Category: software

  • Oh Verizon Mifi, why can you not delight like Apple?

    Ok, say you’re a big technology company and you have a hot new product. You put out a press release enumerating the many amazing features and announcing a release date several weeks hence. Even better, one of the most-read tech columnists on the planet, the New York Times‘ David Pogue, raves about your new product…

  • I’m Doomed, or the latest, greatest Fran’s Chocolates

    Remember back in December when I discovered those addictably delicious Fran’s Salted Caramels and promptly ate about a zillion dollars worth? Well, Fran is back. Among recent birthday presents, my fabulous wife found that Fran’s has extended their line to some kind of super-powered, dark chocolate-covered Snickers bar redux called the Almond Gold Bar. Let’s…

  • Changing themes at Buckingham Palace

    Well, I was getting a little tired of my WordPress theme, Mandigo. Not that it wasn’t great but I find myself in the mood for something different after just about two years of no change. I’ve opted for a much simpler, cleaner, and less busy look using a theme called SubtleFlux by an unknown author…

  • Civ IV: Beyond the Sword Arriving for Macs?

    (UPDATE2: July 31: Or YES, finally yes! Aspyr has released the Mac version of Beyond the Sword. See my blog post here.) (UPDATE May 17: Or not — As a commenter points out below, Aspyr has taken down the promo page and replaced it with the depressing text: Requested product does not exist. Alas…) Its…

  • 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…

  • God is god: Ron Moore’s most excellent end for BSG

    So it’s over. Last night marked the final episode of one of the more original and fascinating television series to come along, Ron Moore’s thoughtful re-imagining of the cheesy 1970’s scifi classic Battlestar Galactica. In Moore’s hands, and made possible by a very talented cast, the newly-updated Battlestar Galactica, or BSG as they say on…

  • Instapaper’s instantly useful for sending articles to Kindles

    For a while now, I’ve found that the best way to read long-ish online articles and blog posts is to email them to my Kindle. This avoids the horrid eye strain from reading them on my computer and is more environmentally-friendly than printing them out on paper. Back in December, I even wrote a simple…

  • Insanely great Kindle on iPhone needs one big improvement

    (Updated 3/5) Wow – just wow. Pretty much ever since Amazon announced its nifty Kindle e-book reader in November 2007, people have been predicting that Apple would jump into the e-book game and blow Amazon away. Today, Amazon decided it wasn’t going to wait around and introduced an e-book reader program for the iPhone and…

  • 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…