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These columns appear in the Times Record each Friday in the Technology section. |
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Date |
Title |
| 12-30-05 | Goodbye (And Good Riddance) to IE for Mac ... As promised, tomorrow Microsoft will end all support for IE for Mac, and will provide no further security or performance updates. Wait a minute! IE has security and performance? But, I digress. |
| 12-23-05 | Keeping Christmas Card Contacts Under Control ... With the Internet came email, HTML email with images and MIDI Christmas carols (AARGH!), PDF newsletter attachments, links to family web pages, and links to Flash-based animated greeting cards with cute retreivers. |
| 12-16-05 | What Do You Get The Mac User Who Has Everything? ... it’s time for the yearly MacHead Christmas Gift Spectacular, with gift ideas for Mac and iPod users young and old. Get out that plastic and let’s get it started! |
| 12-09-05 | All iWant for Christmas 2005 ... You have ten days. 240 hours (more or less depending on when you read the Times Record today) to order an iPod from Apple’s online store, take advantage of free “standard” shipping, and get one of this (or last, or probably next) year’s hottest tech gifts in your hot little hands by Christmas Eve. |
| 12-02-05 | It’s Not A Video iPod. It’s an iPod that Does Video ... As the above title infers, the new iPod (also available in a 30GB version) is first and foremost a great new iPod that just happens to play video as well. |
| 11-25-05 | Blessed Mother of Aerodynamics, Don’t Fail Me Now! ... I’m thankful that, as a Mac user, I can do almost all of my computing with impunity. Mac OS X’s Dictionary Widget defines impunity as “exemption from punishment, or freedom from the injurious consequences of an action”. |
| 11-18-05 | As My Daddy Said, “There’s No Free Lunch” ... Although it’s a little late for Halloween, you wanna hear something really scary? Why not build advertising right into the operating system itself? Click on the “Start” button, and have one of the options be a link to an ad for a colored pill. |
| 11-11-05 | You Don’t Have to Suffer Any More ... Speaking of new to the platform, according to a recent report, over one million Windows users bought Macs for the first time this year. If you’re “new to the fold”, welcome. If you’re teetering on the edge, come on in, the water’s fine. |
| 11-04-05 | Getting Too Attached to Email Attachments ... Actually, in the words of the Captain, Road Prison 36, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”. If you attach something to an email message, it’s really a “crap shoot” whether or not the receiver can open it. |
| 10-28-05 | Macs Love “Hanging Around” With Other Macs ... Anyway, with Mac OS X, when one Mac sees another Mac on a network, be it a wired or wireless network, they’re connected. No muss, no fuss, no major configuring needed. |
| 10-21-05 | Apple’s New “Aperture”: More than iPhoto on Steroids ... Think of Aperture as iPhoto on steroids. Aperture performs the same basic photographic functions that iPhoto does (managing, editing, and sharing), except with far more power, flair, and speed, and designed for the pro rather than the consumer. |
| 10-14-05 | New iMac G5: A Media Center PC “For the Rest of Us”? ... But wait – it gets better. The new iMacs have an iSight web camera installed just above the screen. And it’s a new-and-improved iSight, with better resolution than the $150 stand-alone models. The new setup is perfect for video conferencing for business and pleasure with iChat AV. |
| 10-07-05 | What’s That Clunking Sound Coming From the Dryer? ... All this fuss about scratches has prompted two members of the Mac online community to explore just how sturdy and resilient an iPod nano can be. One, by accident – the other, on purpose. |
| 09-30-05 | When Good iPod nanos Go Bad ... This last week reports of flaws in the tiny color screen on Apple’s new iPod nano started to surface. Others reported that the screen (and other parts of the iPod nano) scratched easily. One internet tech pundit even referred to the nano as Apple’s next Cube, which had an industrial design way ahead of its time, but suffered from high pricing and reports of cracks in its translucent case. |
| 09-23-05 | Hope for the Hopeless Backup Procrastinator ... Even though Macs are not afflicted with viruses and other malware that can bring the system crashing down, destroying the precious data on our hard drives, we still use fallible hard drives and need to back up our valuable data. |
