Category: utilities

  • Reading Infinite Jest on the Kindle versus dead tree pulp

    When I was a younger man sans spouse and kids, I had more time for the more diverting pursuits, pursuits like reading post-post-modern, 1,000-page novels written by genius authors who loved footnotes. Exhibit A: Infinite Jest by the late David Foster Wallace. You can see the beast pictured here to the left. Ah, but those…

  • The messy, the missing and the mistakes: Adventures in iTunes Plus upgrading

    Well, it’s been almost two months since Apple announced the huge expansion of higher-quality and DRM-free music in its iTunes Store “Plus” offerings and I think it’s fair to say that the upgrade process is an unmitigated disaster. Despite personally paying 30 cents per track to upgrade hundreds of tracks, Apple has erased my metadata,…

  • Switching Time Machine drives easy but not quick

    Back in December, 2007, when I upgraded my super-duper 24″ iMac to Mac OS X 10.5, I immediately turned on the Time Machine automatic backup program. Seeing as how I had a less-than-half-full 500 GB hard drive in the iMac, I figured I’d be fine using a 500 GB Western Digital MyBook Pro external drive…

  • Exciting e-book progress from Amazon and Google

    It’s been over two years now since I first starting writing about electronic books and e-book readers on my blog. At the 2006 introduction of Sony’s reader, I was concerned that the “long tail” of niche and out-of-print content was being ignored in favor of making the latest John Grisham best sellers available on an…

  • Making the transition to a Blackberry Curve

    Well, the two-year handcuffs on my Verizon-locked Treo 700p smartphone finally came off and it was time to reevaluate. The biggest downside to the Treo was its miniscule battery life, though its bulky weight was another serious bummer. My company pays for the phone so my replacement choices were fairly limited. Since my wife appears…

  • WordPress 2.7 is the best WordPress yet

    When WordPress 2.5 came out a few months ago, there was a lot to like but there was also a lot to not-so-like. The layout of key parts of the program, including the dashboard and the editing page for new posts, didn’t seem very well thought out. The overall design was visually noisy and distracting,…

  • Using Applescript to send articles to my Kindle

    I’m constantly finding new ways to use my Kindle e-book reader. Lately, I’ve found a way to save eye strain and trees when reading long magazine articles posted online. Instead of reading them on my laptop, and making my eyes watery and tired, or printing them out on a zillion pieces of paper, wasting all…

  • Acrylic Software’s Wallet, great password manager for iPhone

    (Updated 12/3) To keep track of all the various web site passwords, log-ins accounts, serial numbers and other top secret secrets in my life, I’ve been using the OS X version of Acrylic Software’s Wallet program (Acrylic was formerly known as Waterfall Software). It’s one of the best looking and best performing password managers I’ve…

  • Foxmarks browser sync adds great password syncing feature

    Don’t you love it when software designers listen to their customers? Gives me a warm feeling all over. So kudos to the authors of the incredibly useful Firefox bookmark synchronization add-on Foxmarks. After the demise of Google’s great browser synching tool back in June, I turned to Foxmarks to keep everything in tune on my…

  • Sprint’s old U720 gets GPS functionality on Macs with upgrade

    The other day, for no apparent reason, something went kablooey with my trusty Sprint wireless modem. Maybe it was the OS X 10.5.4 update, but who knows? For the past year plus, when I plugged the modem (it’s a Novatel Ovation U720) into a USB port on my MacBook pro, a little signal strength meter…