Category: Thoughts

  • Most popular and favorite posts of the year here

    Another year is in the books, so here’s a quick look back at some highlights of the last 12 months of posts at the Gravitational Pull dot net blog. I was proud to see that total page views doubled in 2009 from the prior year to about 44,000 and total visitors also doubled to about…

  • Nook Delays: Why Barnes & Noble hates its customers

    Back in October, when Barnes & Noble finally took the wraps off its Nook E-Reader, I expected to see David Pogue, Walter Mossberg and the whole rest of Gadget World publish their reviews within a few days. After all, Barnes & Noble was happily taking customer orders (and customer money) on their web site. At…

  • Best way to sync Mac and Google contacts? There isn’t one

    It’s kind of a disaster when your two most critical IT vendors won’t play nice. And it’s happening right now to me with Apple and Google feuding over iPhone apps. Google had an iPhone app for managing its fabulous Google Voice service but Apple nixed it (or didn’t approve it, or whatever). Now I have…

  • With growing Apple tablet excitement, misguided Kindle whining returns

    We’re coming up fast on the 2nd anniversary of the introduction of  Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. Yet despite the many improvements and price cuts in KindleWorld, we’re still subject to the same weird, off-base complaints we first heard back before anyone even had even gotten their hands on one. Recently, my favorite Mac guru, John Gruber,…

  • Changing guard at Buckingham Palace: New laptop

    New job? New laptop! It’s my number one workplace tool, so it’s also fitting to fit my laptop requirements to a change in employment. As I’ll be doing a lot more daily commuting and possibly more business travel, I decided to downsize from my Macbook Pro with a 15″ screen (the Mid 2007 model) to…

  • Another reason to love Mifi? No driver software

    I’ve been using my Verizon Mifi 2200, the portable broadband modem and wifi hot spot, all over the place for the past four months and it’s been doing just what it’s supposed to do. It connects quickly and gets my laptop, iPod Touch or any other kind of net surfing device online. I already raved…

  • Apple still isn’t going to kill Amazon’s Kindle, or any other ereader

    Steve Jobs’ latest mouthing off about the market for electronic books and dedicated ereader devices like the Amazon Kindle has sparked the usual conflagration of comments, interpretations and predictions. Some are way off-base, others quite savvy. But after seeing a bit on Techcrunch claiming that everyone was misinterpreting Jobs, it seems like some further clarity…

  • Times Reader’s offline New York Times needs improvement

    “Welcome to the future,” reads the web page for the New York Times’ software/web hybrid application, Times Reader. “Your newspaper is here.” Well, I certainly hope not. The Times Reader, a program which allows you to download virtually the entire contents of the newspaper in seconds online for offline perusal at your leisure, is rather…

  • Kindle DX: Even better electronic book reader

    No secret that I’m a huge fan of Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader. I’ve had one since Day 1 and read dozens of books and hundreds of shorter articles on it. Its crystal clear e-ink screen works even in bright sunlight. The battery life is phenomenal. And the free wireless connection makes it a breeze…

  • Mac users should stick with online backup Mozy

    For more than two years, I’ve been quite happily using the Mozy online backup service. Now owned by storage giant EMC, Mozy offers unlimited backup space for under $5 a month per computer and a slick Mac program that automatically uploads new files in the background (there’s also a Windows version but I don’t use…