I don't often write articles here just to rant about products I don't like, or that don't work, but today I want to make an exception. About a year and a half ago, I bought three Belkin UPSs (uninterruptible power supplies) to protect the Macs in my home office. I have a Mac Pro, and my wife and son have iMacs. Out of the three UPSs I bought, I had to return one because it simply didn't work, and now a second one has stopped working - when power cuts (which happens occasionally here in the country) it just goes BZZT and my Mac Pro restarts.

While I got the first one exchanged (a process that took about two months), I'm not going to even bother to get the second one exchange. Belkin has shown me that these products are crap, and that their customer service is slow and inefficient. So this is just a warning - if you need a UPS to protect your computer (something I'd recommend in most cases) buy from a different company. I've just ordered an APC unit to replace my Belkin, but I don't know if that works any better. In any case, Belkin is crap. (To be fair, they make some very good products, but not UPSs.)

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Daniel Barenboim owns Beethoven! Watching this set of DVDs and listening to his magnificent performances shows why Barenboim is clearly the pre-eminent performer of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. While many will disagree - after all, there are countless recordings by dozens of performers - what comes through after seeing these recitals is the deep familiarity that Barenboim has with the music. Playing these sonatas for some fifty years, they have become a part of him.

This set contains a series of eight recitals that Barenboim performed in Berlin in 2005, together comprising all 32 of the sonatas. Each recital lasts about an hour and a quarter or an hour and a half, and contains four sonatas, early, middle and late. The programs themselves work well, but any selection of sonatas played by Barenboim would be fine. The camera work is among the best I've seen for this type of performance; there are enough different camera angles to keep it from repeating itself, and the intensity of watching Barenboim perform is enough to trump the limits of such filming. The sound, in PCM stereo or Dolby Digital 5.1; the surround mix is excellent.

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For those who weren't around or listening to music in 1979, it's hard to imagine how different the world of "popular" music was. Critics and retailers hadn't fragmented music into the many genres you see today in stores, and many of today's genres didn't even exist. Rap was taking its first steps, ambient and electronic music were considered avant-garde, new age was just budding, and punk and disco were battling it out in the record bins. New wave was just following in the footsteps of punk, as progressive rock was in its final death throes.

Amidst the punk and new-wave music that came out of England, as part of the late-'70s independent music scene, was a now-legendary record label based in Manchester: Factory Records. Its first two groups were Joy Division (which, after the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, morphed into New Order) and The Durutti Column, but Factory released many other records by little-known groups, and the Factory concept, together with other independent labels in the UK, such as Rough Trade, revitalized a moribund music scene.

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The Rest is Noise
Alex Ross
640 pages. Farrar, Strauss, Girous, 2007. $30

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“Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” said French poet Charles Péguy. This sentence, which begins chapter 11 of The Rest is Noise, may sum up the entire book, and the music of the twentieth century. Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker (and blogger: his web site is also called The Rest is Noise ) has written a comprehensive study of classical music after the 19th century, which looks less at the music itself than at the political and social context surrounding composers, as well as their inter-relations. Not that the music doesn’t count, but Ross focuses more on the “why” than the “what”.

Beginning with Richard Strauss conducting Salome in 1906, an event that “illuminated a musical world on the verge of traumatic change,” Ross sketches out the complex history of modern music. In what, at times, is more a series of articles than a single coherent narrative, Ross looks at all the main currents of musical thought and fashion, and gives the reader an excellent understanding of why certain composers wrote the music they did. For music does not exist in a vacuum; it depends on the cultural context of the times. Modernism didn’t just happen overnight, but can be seen as an organic result of what came before. From Wagner to Mahler, the seeds of twentieth-century music had been sprouting before the beginning of the century. Of course, no arbitrary boundary, such as a date, can separate musical styles, and Ross shows just how music evolved around the cusp of the twentieth century.

