January 31st, 2002
That's what the folks over in Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport seem to be thinking: they've taken to installing 802.11b wireless internet connectivity, a mouthful better known as Airport (or Wi-Fi), and come March 1st, it'll be accessible to all travelers passing through their concourse.—Continue reading....
February 1st, 2002
Entourage (Microsoft's email app that comes with Office v.X for Mac OS X) has some great features. The seemingly unlimited criteria and actions for rules (filters) makes managing vast quantities of email a breeze. Other features I particularly appreciate are the ability to link messages to contacts automatically, and to filter messages based on categories in your address book (for example, I keep email addresses I accept direct mail to in a category called Direct Mail OK, and with one filter I can move them into a single mailbox. Much better than creating dozens of individual rules).—Continue reading....
February 12th, 2002
You've heard the cliché: there are two types of businesses in this world, those that have lost data, and those that will. When 30 gigs of valuable corporate information pull a Houdini and you don't have current backups, there is an option besides chaining yourself into a vat of water: a data recovery service.—Continue reading....
February 14th, 2002
Bill Gates, that paragon of love, has suggested that people show their affection for each other this Valentine's Day by purchasing Microsoft software. Which, thinking about it, makes sense. After all, this is the company whose applications enabled the wonderful "I Love You" virus a couple of years ago. Nothing says "undying love" like wiping out your hard drive.—Continue reading....
November 12th, 2006
In what has to be the oddest story (to date) about the forthcoming Microsoft Zune is that Microsoft has agreed to play Universal Music Group (the music publishers) $1 per Zune sold. This is regardless of whether anyone ever adds a single Universal-published song to the Zune, ever. —Continue reading....
February 4th, 2007
Admit it: you're dreading the day it happens to you. The day you open up your laptop and instead of getting email, you're getting errors. When your Wi-Fi goes bye-bye. Yes, your internet connection has died, and you don't know how to survive.—Continue reading....
February 5th, 2007
Whew. My DSL is back and, more importantly, my servers are back too. It took some doing, though.—Continue reading....
February 10th, 2007
It would appear that Google's crack team of engineers has managed to solve an age-old quantum physics problem: can an object be in two places at once? The answer, according to Google Maps, is a resounding yes.—Continue reading....
March 3rd, 2007
I love taking pictures.—Continue reading....
March 26th, 2007
Wired.com just rolled out a new design, and in doing so, broke URLs that worked just a few hours earlier. Their Bruce Lee Lives On article which originally appeared at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,73022-0.html now returns a "Content Not Found". The new URL is at http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2007/03/bruce_lee0323.—Continue reading....
March 29th, 2007
I'm on a business trip for a couple of days, staying at a Hyatt. They offer wireless internet via a T-Mobile HotSpot ($10 for 24 hours). Alas, they block my ability to send email via my own server. As a security and spam-prevention measure, many of these hot spots (not just T-Mobile) will block you from connecting to any mail server other than their own. If you don't have a web-based mail interface (say, .Mac or Yahoo), or a company-provided VPN solution, you're screwed.—Continue reading....
May 11th, 2007
Media Rights Technologies and BlueBeat.com Issue Cease and Desist to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Real Networks 1—Continue reading....
May 15th, 2007
I still own and use Apple's first iPod Shuffle (the long, white one that holds 240 songs or a gigabyte of data). I find it extremely convenient for shuffling files (not music) between machines, especially if there's no network available or the data is too big for email. I thought at the time that for $99, they were tantalizingly close to the give-away-the-device price-point, where you would, for example, buy a music album that came on the iPod Shuffle, not on CD.—Continue reading....
May 24th, 2007
A few months back at my irregular vision checkup, I learned something that every woman I've met has known: I'm color-blind. Not severely, mind you, but enough that I'm unable to distinguish the number in the image to the side.—Continue reading....
June 5th, 2007
Irony alert: Movable Type today released a beta of the fourth version of their "publishing platform". Unfortunately, the warning they give users that they—Continue reading....
June 5th, 2007
Six Apart released a beta of Movable Type 4 today. As I've installed just about every blogging/CMS tool out there (and Movable Type was one of the first ones I ever used), I figured I'd give it a shot. Unfortunately, a mere 90 seconds after attempting the install, I've decided MT will never again be the top dog in the blogging tool world, for one simple reason:—Continue reading....
June 25th, 2007
Not sure how I should react. The unprofessionalism of that name shocks me, and I keep looking to see if I'm misreading it.—Continue reading....
July 15th, 2007
I'm a huge fan of Netflix: it's great for catching old and new movies I've missed or love, and for catching up on entire seasons of TV shows (it's how I became addicted to Battlestar Galactica, for example). —Continue reading....
September 4th, 2007
Update: Now that Apple's updated GarageBand, you can make your own iPhone ringtones without any of the hackery below! Don't have GarageBand? It's part of iLife '08. It also comes for free with any new Mac, like the all-in-one 20" iMac.—Continue reading....
January 5th, 2008
There are two types of people in this world: those who've lost data, and those who will. I've lost more data than I'd like to remember, and tonight, thanks to luck and some forewarning, I believe I've managed to avoid a catastrophic failure.—Continue reading....
May 23rd, 2008
I love Netflix. I've been a subscriber for about two years (on the three-at-a-time, unlimited plan). I list the movies I currently have at home on this site, along with an ad for them (if you sign up from the ad I get a small commission). I even own a bit of Netflix (NFLX) stock (which has gone up about 37% since I purchased it a few months ago).—Continue reading....
June 5th, 2008
Losing data from your hard drive is easier than you think. You can delete it, run a magnet over it, drop it from great heights or just have a bad drive from a manufacturer that won't admit a problem.—Continue reading....
July 1st, 2008
If you live in California, you've been slammed over the head with ad after ad reminding you that July 1 starts the new "hands-free cell-phones while driving" law. And if you're like many Californians, you're running out to Radio Shack or Best Buy to pick up your Bluetooth headset today, instead of sometime in the last six months since you first heard it was coming.—Continue reading....
July 14th, 2008
A few weeks after getting a new computer, I still haven't set it up: I continue to use a MacBook Pro borrowed from work. It hasn't been a significant issue since a lot of what I do is in The Cloud™ and the rest is original creations. (If the stock market ever recovers, I'll recover the previous original creations.)—Continue reading....
July 15th, 2008
Tonight I had a problem with MobileMe's iDisk: I kept getting an "Error -35" while trying to access it, with a dialog that my "member name or password may be invalid". If I went to System Preferences > MobileMe, I was in fact logged in, so my credentials were indeed valid.—Continue reading....
