotech tool-maker Illumina (ILMN), and nearly 500 times bigger than No. 5, semiconductor designer Techwell. Apple has grown at an annualized rate of 40% per year over the past five years.

The only other company of Apple’s size on the list – Google, with revenues nearing $22 billion and growing at the rate of 72% a year, good enough for the #2 spot.

See the full list here.

Via Fortune

JAJAH, a leading IP telecommunications company, further blurred the lines between iPhone and iPod touch Thursday by announcing a new service aimed at businesses and other telecommunications carriers who want to provide their customers with the ability to make low-cost phone calls and send SMS text messages to any phone in the world from an iPod Touch.

The white label service, which will allow carriers and non-carriers alike to enable VoIP calling with just an iPod Touch and a WiFi connection, could soon see any number of offerings crop up in the AppStore promising Touch users the ability to turn their device into a fully functioning mobile phone.

JAJAH’s platform features a full suite of telecom management services, from termination of the calls and quality control, to billing and processing payments in 200 countries around the world.

“Millions of people around the world already have an iPod Touch in their pocket. With JAJAH’s solution, any company can turn their customers’ iPod Touch into a fully functioning mobile phone,” said Trevor Healy, CEO, JAJAH. “The device is particularly popular amongst students, who live in a world where Wi-Fi access is always available and, like everyone, they are looking to save costs, so this is a perfect solution.”

One wonders whether AT&T and iPhone’s other exclusive global cell carriers can read the writing on the wall.

Google’s Book Search Project launched mobile editions of its 1.5 million book virtual library Thursday, immediately turning iPhone and iPod Touch into compelling options for those looking for a good eReader.

Of course handy free apps for Apple’s mobile devices, such as Stanza and eReader have already established iPhone and iPod Touch as viable competitors to Amazon’s pricy Kindle and even more costly next-gen readers such as those from iRex and Plastic Logic.

Even those apps, however, are predicated on the idea of consumers buying “books” to read on their mobile devices, and offer access to something like 50 – 60 thousand titles. Google has opened the doors to a library with over a million and a half public domain books, a catalogue that’s growing as fast as Google’s scanners can scan, and the reading is free.

Free is always compelling.

Check out this cool video from Stimulant, the San Francisco design house and creator of XRay, an app that takes the awesomeness of Microsoft’s Surface and the amazing abilities of the iPhone and creates something rather stunning.

From the Stimulant desciption:

What you see here is a prototype that takes advantage of Surface’s object recognition capabilities to recognize the position of one or more iPhones on the Surface, and allows those phones to “see through” the images and reveal a second layer of information.

The possibilities here are fairly extensive; what’s most interesting is the potential for adding a layer of personalized information on top of a public computing experience.

This could enable users to capture content and take it with them, or to have the system display a personalized information layer (translated text/larger-print type/private messages) for individual users of a multi-user system.

iPhone was the first mobile platform we dug in to, but we’ve also got XRay working on Android-based and Windows Mobile-based phones as well.

Via Ars Technica

Independent Mac repair shops all over the world are rejoicing this week, after Apple’s announcment the company will phase out repair support for certain G4 machines, xserve products and other “vintage” and “obsolete” gear.

After March 17th, Apple will no longer provide service parts or documentation for the products listed after the jump, and the items will not be accepted as Mail-In Repairs to AppleCare Repair Centers.

It’s mighty kind of Apple to support the Apple repair ecosystem this way, and yet gives incentive to the consumer to buy new gear at the same time.

Sheer brilliance.

Via AppleInsider, via MacMerc

The guys at Rapid Repair report success modifying an iPod Video 5G with a Toshiba MK2431GAH drive, creating the world’s first 240GB iPod.

“The mod is actually very simple to do on a 5th gen iPod. And with a 240GB iPod you can finally carry your entire $57,667.50 iTunes library” Rapid Repair CEO Ben Levy said in an email.

The Toshiba drive is only compatible with the iPod Video 5G and original iPod Video (30GB, 60GB and 80GB ONLY). Rapid Repair hopes to add the iPod Classic and Zune 2G to the compatible list very soon.