| 09-16-05 | MMOOS Season Opens Next Tuesday ... From September to June we Mac users gather (normally) the third Tuesday of each month at 7:00 in the Multi-Purpose Room on the second floor around the back at Brunswick High School. This coming Tuesday, the 21st of September, will be no exception. |
| 09-09-05 | Taking the Air Out of the Compression Argument ... So now you’re asking, “Wait a minute! What about being a good steward of my hard drive space and “zipping” or “stuffing” files to free up space on my drive on an everyday basis?” |
| 09-02-05 | Let’s Get Small: Stuffing, Zipping, and Other Acts of Shrinkage ... Mac OS X now includes built-in support for the Zip format. In fact, get a new Mac, or do an Erase and Install to Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, and you’ll discover that the venerable Stuffit Expander is no longer bundled with the system. |
| 08-26-05 | Who Opens What on Your Mac? ... Unlike earlier versions of that other operating system, you’ve never had to attach a suffix to a filename, like “.doc”, to tell the system what to open it with. You just double-clicked on the file, and it opened within the appropriate application. |
| 08-19-05 | A PDQ Course on PDF ... Us Mac users, have another, or should I say, an additional, way, to create and view PDF files. See, Apple licensed and integrated Adobe’s PDF technology right into Mac OS X. Anything you can print in OS X, you can “print to PDF”. |
| 08-12-05 | Underappreciated and Taken for Granted: Tiger’s Preview Application ... You most likely use it all the time, but you probably don’t even have its icon in your Dock. And, especially if you’re running Mac OS X “Tiger” (and you should be, you know), you probably haven’t scratched the surface of what this application can do for you. |
| 08-05-05 | Mighty Mouse Comes to Save the Day ... The final icicle in the Devil’s back? Apple this week introduced a multi-button mouse. Break out the toboggans! Cats and dogs living together! It’s the end of the world as we know it. |
| 07-29-05 | School Days: Apple Updates iBooks and Mac minis ... New to the iBooks is built-in Bluetooth 2.0 wireless connectivity, featuring enhanced data rates, which can be used to connect to a wireless keyboard or mouse, as well as a myriad of mobile phones and PDAs. |
| 07-22-05 | $2 Million For Driving While Blind ... So, what we’re talking about here is a car without a driver. You’ve seen them on I-295 plenty of times. Seriously, AGVs are designed to follow a pre-programmed route, but also have some capacity to react to unforeseen obstacles that may appear in their path. |
| 07-15-05 | On the Road to Find Macs ... a web site that tracks current and potential Apple Retail Stores has calculated what they believe to the be town furthest from any Apple Store in the U.S. The unlucky burg? Atomic City, Idaho. Population: 26. |
| 07-08-05 | Surviving the Digital Vacation ... Our reliance on tech tools and toys extends into our leisure time as well, and not solely for staying in touch with our businesses and livelihoods. Despite your best intentions, you may find that you need your laptop along after all. |
| 07-01-05 and 06-24-05 |
Dawn of the Age of Desktop Search ... Although “Desktop Search” in its many present forms is garnering a lot of techie buzz today, the ability to search and find files on your computer has been around for a long time. It started out simple (as most things do). |
| 06-17-05 | Buy a PowerPC Mac Now, or Wait for Intel? ... So, if two weeks ago you were about to get a new Mac, either as an upgrade from an older Mac, or as a refugee from “the Dark Side”, what on earth do you do now? It’s a fair question, probably with no real right or wrong answer. |
| 06-10-05 | More on Apple’s Move to Intel Processors ... "More than even the processor, more than even the hardware innovations that we bring to the market, the soul of a Mac is its operating system, and we’re not standing still” |
| 06-03-05 | My Favorite Widgets (So Far) ... Ever since beta builds of Tiger were released to developers, they have been busy building widgets as well, with many ready for Tiger Day One. Here are some of my favorites, so far. |
| 05-27-05 | Slideshows a Breeze in Apple’s “Tiger” ... In Tiger, slideshows are integrated at the System level, and accessible by any application that can call upon them. It’s all part of the Core Image-powered visual smorgasbord that is Tiger. |
| 05-20-05 | iTunes 4.8 – Sneak Peak at an Apple Movie Store? ... What do these added video capabilities mean in the bigger scheme of things? Is Apple testing the technology needed to introduce the much-rumored iTunes Movie Store (or whatever they end up calling it)? |
