These articles appear in the Times Record each Friday in the Technology section.
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Date Title
12-30-05 New Year’s Resolutions for Emailers ... Here are some easy-to-succeed-at email resolutions that will make your personal computing world a better and safer place in 2006. Raise your mouse into the air with your right hand and repeat after me.
12-23-05 Peerless Prognostications: Two Steps Backward, One Step Forward ... I also mentioned the release of Windows “Longhorn” (now “Vista”) as coming in “2005 (2006?)”. The bovine-turned-beauty will be coming to PCs sometime in mid-to-late-summer-early-to-mid-fall-early-to-mid-winter 2006. Keep your fingers crossed.
12-16-05 Bill and Steve’s Very Different Christmases... Christmas Eve. A gentle snow is falling. The fireplace crackles and the sweet smells of cinnamon cider and sugar cookies fill the house. The rhythmic “thump-thump-thump” of pajama-covered feet bouncing about The Tree, its branches laden with tinsel and ornaments, its base surrounded by boxes and bows.
12-09-05 Microsoft Moves to Mold Model for “Mo Money”... Now, especially if you’re Microsoft, the most effective way to keep people from pirating your software is to not let them install it on their computers at all. But, Chairman Bill, you ask, “how do you keep the Microsoft coffers (which would make Solomon blush) full?”
12-02-05 The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same... Gates’ vision is to create three families of web services – “Windows Live” for consumers, “Office Live” for small businesses, and “Xbox Live” for entertainment and games.
11-25-05 Longing for a “Billboard-less” Information Superhighway ... The information superhighway, on the other hand, winds its way through an ever-thickening billboard jungle that is about to get thicker. To get a clear view of where the highway is going, let’s look in the rear view mirror and see where we’ve been.
11-18-05 Be Wary of Walls, Waves, and Wires When Working Wirelessly ... Before we get into that, let me offer a time-saving tip. Before you “deploy” your wireless network equipment all over your house, connect all the pieces, fire up the network, and see if everything’s working the way it should.
11-11-05 WEP, WPA, and Your “Wascally” Wireless Network ... Some people actually connect to their neighbors’ networks instead of their own, and then wonder why “their” signal is not as strong as they’d hoped, or why there are unfamiliar names in their “My Network Places”.
11-04-05 The “Bits and Pieces” of Your Home WiFi Network ... Configuring the software is the most difficult part of the process. Different wireless routers use different software to configure and control the router. Some use software written specifically for the task. Others simply use your web browser to access the router’s internal controls.
10-28-05 Data Transfer: Just How Fast is “Fast”? ... So, what do you need to know about wireless networking in preparation for turning your home into a wireless “hotspot”? First, let’s talk a little about digital data transfer speeds between devices, be they computers, modems, or wireless antennas.
10-21-05 New PowerMac Math: Two Times Two Equals 69? ... This week Apple announced what many analysts believe to be the last revisions to the G5-and-G4-based PowerMacs and PowerBooks before “the change”.
10-14-05 Apple Gets “Lost” and “Desperate” With New iPod ... So, what do you do with a product that is as wildly successful as the iPod? You replace it, of course. Actually, you just make it better. This week Apple announced two new “full-size” iPod models. Size is, of course, relative, as both new models are smaller than their predecessors.
10-07-05 Care and Feeding of Your Portable Electronic Device ... Walk through any airport and you’ll see a veritable “Mos Eisley Cantina” of beings with futuristic modules strapped to their ears and earpieces for their music players and phones dangling almost to the floor. Some travelers have multiple devices around their waists, reminiscent of Batman’s Utility Belt.
09-30-05 Who’s the Worst Spam Offender? Look Next Door (Or in the Mirror) ... Today’s email chain letters seem more intent on informing me of the untold truths that I can’t discover through “the regular channels”. Here are a few of the fascinating things I’ve learned in the last year or so from email forwarded to me by friends and acquaintances.
09-23-05 .Mac Gets Bigger, Stronger – But There’s a Catch ... In response to the features these services offer, this week Apple “beefed up” .Mac. Subscribers now get 1 GB of mail/data storage (2 GB if you order the “Family Pack”), and the ability to create .Mac Groups.
09-16-05 The Beginning of the End of the Hard Drive? ... There’s another kind of memory out there, however, which is poised to fundamentally change the face of computing. It’s actually all around you already. In digital cameras, cell phones, “Jump Drives”, and personal digital music players like the iPod.