Ready to take the plunge? Looks like it will cost you just slightly more than a buck a gig.

Via methodshop

Lim Ding Wen, a nine-year-old from Singapore, has written a free art application for iPhone, called Doodle Kids. The app has been downloaded more than 4000 times since its release on Feb. 1.

While many kids his age are content to simply play games on the iPhone or PSP, Ding Wen is all about programming in ActionScript and JavaScript. He also understands five other programming languages and is already hard at work on his next app, a game called “Invader Wars.”

Ding Wen’s efforts stem from his father’s devotion to the Apple IIGS, which he calls “one of the best computers Apple had ever produced.” His dad maintains a website “to bring back the fun and excitement of Apple IIGS programming for all the young children,” with sample codes and a Virtual GS disk available for download.

Kids today. Kind of gives one hope for tomorrow.

Via Engadget

When the comfortably semi-retired co-founder of one of the hottest high-tech entrerprises of the past ten years goes back to work, it’s news – whether he’s called by opportunity, need, or just plain desire.

Steve Wozniak is going back to work – at a storage start-up he says he’s joining because ” I like the people and the product, and … I would like some greater involvement.”

Fusion-io is backed with investment from Dell, and has distribution agreements in place with the Texas hardware maker as well as with HP and IBM, according to a report in the NY Times.

It’s said in times of greatest crisis there is greatest opportunity, so I’m inclined to take Woz at his word when he says, “I think I have a better place at smaller companies looking at new ideas.”

via [gizmodo]

Cult reader James moves to the head of the pack in the incredible contest to see how many apps can be running on your Mac and displayed on your desktop in all their juicy, chaotic goodness by Exposé.

James’ machine is Mac Pro 8 core, with 10GB RAM, 30″ NEC 3090 monitor, and 2 1TB Samsung drives raided together. He has a lot of high end apps running, including all of Final Cut Studio, all of Adobe Creative Suite CS 3 Design Premium, all of Office 2008, all of iWork 08, Google Earth, Windows XP and Crunch Bang Linux in virtual box , Sling Player, Filemaker xcode and mmaannyyy more.

“I got to the point where it started giving an error code and would not launch any more apps,” he told us. “When I tried to screen shot it refused, so I had to quit an app before I could make a screen shot.”

Click on the image to see the original size and find he’s also got Open Office, Think Free Office, Eclipse IDE, a 22 mega pixel image from a Canon 5K Mark II (the ship), Proxi, Sketch Up, Sketch Book education, Skype, Gizmo, Gridiron Flow beta, eBay desktop, Acquisition, Adium, Firefox, Safari, iPhone Simulator…

He thinks there are about 240 apps running in all, but says, “I reckon the Pro could take another 100 if the OS would allow it — maybe snow leopard.”

Follow afer the jump for screen shots of James’ Activity Monitor.

The much-maligned iPhone camera keeps getting more awesome software written to enhance the things you can do with it.

Last week I wrote about Light, something to give your pics a pro touch, there’s another one I’ve been playing with coming out of embargo shortly and the latest is an app called TimeLapse, which lets you time a photo to be snapped as infrequently as every 24 hours, or as often as every 10 seconds, which is about as fast as the phone can snap and store a image in the camera roll.

Once you’ve collected your pics, you can easily dump them into iMovie or QuickTime Pro and make a simple time lapse movie.

You can also set a delay to allow the photographer to get in the frame for a group photo. And TimeLapse works as a rudimentary surveillance camera, too. While it’s running, a display lists when it started, the time of the last picture taken and the approximate time of when it will stop.

A happy early adopter has a handy tutorial here.

Now you can go make a movie and get famous like that guy Matt. Well, not exactly, but what do you want from a camera phone?

Via TUAW

You may know there are now 2,345 fart-oriented applications on the iTunes AppStore, but were you aware of the growing number of ways the iPhone and iPod Touch can help you keep track of your own or (more likely) your mate’s menstrual cycle?

Yes, Apple’s amazing mobile device can help you keep your relationship together, plan a family, or just avoid unnecessarily broken household objects.

