MacOS

Amazon.com has opened up the second round of the beta phase for its unbox instand video streaming service called “watch now”. The unbox service enables you to rent and buy movies and TV shows from amazon through a download to your PC without the need to get the DVD shipped to you, or going to a DVD rental store. The amazon-unbox watch now feature is an additional way from amazon-unbox to make the service more attractive, allowing you to start watching instantly (the video gets streamed to your computer). You will need at least a 0.5Mbps DSL (down stream) connection to be able to use the service.

As of this morning they are still alowing new sign ups, but space is limited. Just go to the Amazon.com unbox page and on the upper, right hand side you’ll find the link (picture to the left) to sign up for the test.

I’ll be testing the service and will post an update on my findings.I am very curious to see how it will work on PC AND (!) Mac, as it was PC, Tivo, Xbox only before. You need the latest Flash version (v9) for your computer to be able to use the new watch now feature. The good news is that you also be able to continue to download movies (e.g. after buying them, not only renting them for a day…) and store them locally on your harddrive (this remains a PC & Tivo only feature).

Check out the new amazon unbox service and watch now!

Have you been using the Amazon unbox service before, in the incarnation of a video download service?

I just installed a program and kernel extension which allows me to mount a remote server over SSH as a “normal drive” under MacOS X. Nothing brand new, but I did some research and thought I share what I found out to speed up other people who might need this.

Here is a description of the project and what you can do with it from the project’s page:

MacFUSE implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X (10.4 and above). It aims to be API-compliant with the FUSE (File-system in USErspace) mechanism that originated on Linux. Therefore, many existing FUSE file systems become readily usable on Mac OS X. That said, MacFUSE has numerous user- and developer-visible interfaces that are specific to Mac OS X. The core of MacFUSE is in a dynamically loadable kernel extension.

Although MacFUSE has a completely different kernel-level implementation from Linux FUSE, it supports the FUSE specification well enough that many popular FUSE file systems can be easily compiled and made to work on Mac OS X–often out of the box. Examples of file systems that are known to work and were once tested (to varying degrees) include sshfs, ntfs-3g (read/write NTFS), ftpfs (read/write FTP), wdfs (WebDAV), cryptofs, encfs, bindfs, unionfs, beaglefs (yes, including the entire Beagle paraphernalia), and so on.

Do get you going you need to get three things: MacFUSE, SSHfs (to mount an external server over SSH) and the GUI for MacFUSE called MacFusion.

What is MacFusion?

MacFusion brings all sorts of information to your Mac in the form of files and folders displayed as just another “Volume” on your Mac desktop. Right now you can use this software to show a Secure Shell or Secure FTP share from another computer on your macs desktop, letting you manipulate the files on it as if they were on your own computer. MacFusion can also do the same for any File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, giving read/write FTP in the finder for the first time!

First you have to grab the installer and the SSHfs from from the Googe code page at: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ , actually this page.

After installing MacFUSE and SSHfs all you need is the GUI called MacFusion from here and you are all set.

There is a newer version of MacFusion under development (at the time of the publication of this post still beta!):

Macfusion2 project

Some other resources are:

FUSE and sshfs in OS X
Antoher GUI is called SecureRemoteDisk
Lifehacker – Geek to Live: Mount a file system on your Mac over SSH
Encrypted FS and file voult: encfsvault, ikrypt

Amazon.com unbox – watch now: Instant video streaming is coming to PC and Mac

MacFUSE: Mount remote server dirs over SSH protocol on MacOS X