Over on my personal blog, I've written a little tutorial on getting Canon's superb Pixma MP640 – and probably other recent Wi-Fi Canon MFDs – to work with Snow Leopard; the installer doesn't like Mac OS X 10.6, but there's an easy, elegant solution. If you've been struggling with one of these printers, or are looking at buying a terrific-value printer/scanner/copier that you can use over Wi-Fi and need it to work with 10.6, head on over:

Use a Canon Pixma MP640 over Wi-Fi with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Go on have a look at your keyboard right now. It’s actually pretty scuzzy, isn’t it? There are all sorts of  cleaning products you can use to remove the grime from your keys, but today I opted for whatever I could scavenge from the dumping ground that is my desk, together with a baby wipe loaned from Mr Christopher Phin, MacFormat’s Deputy Editor (why he has a pack of baby wipes in his office drawer, when he has no babies - either in his drawer or elsewhere - remains a mystery, but let’s not go there right now).

The things I’ve learned today are:

1) The new style Apple keyboard is a lot easier to clean than the old style. See the picture above. As you can see, while I have two lovely glossy screen aluminium iMacs to play with I’ve got both an old style Apple keyboard, full of crevices and inaccessible areas, which is a veritable magnet for dust, and the other a new style Apple keyboard, which has an easy to clean surface from which you can just wipe over.

2) The only way to properly clean an old style Apple keyboard (short of putting it in the dish washer) is complete disassembly. However, for the time poor and effort shy, a cotton bud can get between the keys quite nicely.

3) I really need to tidy my desk.

Let's just stop for a sec, and wonder at how cheap, robust and convenient storage has become in just a few short years.

Today, you can buy an 8GB microSDHC card at Amazon for less than a tenner. At 11×15mm, it's the size of a fingernail, and because it's solid state, your data is pretty safe.

Think back to the days of 3½″ floppy disks. A back-of-a-fag-packet calculation suggests that, to store the same amount of data, you'd have to buy almost six thousand floppies, which would, when stacked, reach almost 60 feet high.

We can't, practically, show that here – it's just too tall – so we've had to spilt the floppies into eight little piles. Still: that's a hell of a lot of floppy disks, huh? The real kicker, though, is the price; you could easily spend £17,000 on that many floppy disks, whereas that 8GB microSDHC card was, remember, less than a tenner.

Now, we've had to fudge the figures a little. We've assumed that a floppy disk holds 1.4MB of data (and an 8GB card holds 8GB of data), whereas in reality, a little of that capacity will be lost to directories and the like. It's a small amount, but tiny differences multiply when we're talking about thousands of floppies. For scale, we've assumed that the figure is 5′ 10″. Hard science, this ain't, but it should give you an idea of the astonishing speed with which storage capacities have shot up at the same time that cost and form factor have shrunk rapidly.

How to catch an iPhone thief

An old article, but a good one. What I don't get though is why the police weren't interested? His iPhone had been stolen and he knew who had stolen it.

Natively, iTunes is capable of playing five types of audio file; MP3, AIFF, WAV, AAC and Apple Lossless. There are plenty of applications available that convert sound files encoded in other formats into iTunes-friendly tracks. For example, NCH Software's Switch is available for Intel and PowerPC Macs and is free for non-commercial use. The also-free X Lossless Decoder (XLD) boasts drag-and-drop simplicity and can convert your files into a variety of formats without losing metadata such as track numbers or album art. But there are ways of importing FLAC and Ogg files without re-encoding them at all.

To play FLAC files in iTunes, you need to download an application called Fluke. It's free (but you can make a voluntary donation), and is currently in version 0.1. Fluke installs new components for QuickTime, allowing multimedia applications that use the QuickTime framework to play FLAC files. After installing, you just restart iTunes and you can import FLAC tracks without converting them; just follow the instructions on the Fluke website. Fluke requires OS X 10.4 or above.

Unfortunately, FLAC tracks added to iTunes using Fluke lose some of their metadata, such as album art, but perhaps support for this will be added later. An already-available beta release of Fluke 0.2 ‘supports track numbers, is much faster and smarter, and will soon have a few neat new features,’ but this version no longer supports Tiger, and a little more work is needed before it's ready for a full release. An uninstaller is supplied with this beta version, which can also be used to uninstall Version 0.1 (quit out of iTunes before uninstalling).

To natively play Ogg Vorbis files, you must download a QuickTime component from Xiph.org. It works with Intel or PPC Macs, QuickTime 7 or above, and OS X 10.3.9 or 10.4 and later. Installation is a manual task, but a simple one. You just drag the components bundle into your Components folder, as instructed in the ReadMe file downloaded with XiphQT. With the new component installed, you can import your Ogg files into iTunes in the usual way. To uninstall XiphQT, simply drag it into the trash and empty.