I’ve been posting a bit to my friend Victor Cajiao’s excellent blog and podcast at TypicalMacUser.com. I’ve got to support Victor since he is from Riverside, California and I grew up just down the street in Ontario. Anyway, you can read several of my ramblings over there including:
The Birth of a Windows Dummy
OmniFocus Impressions
The New Candy
I’ve started doing an occasional opinion piece for my friend Steve Stanger on TheMacAttack podcast. I did my first installment in episode 81 that released today. For my first recording for Steve, I expanded a bit on my opinions of the Kindle and Sony readers. As I’ve blogged before, I think the combination of DRM and no proper annotation leaves these products in the category of “toys” more than “tools”.
Having publicly said that, I heard Andy Ihnatko (whom I think is both hilarious and much more tech-savvy than myself) extolling the virtues of his review Kindle. Andy’s praise aside, my opinion still hasn’t changed. I still don’t think those products are ready for use until I can put material on the machine as easy as I can my Mac and annotate it as easily as I can with my pencil. When they pull that off, I’ll be first in line.
Don’t get me wrong. I like TimeMachine for backups. It has already saved my bacon in ways SuperDuper can not. Yet . . . alas . . . there is a part of me that can not help wistfully thinking about that bootable backup. I’ve resorted to stalking the ShirtPocketSoftware website waiting for that Leopard release. Anyway, this has inspired me to Haiku
Man . . . I really shouldn’t post after 14 hour days in the office.
Continue readingThere are a few entrepreneurial folks out there looking to cash in on your Mac Geekery. Specifically, InsantelyGreatTees has a variety of Mac-centric shirt including, among others, one with a 30 year timeline of Mac history and another humorously called “It Never Happened” with just a big Command-Z.
Of course, if you are feeeling fiesty, FakeSteveJobs is peddling a shirt that says, “Everytime you buy a Dell, a baby seal dies.” Now THAT is poetry.
Parallels has worked in Leopard but not been entirely consistent. I noticed today that a new beta was released that was supposed to give better Leopard compatability. I installed it without event and am running it now with no excitement. It seems to be a bit more stable than the prior build. I’ll keep you posted.
Continue reading
I don’t watch a lot of television but once in awhile something grabs me. About 3 months ago I started renting the DVDs for HBO’s Rome from my local Blockbuster. I finished the last one recently. Rome is, essentially, a 20 hour miniseries following the rise and assassination of Caesar and the following power plays that led to the rise of Augustus. This is not a show to watch with kids or the faint of heart. There is blood, gore, nudity and sex. More than once, my wife asked me, “exactly what kind of movies are you renting Dave?”
I thought the acting was very good. Back in school I read the writings of Cicero and had a great deal of respect for him. The actor did such a good job of portraying him in a negative light that I’m going to have to re-read Cicero again. The production not only related the doings of great men but also the common people of the age. The DVDs have a feature where a historian will occasionally pop in a little text blurb to explain some historical fact related to the story that I found very interesting and educational.
Anyway, if you are comfortable with the very adult themes and content, you may want to give it a try.
I’ve posted before, along with pestering friends and fellow geeks, with my big MacSparky problem since moving it to its own server. Specifically, I was dead to Google (and every other search engine). I knew this must be a simple problem but it was a bit disheartening to see that little box in my web stats that shows nobody was stumbling upon my ramblings with a search engine. The good news was that I still have a pretty good following of people that carry my feed and the numbers were still pretty acceptable. Maybe that is why it took me so long to get to the root of it.
Regardless, through a friend I talked to someone at Google and they were baffled. I wrote several emails to my hosting provider, Dreamhost, to which they very nicely told me it may just because my content isn’t that good. Well, THAT most certainly could not be the problem.
Last night I had some time on my hands and decided I was going to go through every line of every menu on my Wordpress settings and sure enough, buried deep inside, there was a check box called “Privacy” with a big ugly check next to it. I know I never set that but, alas, there it was. I unchecked it and this morning I find that MacSparky.com is no longer one great big black hole in the internet and people are actually finding me again. So there you have it, operator error at the root of my problems . . . again.
I’m going to do a series of posts on some of my favorite menubar applications. I thought I’d start with Jumpcut. Jumpcut is an application that provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history.
In addition to pulling your text snippets off the menubar, it also can pop them up inside your document with a bezel activated by CNTRL-Option-V.
This app is really helpful when writing just about anything and free! Check it out.
I’ve written before about how much I love this little application that makes sure you have the most current version of your software applications. They have announced that it is now fully Leopard compliant although I must admit I used the prior version in Leopard with no problems.
Continue reading
I’ve been helping a switcher friend get up to speed on the Mac. One resource I gave him was TUAW’s Mac 101 series. He reports these entries have been really helpful to him so I thought I’d share it here. Head on over to Mac 101 and I guarantee you’ll learn a thing or two.
Continue reading