09-09-05 Apple Announces Official Beginning of Holiday Buying Season ... It’s the season when (for the last few years, anyway) technology companies from Tokyo to Redmond and Taipei to San Jose all call press conferences to announce that this year is THE year that their personal digital music players and online music stores will topple the industry-leading iPod and the iTunes Music Store (iTMS).
09-02-05 Preview vs. Reader Shootout, Round Two ... Preview’s resizing is better integrated into Mac OS X’s Quartz Extreme graphics engine. Resizing in Preview is “real-time”, while Reader lags behind and takes a fraction of a second to “catch up”.
08-26-05 The Great Apple Preview vs. Adobe Reader Shootout ... Before Preview came along, Mac users were stuck with what Adobe then called “Acrobat Reader”. Although Acrobat Reader displayed PDF files perfectly and had a lot of useful features, it was S-L-O-W. Really slow.
08-19-05 Did You Know There’s a Camera in Your Mouse? ... Today, of course, mice are even more high-tech. Gone is the rolling ball, replaced by a red light-emitting diode and a tiny camera. Yes, a camera. This camera takes 1,500 pictures every second of the surface the mouse is moving over.
08-12-05 What’s In A Name? Windows “Longhorn” Becomes “Vista” ... Incidentally, Whistler was the codename for Windows XP, and Blackcomb is the codename for the next-next generation of Windows (which, at the current rate, is due roughly around the time our sun is scheduled to supernova). But, I digress.
08-05-05 MacMaineiac Diet, Week 2 – Don’t Be A Browser Binger ... It’s pretty safe to say that the most-used application on today’s consumer computers is the web browser. All web browsers share a propensity to occasionally put on a little weight. But, they can’t help it – it’s built into their makeup - “in their genes” – so to speak.
07-29-05 Combat Computer Bloat With the MacMaineiac Diet ... Is your computer “overweight”? Without having to stay up all night, here’s some tips to keep your system “lean and clean”. I’m not talking about viruses, or malware like spyware and adware...
07-22-05 Slideshow Portability: You Oughta Be In Pictures ... Exporting to video gives you a lot of flexibility. You can choose to create video that will look great when played in full screen mode (at the expense of the resulting humongous file size), or opt for a smaller screen size and thence a file size that permits emailing or web viewing.
07-15-05 Packing Up Your Slideshow for the World to See ... The music rises with a swell, but not loud enough to eclipse the “oohs and ahhs” from your audience, as the final photo in your slideshow, showing the blazing sun setting over Popham Beach, dissolves into view. All your hard work has paid off, and you get the satisfaction of sharing your slideshow with others
07-08-05 Variety in Slideshows Both a Blessing and a Curse ... have you ever accidentally used salt instead of sugar in a recipe? Or perhaps used way too much of a certain spice? Your slideshow software may offer dozens of eye-catching, Hollywood-produced, cinematic transitions. That doesn’t mean you have to use every one in every slideshow.
07-01-05 Podcasting Hits the Mainstream in iTunes 4.9 ... The term is a concatenation of the words “pod” (as in iPod) and “broadcasting”, and is getting a lot of hype in the tech world right now. Here’s a quick primer so you can sound “hip” and “with it” amongst your tech-savvy friends (or kids or grandkids).
06-24-05 Slideshows and Music: Time Well Spent ... Without getting too heavy into music theory, timing is a vital part of music. Most music can be divided into repetitive segments, or phrases, that, with some variations, have distinct and equal durations (there’s that duration word again).
06-17-05 Slideshows and Music: the Right Time at the Right Place ... Adding music to a digital photo slideshow, if done properly, can turn even the most artistically mediocre collection of photos into a moving emotional experience. "Done properly" are the key words in the last sentence
06-10-05 A Macintosh with “Intel Inside”? Blasphemy? No. Reality. ... On Monday, Jobs announced that by this time next year, Apple will offer some Macs powered by Intel processors (presumably laptops and consumer-oriented models). By 2007, Apple’s entire line will have “Intel Inside” (wow, what a catchy slogan – maybe they’ll use it).
06-03-05 Putting Your Slideshow Life in Order ... Certainly you’ll use some kind of software, but we’re really talking right now about the human side of the process. No matter how sophisticated software becomes, no one has yet been able to program “heart” or “taste” into a silicon and plastic machine.
05-27-05 The Art and Soul of the Slideshow ... Today’s computer users have it easy. The ability to view a collection of photos in a slideshow is built right into modern operating systems. Want to add mood music? No problem.
