Category: Companies

  • New 24″ iMac is mondo big & mondo cool

    I stealthily updated the “tools of my trade” page recently but in case you missed it, there’s a new leader of the (computer) pack around these parts. After going back and forth and back and forth for days, I decided that the future was a desktop and not a laptop. As my brother pointed out,…

  • 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,…

  • Electrifying speed from Netgear’s Powerline

    I moved my home office to another part of the house recently but there was was one small problem — a chimney ran behind one of the walls, greatly diminishing my wifi signal. Running ethernet cable would have solved the problem at a mighty cost so I decided to try the latest networking over power…

  • 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…

  • Google hears my long-tail e-book plea

    Back in October, when Sony’s new and fairly horrific $350 e-book reader gadget came out, I blasted the company — and some of the people who reviewed the reader — for completely misunderstanding the need for such a product. We don’t need to carry around 87 different best-sellers in an electronic format that’s inferior to…

  • 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…

  • 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…