Category: utilities

  • 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…

  • A scanner, a keyboard and other Macworld goodies

    Continuing last year’s tradition, I’m listing a few things featured at the Macworld show in San Francisco that caught my attention. I didn’t attend so this is just stuff that I read about… First, solving an annoying shortcoming of most USB keyboards, Canadian peripheral maker Matias introduced some Mac keyboards with USB 2.0 ports. Most…

  • Phew, that’s a mighty back up

    The year is rapidly drawing to a close, prompting the usual rush to get those last tax deductions in order, clean out the closets and, of course, update my off-site back up. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a thing about backups after having experienced hefty data losses several times, including the time when my…

  • Everbody’s thinking about S3 for backup

    I can see today that I’m hardly the only one messing around with Amazon’s super-cheap S3 online storage system as a possible off-site backup strategy. Jeremy Zawodny, whose has been wanting/predicting solid online backup for a while, says he’s experimenting with S3, but doesn’t give all the details yet (like what software is he using,…

  • Speedy blogs, speedily updated on VoIP

    Once upon a time, I kept stacks of computer magazines on hand just in case I was suddenly in the market for some gadget reviewed months earlier. Now a days, of course, the Internet has completely subsumed that role and it’s usually not the web sites of big magazines that even run the best reviews.…

  • New page of stuff I’m messing with

    I’m adding a new permanent page to my link list down the side today. It’s intended to fill the gap between blog entries and my existing lists of hardware and software that I use regularly. Really, it’s just stuff I’m messing with and I’ll use it to keep a running list of products that I’m…

  • My indi-adventure begins

    And it doesn’t have anything to do with Harrison Ford’s upcoming flick, which doesn’t arrive until next year. Instead, I got an email today that starts: Hello Aaron, In the recent past you requested to join the “indi” software Beta program. Please accept this as your invitation. Ok, I did and I will.

  • Shrook, shrook not quite Shrook

    Well, the Shrook feed reading experiment is over and the NetNewsWire experiment begins. Shrook is an offline reader that synchronizes with its own online web-based reader. Re-inventing the wheel (in this case, re-inventing Bloglines) is not a winning strategy. Ah, but NetNewsWire, another offline reader, actually synchronizes with Bloglines. It also uses my .Mac account…

  • Google saves Outlook email search

    Like many Mac users, I suppose, I must make do with a Windows XP box at work. Blah. But the true horror is being forced to use Microsoft Outlook, likely the worst email program I have ever seen. One of the very worst features is the brain-damaged search function that works like a snail in…

  • Nifty weather display for Macs

    Someone was recently complaining that there was no Mac equivalent to the program Weather Bug, which sits in the Windows taskbar and displays the temperature and an icon for current weather conditions in a city of your choosing — and links to a lot of ads when you click for more details, yuck. Anyway, all…