Category: review

  • Apple LED Cinema Display is the best dock for a Macbook Pro

    I’ve been slowly devolving from a laptop with a huge screen to a laptop with a medium-sized screen to, most recently, a laptop with a small screen. But the smaller my laptop gets, the more I’d like some kind of docking solution when I bring it home. Apple hasn’t been very receptive to we would-be-dockers…

  • Evernote is the best note keeper in the cloud and on the ground

    Wall Street Journal tech reviewer Walter Mossberg doesn’t always hit the rights notes, in my view, but he was pitch perfect today in a rave about note-stashing software program and web site Evernote. This is the data storage program that runs on practically every platform — Windows and Mac desktops, iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and Android…

  • Google slashes price of online storage vs. Apple, others

    (Update April, 2012: Google finally opened its GDrive service and promptly raised the price of storage. Doh!) In a much-commented-upon announcement today that I first saw on Rex Hammock’s blog, Google said it would start selling online storage space for keeping any kinds of files. Previously, the company’s cloud-based storage was limited for use with…

  • Most popular and favorite posts of the year here

    Another year is in the books, so here’s a quick look back at some highlights of the last 12 months of posts at the Gravitational Pull dot net blog. I was proud to see that total page views doubled in 2009 from the prior year to about 44,000 and total visitors also doubled to about…

  • Best way to sync Mac and Google contacts? There isn’t one

    It’s kind of a disaster when your two most critical IT vendors won’t play nice. And it’s happening right now to me with Apple and Google feuding over iPhone apps. Google had an iPhone app for managing its fabulous Google Voice service but Apple nixed it (or didn’t approve it, or whatever). Now I have…

  • Changing guard at Buckingham Palace: New laptop

    New job? New laptop! It’s my number one workplace tool, so it’s also fitting to fit my laptop requirements to a change in employment. As I’ll be doing a lot more daily commuting and possibly more business travel, I decided to downsize from my Macbook Pro with a 15″ screen (the Mid 2007 model) to…

  • Another reason to love Mifi? No driver software

    I’ve been using my Verizon Mifi 2200, the portable broadband modem and wifi hot spot, all over the place for the past four months and it’s been doing just what it’s supposed to do. It connects quickly and gets my laptop, iPod Touch or any other kind of net surfing device online. I already raved…

  • Times Reader’s offline New York Times needs improvement

    “Welcome to the future,” reads the web page for the New York Times’ software/web hybrid application, Times Reader. “Your newspaper is here.” Well, I certainly hope not. The Times Reader, a program which allows you to download virtually the entire contents of the newspaper in seconds online for offline perusal at your leisure, is rather…

  • Kindle DX: Even better electronic book reader

    No secret that I’m a huge fan of Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader. I’ve had one since Day 1 and read dozens of books and hundreds of shorter articles on it. Its crystal clear e-ink screen works even in bright sunlight. The battery life is phenomenal. And the free wireless connection makes it a breeze…

  • Mac users should stick with online backup Mozy

    For more than two years, I’ve been quite happily using the Mozy online backup service. Now owned by storage giant EMC, Mozy offers unlimited backup space for under $5 a month per computer and a slick Mac program that automatically uploads new files in the background (there’s also a Windows version but I don’t use…