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Some time ago, Amazon.com began selling "Amazon shorts", short stories in a variety of formats (PDF, HTML and text) that cost a mere 49 cents. You can purchase hundreds of these stories, in just about every genre: science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, literature, and there are even nonfiction texts.

For example, you can get The Second Coming of Charles Darwin, by my friend James Morrow, who describes it as follows:

I wrote this satiric fable in hopes of adding a new and phantasmagorical wrinkle to the Darwin Wars, the ongoing conflict between religious conservatives and evolutionary thinkers over the source of our planet's biological diversity. The plot turns on Omar, a cyborg tortoise dispatched via time machine from a high-tech future to the Galápagos Islands of September 10, 1835. His audacious mission: to alter the local fauna so radically that, when Charles Darwin arrives seven days hence, he will never become inspired to father the theory of natural selection.

(While you're at it, check out Jim's astounding novel The Last Witchfinder!)

Amazon shorts is a great idea--e-stories of all kinds, available for a pittance and a few clicks. Authors include historian David McCullough, suspense author Jeffrey Deaver, sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, and many more. But first, do check out James Morrow's story; it's a brilliant satire/alternate history that raises many interesting questions.

In my latest article for Macworld, I explore the ins and outs of using album art with iTunes and on the iPod. Learn how to add album art, replace it, and manage it with these quick and easy tips. If you've ever wanted to get artwork on all your music files, this article will help you.

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite authors, Henry James. His stories of Americans abroad in the late 19th and early 20th century, and his fine-tuned characters, combined with a style of writing that is both luscious and flowing, make him one of the English language's great writers. An American who became a permanent expatriate (he moved to England, where he took British nationality shortly before his death), his life story resonates with me, an expat as well.

You can find out more about Henry James here and here, and you can find many editions of his novels in bookstores everywhere. My favorites are the Library of America editions, which feature all of his novels and stories (the final novel volumes have yet to appear, but the series will be complete in the near future).

If you've never read James, start with one of his shorter works: Daisy Miller, Washington Square or The Aspern Papers. The latter is one of my favorites; it's about an editor seeking some letters from a famous poet, and the imbroglio that he gets into; it contains a concentrated version of many of James' themes. Then try some of his longer works, Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl or Wings of the Dove. And don't forget that many of Henry's novels have been brought to the screen; while they don't capture his unique style of writing, they do well capture his stories. Try, for example, this film of The Golden Bowl, or this adaptation of Wings of the Dove.

I play go , and once a week I have a go lesson, which takes place via an online go server and over Skype. Usually, my MacBook Air gets about two hours' battery life when doing this, and after about fifteen minutes, gets quite hot and the fan goes up over 6000 RPM. Last night, I noticed that, following the recent firmware update, not only did I get much longer battery life (my lesson was about 2:45, and I had 7% battery left at the end), but also that the air was less hot, and the fan was running slower. I checked a couple of times, and the fan was around 4000 RPM; either because the Air was running cooler, or because the fan speed went up earlier to keep the temperature down.

I mentioned this to my friend Rob Griffiths, fellow Macworld contributor and hintmeister at Mac OS X Hints, and he remembered recently seeing a MacRumors forum thread discussing the idea of sending lower voltage to the MacBook Air's processors. He wondered if Apple hadn't done this in the firmware update; changed the amount of voltage the processors are using. It would have the same effects: longer battery life, less heat, and, as a consequence of the temperature, slower fan speeds (which also increases battery life). In fact, one poster said just that: "Reducing the voltage applied to the CPU will reduce the power consumption resulting in the CPU running cooler. This will allow the fan to run at a slower speed when under stress and it will help to reduce core shutdowns. Another benefit should be an increase in battery life."

If this is true, then Apple has done a great service to MacBook Air owners. It suggests that either they were sending too much power to the processors, or they realized that these processors could work with less power. If the latter is true, could this also be applied to other laptops? If any readers have thoughts on this, do chime in.