TikiJon.com

Have you ever wanted to copy or convert your personal collection of DVDs for backup or easy viewing on your Apple TV, only to be thwarted by CSS encryption? I feel your pain, and so do the good folks at Metakine. Lucky for us, Fairmount is here to help, and it’s free!

CSS, or Content Scramble System, is an approach used by most DVD manufacturers as a way to prevent unauthorized copies and unlicensed playback of DVD content. Unfortunately for consumers, this kind of digital rights management can be cumbersome for those who want to take advantage of their fair use rights. Fairmount makes setting aside this type of DRM extremely easy.

Fairmount works together with the VLC Media Player to decrypt your mounted DVD and replace it with a unencrypted disk image. It’s really simple to do. With a DVD mounted, just launch the Fairmount application and it will automatically and transparently hand off the decryption to VLC and then begin mounting a new decrypted image of the disk.

Once the DVD is decrypted, and the new disk image is mounted, you can then save the video files on to your network, convert them for playback on other devices, or burn the image back to a disk. The decryption is very fast and the exchange with VLC happens completely in the background. You even get a nice animation as the mounted DVD is smeared over with cream cheese, “Bagels are good!”

If you’re planning on burning the image to DVD, the Fairmount download comes bundled with another application from Metakine called DVDRemaster which will let you do just that. If you’re just interested in converting files for viewing on your Apple TV, iPhone, or iPod, I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend an excellent and free application called HandBrake.

Fairmount, VLC, and HandBrake are all free applications released under a General Public License. DVDRemaster is available in both standard and pro versions for $39.99 and $49.99, respectively.

Slowly but surely, push notification apps are trickling into the App Store, as you can see from this handy little list by AppAdvice.com. Some of them are less than impressive, since they offer strange niche functions that I could never picture myself actually using. Beejive IM came out last week, though, which has become by far my most-used app since, and now Remember The Milk (Free with RTM Pro account, iTunes link) is available, as of today, with push features.

A to-do app with push might just be the thing I need to get me to buckle down and actually use a to-do app with some kind of consistency. Sure, RTM for the iPhone requires that you have a Pro account with their service, which is a $25-a-year subscription, but I actually already have one from when the app was first released. Yes, I signed up many months ago and haven’t exactly taken great advantage of that subscription since, but version 1.1.0 gives me reason to believe I may actually begin to get my money’s worth.

The problem, for me, with to-do apps (whether they be desktop, web-based, or iPhone apps), is that for them to actually work, you kind of have to check them consistently. Sure, most allow you to send email alerts when a task’s due date is approaching, but my email comes in with such frequency that it’s very easy for a task reminder or two to slip through the cracks as I tackle more urgent messages. Now, RTM for iPhone will send me push notifications in the form of text alerts whenever a task’s due date is approaching, at a time determined by me that I set up via the web through my account settings. Audio alerts are oddly omitted from this version, but developers say that the addition is included in the next update.

Is it worth the $25 price of admission, when there are probably one-time purchase apps with similar features on the way as we speak? That depends on your to-do tasking practices. If, like me, you like the added convenience of having your list accessible from any Internet-connected platform (and offline, too, via Google Gears), then RTM, with its attendant free iPhone app, might be what you’re looking for. You could also hold out for Appigo ToDo’s push features, which are included in an update that’s already been submitted to Apple. Either way, if you’re looking for some way to get things done more efficiently, this implementation of Apple’s push could be the most practical yet.