Category: Thoughts

  • Easy BIOS upgrades? Who wudda thunk

    Every time I boot up my cheapie Windows PC running Windows Vista, I get the same annoying error message. The Asus T3-M2NC51 barebones box has a slight conflict with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ Brisbane processor at its heart. It’s something I knew when I paired them up last spring (See “Imperfectly building my…

  • Yelping for fun and profit – well, fun anyway

    True to my astrological sign, Taurus, I’m always on the look out for some new, fancy-shmancy restaurant or coffee shop or paper store or whatever. As such, I’m starting to get more and more into the local review site Yelp.com. I’m adding my Yelp profile page to my links list here and dropping the Facebook…

  • Three friggin millimeters, Steve Jobs, is all I ask

    (Updated 1/25) The more I think about the new uber-thin Macbook Air, the more confused I am about one design decision in particular. I can get over the lack of ports, the add-on optical drive, the wimpy graphics. But I keep coming back to the dreadfully small hard drive which maxes out at 80 gigabytes.…

  • Thin is in but I’m not sure why

    Steve Jobs had a couple of widely leaked “surprises” to unveil at yesterday’s Macworld show. As we’d all read everywhere for the past few weeks, Apple added rental movies to its iTunes download store. The selection is a bit small and the 30-day delay from DVD release to rental seems ridiculous but, hey, these are…

  • It’s a heavy, heavy snow out there

    Wandered out today ’round my Needham, MA, home to give my Canon Rebel XT digital camera (complete with Canon’s wunderbar 50mm 1.4 EF lens) a cold weather work out in the umpty-umpth snow storm of the 2007-2008 winter class. If I had to categorize this dump of some 6 to 8 inches, I’d call it…

  • Sometimes you eat the long tail, sometimes it eats you

    The explosion of the Internet and e-commerce and the interconnectedness of everything is generally A Really Good Thing. As Wired editor Chris Anderson has explained ad nauseam on his blog, we’re in age where more different things sell to fewer people and the collective weight of all that less-popular stuff is growing. The “long tail”…

  • Inching the household up to Mac OS X 10.5

    Slowly I turned, inch by inch…well, not literally. But with the first dot-1 update out to Apple’s new operating system, Leopard, and more updated programs available as well, I’m inching my household towards full upgrade-hood. As I mentioned the other day, my antiquated, first gen Mac mini was the first to get hit with Leopard…

  • Clean the closet – before and after

    As I mentioned yesterday, we did a huge closet cleaning project recently. Here’s the before shot (notice the pile of 10 years of junk from the likes of Linksys, Apple, Fuji, Brother, Uniden and every other brand I’ve ever blogged about): And here’s the after shot:

  • Reclaiming an ancient PocketPC as a web browser

    Cleaning out the attic closet recently, I came across an ancient Casio PocketPC that I must have bought six or seven years ago, the Cassiopeia E-115. It’s a cute little device featuring a smallish, color touch-screen and compact flash card slot. My son was immediately interested in reclaiming it but we couldn’t get it to…

  • Ignore that cranky Mossberg and his Kindle whine

    I kept meaning to predict that Wall Street Journal gadget reviewer Walt Mossberg was going to pan the Amazon Kindle e-book reader because he’s hyper-sensitive to minor flaws. But life intervened and I didn’t get the chance. And, of course, now he has. Sometimes Mossberg is right on, but unfortunately with the Kindle, he’s far…