Category: software

  • 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…

  • Getting more info with Feedburner

    (Updated 2/19 with widget info) I added a MyBlogLog account the other day to get more info about who’s reading my blog but the hole in that strategy is that MyBlogLog only counts people coming to my web site, not those who read entries via RSS. So I’ve now switched my RSS feed sign ups…

  • 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,…

  • Plugins to the rescue on tagging posts

    (Updated 2/22) I was complaining the other day about WordPress categories not helping me tag things appropriately for blog search sites like Technorati. Andrew Watson, who writes the blog Changingways, commented that there are plug-ins for WordPress. So I’ve dropped in Bunny’s Technorati Tags and we’ll see how it goes. (Update) Well, this week I…

  • Waiting on the WordPress 2.1 update

    I always say wait on upgrades to key software and the newest version of WordPress is no exception. Let somebody else work the kinks out while I keep getting work done. I’ll get the same new gee-whiz features a week or two later while avoiding all the disasters and head aches suffered by the early…

  • 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…

  • Tags aren’t categories and vice versa

    Begin rant: One thing that annoys me about the otherwise fabulous WordPress software that runs this blog relates to categories and tags. Categories, which run along the side of most blogs (look to the right), tell you about general topics a blogger has written about that might be of interest. Sort of somewhere between an…

  • WriteRoom getting better

    Version 2.0 of the retro word processor WriteRoom is out today (tip o’ the cap to MacMinute.com) with some nifty new features. I’ve been messing around with the initial release because it helps me to concentrate on writing and avoid getting sucked in to answering email or making new iTunes playlists or anything else. Essentially,…