Choices include:

* the free uPMS, an app directly aimed at guys “suffering the monthly Pychotic Mood Shifts from their better halves;”

*PMS Tracker, which, for a buck lets a user quickly track the approximate time each woman in his/her life will have PMS, using a green, orange, red coding system to indicate the likelihood of turbulence on any given day;

* iPeriod is an app aimed at busy women who need a little assist with “doctors appointments, event planning, and knowing when to leave the house prepared,” which could be a handy little $4 tool. It even predicts a user’s next 12 periods, fertile days and ovulation windows;

* another $4 app, MyMate seeks to help the sensitive man “organize information [he] frequently needs but can never remember.” It calculates period and ovulation days for up to six months and also provides means for tracking favorite color, song, perfume, “Don’t Likes,” gift ideas and sizes (with convenient European conversions);

*the high-end Woman Calendar is a $10 tool for family planning that logs biological data including cycle days, basal body temperature, ovulation dates, weight, and other customized personal records. It’s got a module for journaling and allows a user to export data from a date range to a CSV file for backup and use with other desktop applications. Comes with password protection or data security;

* last, but not least is IAmAMan, the $2 “private life planner” that lets a user stay abreast of the cycle probabilities for several women. The record and existence of each person tracked is password protectable, so no one need find out who or how many people a user is tracking, and it has a handy click-to-call feature that dials a woman up just by tapping her name.

That’s just a quick round up of a few apps I found after reading about PMS Buddy a web app that’s reasonably popular on Facebook and reportedly headed to the AppStore.

As these things go, there are likely more coming down the pike.

Via Cnet

Not long ago, I reviewed Altec Lansing’s expressionist CLASSIC PC speakers and found them great value for the money. After listening to them for a while beyond the publication of that review, I still loved the sound quality from those $80 speakers but found myself wishing for a little more oomph on the bottom end.

Well, I should have known Altec had already thought of that. Ingeniously engineered into the small-footprint housing of their Expressionist BASS computer speakers, powerful 4″ (100mm) long-throw subwoofers deliver all the lows that are typically missing from the little speakers you find sitting on desks all over the world.

Of course, you could spend lots of money on high-fidelity audio components for a computer set-up, which in many cases would include a separate subwoofer that sits at your feet or hides somewhere nearby, effectively dispersing the low frequency signals you need to get a truly rich audio experience on the computer. Altec Lansing has managed to put that all together for you in a pair of attractive desktop cones that are super easy to hook up and sound great without breaking the bank.

Twin 1 ½” drivers deliver mid and high frequencies so vocals and details come through with the clarity you expect from the company’s long history as a quality speaker manufacturer, and the sub-drivers in each speaker really do provide that punch-in-the-head color you want from your online gameplay, movie watching and YouTube browsing. They also have an auxiliary input for conveniently connecting portable CD, DVD, and MP3 players.

To get the most out of these speakers I had to play around with the EQ in my iTunes app to correct for their increased bass response, but once I got everything balanced the way I wanted it, I found I could actually listen to all sounds from my computer at a lower overall volume than previously and now, two weeks into using them, I find I actually mute the computer volume quite a bit less than I used to, and I work with music on in the background more as well.

For $130, Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass computer speakers could help you come to love computer audio.

Iotum is taking its innovative Calliflower conference calling application mobile with a free application for iPhone and iPod Touch on Apple’s iTunes AppStore, the company announced Tuesday.

Calliflower makes organizing and participating in multi-party calls simple and engaging by allowing participants to see the status of other callers, and features interactive chat, intuitive conference controls, recordings, call archives, invitations and reminders, integration with calendars, and more.

“We’re liberating Calliflower conference calling from the desktop and extending all of its features to the world’s most powerful mobile device,” says Iotum CEO Alec Saunders. “We had to reread some of the iPhone’s UI requirements in order to get Apple to approve the app, but we feel it faithfully recreates on the mobile platform what over 200,000 users have come to appreciate about the web-based app.”

One useful feature of the web app that won’t be found (yet) on the iPhone is Calliflower’s document-sharing functionality. “It’s Flash-based,” Saunders told us, “so we’ll have to wait for Flash on the iPhone before we get document sharing.”