05-20-05 QuickTime 7 Media Layer Makes Movies on Macs Marvelous ... H.264 provides the same quality as MPEG-2 (the codec used on today’s commercial DVDs) at a third to half of the data rate, and up to four times the frame size as video encoded with the MPEG-4 standard codec at the same bit rate.
05-13-05 Don’t Send a CPU to Do a GPU’s Work ... Tiger’s new “graphics engine” is made up of four parts: three system-level software “packages” (Core Image, Core Video and QuickTime 7), and your Mac’s graphics card (henceforth referred to as the GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit).
05-06-05 Tiger’s Mail Application a Showcase for Tiger Tech ... Tiger’s built-in email application has been rebuilt from the ground up. Its already powerful spam filtering system gets a boost...
04-29-05 Four Good Reasons to Upgrade to Tiger ... Because, as we’re talking about Tiger, while Mac users can get a preview of what they’ll be using tonight, Windows users can get a glimpse of what they’ll be using next year. See? Something for everyone here at the MacMaineiac.
04-22-05 Tigers and Cows: NOT the Chinese Calendar Variety ... It’s time to “let the cat out of the bag”. Time to welcome the “cat’s meow” of operating systems from the computer company that’s “roared” back and proven that it hasn’t used anywhere near the last of its “nine lives”.
04-15-05 Digital Photos: Using Metadata to Stay Organized ... Right about now you’re saying to yourself, “Wow, all this metadata stuff sounds great, but where do I look on my computer to find it?” As the immortal Bard would say, “Ah, there’s the rub”.
04-08-05 Digital Photos: Knowing your EXIF from your IPTC ... You may not envision it the day you transfer your first memory card full of pictures into your computer, but someday you’re going to have thousands, probably tens of thousands, of pristine digital images to keep track of.
04-01-05 Making Beautiful Digital Memories Requires Memory ... Making the move to digital photography is more than just changing the kind of camera you use. At the risk of sounding too hokey, it really is a “life-changing experience”.
03-25-05 iPod: More to the Eye Than Meets the Ear ... Besides being the world’s most popular personal digital music player, the iPod is a “jack of other trades” as well. Let’s take a gander at some other the iPod’s other “talents”.
03-18-05 Playing “ID3 Tag” With Your Digital Music ... As an added bonus, we’re covering “cross-platform” stuff this week, so you “95-percenters” won’t feel too left out. It’s a “big tent” here in the Mac world. So, without further ado…
03-11-05 Pages: Not an “Office Killer”, But Still A “Killer App” ... You can count on it. Every year around MacWorld San Francisco time (the first week of January) rumors swirl of a new Apple-branded “AppleWorks-on-steroids” Microsoft-Office-killer application that will finally free Mac users completely from any reliance whatsoever on Microsoft software.
03-04-05 Award for Best DVD Soundtrack? You (and GarageBand ’05) ... With GarageBand ’05 you can record up to eight real instrument or vocal tracks and one Software Instrument track at the same time (with appropriate third-party audio input/output hardware, of course).
02-25-05 Minor Reorganization in the iPod Nation ... No, it’s not an “iTunes music for food” scam, although you can get free iTunes music downloads by finding a winning code inside the bottle cap of certain specially-marked Pepsi products.
02-18-05 The Future is Now in iMovie HD ... Although users will find it very similar in surface appearance to older iMovie versions, it’s what’s “under the hood” that makes iMovie HD a must-have upgrade for serious home-movie-makers.
02-11-05 Dirty Little Secrets of Napster To Go ... the Napster ad contrasted what they claimed to be the $10,000 needed to fill up a 40GB iPod with the ability to download and listen to unlimited music through Napster To Go
02-04-05 Share and Show Off With iPhoto ‘05 ... Let’s face it. Taking great photos is certainly fulfilling, but sharing them with others, be they family or friends, is the best!
01-28-05 Photo Management Made Easy in iPhoto ‘05 ... There’s nothing out there in the PC world, among all that software, that can equal the collective power of the iLife suite. Why settle for second best? But, I digress.
01-21-05 “Bargain” PCs: The Devil in the Details ... Let’s add up some of the “hidden costs” to see what you actually end up paying to get to the “useability” level of Apple’s entry level eMac, which, similarly configured, lists for $1000.
01-14-05 Get Ready to Do the iPod Shuffle ... The biggest buzz from the show centers around a new product, diminutive in size and price, but with very big potential.
01-07-05 One More Thing Before Trashing the Christmas Cards ... Ready to dump that stack of holiday cards into the trash? Wait! There’s valuable information in there! Amidst the photos and mind-numbing chronicles of family adventures, there’s actual news you can use.