| 05-13-05 | Apple Updates Hardware in Time for Tiger ... With all the fuss over Tiger, little fanfare has accompanied the availability of new PowerMac, iMac, and eMac models. Well, we can’t have that, can we? TUM-TA-DA-DUM! |
| 05-06-05 | More Tips on Installing Tiger ... Congratulations! You’ve been “Tiger-ized”. The first thing you’ll see is an entertaining “Welcome” movie. What follows is dependent upon the type of installation you selected. |
| 04-29-05 | Tips on Making Your Tiger Installation Purr ... Installing a new operating system, or a major upgrade to an operating system like Mac OS X “Tiger”, is, for me anyway, an exciting experience akin to opening Christmas presents or driving a new car off the lot for the first time. |
| 04-22-05 | Proper Planning Prevents Tiger Upgrade “Ughs” ... Let’s spend our next couple of times together looking into what you can do to get ready for Tiger, and what Tiger can do for you in terms of making your transition as seamless as possible. |
| 04-15-05 | It’s Official! Tiger Pounces on April 29th ... You can pre-order Tiger from Amazon.com ($94.99 after rebate), or from the Apple online store for $129 with free shipping and access to an exclusive online seminar called “Inside Tiger”. |
| 04-08-05 | Tiger Preview: Spotlight on “Spotlight” ... From the moment you install and start running Tiger, Spotlight is at work “in the background”, transparently indexing all your files, at the core level of the operating system. |
| 04-01-05 | How to Talk to a “Faxosaurus” (If You Must) ... What’s the fax machine of the “internet age”? The computer, obviously, teamed with a scanner and broadband internet connection. Before we go on, let’s wax nostalgically on the technological wonder that is the fax machine. |
| 03-25-05 | Tune iTunes to Your Ears with ‘The Equalizer’ ... The equalizer enables you to adjust the “sound” of your music by manipulating ten different frequency bands. |
| 03-18-05 | Catch a Tiger By the Tail in April? ... It still could be a “summer in the jungle”, but there are indications that Tiger will make its way into Apple Stores and other resellers sometime in April. |
| 03-11-05 | Keynote 2.0: Same Beauty, More Brawn ... If you’ve used, created, or seen a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, you know the basic functions of Keynote. However, if you’ve ever slept through, or cringed at the goofy graphics and transitions in a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, you’re really going to appreciate the beauty of Keynote. |
| 03-04-05 | Browsing More and Enjoying It Less? You’re Not Alone ... Despite all the hoopla surrounding Microsoft and Napster’s “pay forever” music renting scheme, maybe we are an “ownership society” after all. |
| 02-25-05 | Scrolling With a TouchPad and Other Fancy Feats ... Here’s what doesn’t change. Still three models. 12-inch (now 1.5 GHz), 15-inch (1.5 GHz and new 1.67 GHz) and 17-inch (1.67GHz). |
| 02-18-05 | Entomology or Virusology? You Decide ... But wait a minute. Is Windows really a virus? You thought, given the small bit of sarcasm that sometimes creeps into this column, that I would say it is. But, Windows is not a virus. Here’s why. |
| 02-11-05 | Phishing For Love in All the Wrong Places ... Valentine’s Day is fast approaching. Smooch smooch. Computer security firms are warning of increased spam and viral trafficking by the unseemly side of the internet (and the seemly side as well). |
| 02-04-05 | Managing Multiple Libraries in iPhoto ... iPhoto gives you the ability to completely screw up a photo trying to make it better, but always be able to recover the original, so you can try to screw it up again. |
| 01-28-05 | A Layman’s Look Inside the Guts of iPhoto ... On the surface, iPhoto is amazingly easy to use, considering the amazing stuff you can do with it. But what’s going on behind the scenes, and where is it going on? |
| 01-21-05 | Switching to the Mac on a Mini Budget ... Has your PC slowed to a crawl, flopping over like a mackerel in a hot frying pan on a regular basis? Are you thinking about buying a two-story house just so you can chuck your PC out the window onto the sidewalk? |
| 01-14-05 | Is It Bigger than a Bread Box? No. ... Apple did in fact announce (to be available on Januarty 22nd as well), the $499 “Mac mini”. How mini? Three pounds, and about the size of a stack of five CD cases. |
| 01-07-05 | Give Your Mac a Bath For the New Year... Since most monitors do not have glass screens, the use of “Windex” or another cleaner containing alcohol is not recommended. Often a cloth dampened with soapy water will do the trick. |
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