Users can create a new Calliflower account directly from the free app on the iPhone, or existing Calliflower users can simply log in using their current Calliflower account.

This could get ugly. Seems there’s a bit of a competition going on out there over how many apps one can get running simultaneously, as reported by Gizmodo.

Last spring, some guy reported running 150 on a 2.2ghz MacBook Pro,, which was quickly challenged by some clown running 108 on Vista (huh?).

Now, we get the new champ, whose mark has been set on a 20-inch 2007 iMac, with a 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo and 4 Gigabytes of RAM. Makes for a kind of interesting showcase for Exposé, I guess.

How about you? How many apps do you run simulataneously on your Mac?

Via Gizmodo

Does one cheer Alesis for coming up with the TapeLink USB or ask, “what took you so long?”

The TapeLink USB is a dual-well cassette deck designed to digitally archive audio. The device allows users to transfer cassette recordings onto a hard disk, flash memory, CD or iPod. Connection to a computer is provided via USB, with support for 16-bit, 44.1 kHz CD-quality recordings. Two different dubbing modes support either normal or high-speed dubbing. The deck also features full auto-stop capability to keep irreplacable old tapes from breaking. It works with metal or CrO2 tapes and features on-board LEDs for visual reference to sound levels.

The device comes bundled with three different apps to assist in archiving: SoundSoap Standalone Edition (SE) for reduction of background noises such as room noise and electrical hum; Audacity, a lean, clean, excellent piece of audio-editing software; and EZ Tape Converter to assist with transfers.

TapeLink USB is compatible with Mac OS X and carries an estimated street price of $200.

Really, what did take so long?

Via electronista

In a world wth iPod docking stations on offer from what seems like thousands of different companies, the stylish XIS100 iPod Docking Station from Xantech is the first such product designed for the high-resolution television revolution.

It features a unique component video output capability that will let owners of the new 480P video output iPods see their video in full native resolution on a plasma, LCD or other compatible TV screen with component video output. It also features the full iPod menu on its screen and offers full on-board browsing.

The XIS100 is compatible with all current iPods and comes with a 15 button remote with chrome finish. The dock station with touch panel also features an On-TV menu display for music and video navigation.

Support for English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German and Russian; no info yet on exact availability date or price.

Via Slippery Brick

Image © Chris Chan

Apple Retail Stores’ same-store revenues – a key retail metric comparing sales of stores open for at least a year – fell 17.4% in the December quarter from a year earlier, according to a report at Barrons. That should come as no huge surprise, given the economic contagion sweeping the globe.

What’s interesting about the report, originally issued by Needham hardware analyst Charlie Wolf, is that Apple also turned in an extremely impressive sales-per-square-foot performance of $4700 for the year, highest among electronic retailers by far. Foot traffic at Apple’s brick and mortar emporiums was only down 1.8%. , indicating the computer giant’s products retain a certain cache for beleaguered consumers, who remain interested to touch and play with the bright and shiny things in Apple Stores, even if they can’t afford to buy them at previous rates.

This is why we use Macs. Well, it’s one reason, anyway.

There’s always a lot of talk in the blogosphere how one day Macs will no longer be impervious to computer viruses and malware, but every time there’s a real-world example of a computer network going down due to some kind of security issue or DOS attack, it seems PCs are the machines that get hit and Macs are the machines that keep going and going.

A computer virus hit the Vancouver school district on January 7, forcing 10,000 PCs off-line so district IT staff could wipe them clean, an arduous undertaking that, three weeks later, remains unfinished.

An online student forum by Point Grey secondary students identified the virus as Win32.Krap.b trojan, a bug that affects mostly Windows operating systems, shutting down computers as soon as users try to start them. Vancouver School Board spokesman David Weir said each of the district’s Windows machines were shut down, taken off the network and are being individually scanned and repaired as necessary. The project has caused major disruption throughout the school system, and frustration among teachers and students alike.

The report in the Vancouver Sun describing the situation noted that a Macintosh computer lab funded by the Parents Advisory Group at one school in the district was unaffected by the problem. Smart parents of the kids at that school.

Via Edible Apple