Category: review

  • Mighty mouse, today you are so…not mighty

    I’ve been loving Apple’s wireless keyboard and mouse that came with my 24″ iMac. Lean back in my chair, scrounge around the room, pick one up, put it down — never lost a connection. And they even work great to wake the iMac up from a snooze, which I had thought would be the Achilles…

  • He marched in the animals, two by two

    …And he called out as they came through Hey Lord, I’ve got green alligators and long-necked geese Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees Some cats and rats and elephants, but Lord, I’m so forlorn I just can’t find no unicorns. Ah, the Irish Rovers and The Unicorn Song. Brings back fond memories of rainy…

  • Sprint USB Modem Smacks Down Verizon

    (Updated 3/28) As I mentioned the other day, I just passed my two year anniversary as a customer of Verizon’s wireless broadband service. I decided to try Sprint’s competing service since it costs $20 less a month (I can’t add a voice line to the same account). Well, the Sprint Novatel Ovation U720 modem arrived…

  • Time for Sprint v. Verizon for mobile net needs

    Well, it seems like only yesterday I was signing up for Verizon’s mobile broadband service with a Novatel v620 PC Card modem at $79.99 a month. But it’s been two years and in the world of cell phone contracts, two is the magic number. I’m free to consider the competition. Why bother? For one, Verizon…

  • Tivo-Amazon link is cool but what’s the value?

    Amazon and Tivo unveiled their joint downloadable video service today. The basic concept is you purchase video content on Amazon’s Unbox service and it automatically downloads onto your home Tivo, where it appears on your “Now Playing” list alongside shows you recorded yourself. It’s obviously yet another way to get downloaded content from the Internet…

  • Cool new snapshot feature in Fusion

    I’ve been messing around with VMWare’s Fusion software that lets you run virtual machines under OS X. In my case, it’s Windows 2000 which is good enough to run Outlook 2003 and Sony’s horrible digital recorder software. Today I installed the latest and greatest beta version and it has a cool new feature. At the…

  • New 24″ iMac is mondo big & mondo cool

    I stealthily updated the “tools of my trade” page recently but in case you missed it, there’s a new leader of the (computer) pack around these parts. After going back and forth and back and forth for days, I decided that the future was a desktop and not a laptop. As my brother pointed out,…

  • Mine wifi eyes doth deceive me

    Hmm…just the other day, it seemed like the installation of Netgear’s 85-megabits-per-second Powerline switches had sped up my home office link to the net. It may have been an optical illusion. Just now, at least according to Speakeasy’s broadband speed test, my wifi download speed in my home office, which used to seem so weak,…

  • Electrifying speed from Netgear’s Powerline

    I moved my home office to another part of the house recently but there was was one small problem — a chimney ran behind one of the walls, greatly diminishing my wifi signal. Running ethernet cable would have solved the problem at a mighty cost so I decided to try the latest networking over power…

  • Shifting to Interarchy for online backup at S3

    Well, Jungledisk has driven me bananas for the last time. As I blogged back in October and December, I have been messing around with using Jungledisk as a front end to Amazon’s insanely cheap online storage services, S3. Want to save 20 gigabytes of photo and music files? It’s just $3 a month, plus a…