Category: how to

  • 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…

  • Dreaded HP inkjet printer cartridge problem strikes

    Inkjet printers are, in many ways, a phenomenally positive testament to the power of Moore’s law and the advance of technology and all that good stuff. As I’ve mentioned before, around 1990 I bought one of the first Hewlett-Packard Deskjet printers, driving up to New Hampshire to save the sales tax on the $750 purchase.…

  • 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…

  • Making the transition to a Blackberry Curve

    Well, the two-year handcuffs on my Verizon-locked Treo 700p smartphone finally came off and it was time to reevaluate. The biggest downside to the Treo was its miniscule battery life, though its bulky weight was another serious bummer. My company pays for the phone so my replacement choices were fairly limited. Since my wife appears…

  • New York Times killing Times File – How to move your library

    Terrible news for those who love news today. I was reading a story about e-books in the New York Times this morning and I decided it was worth saving as a future reference. I clicked the little “save” button, as I’ve been doing for the past three years or so, to place a link to…

  • Using Applescript to send articles to my Kindle

    I’m constantly finding new ways to use my Kindle e-book reader. Lately, I’ve found a way to save eye strain and trees when reading long magazine articles posted online. Instead of reading them on my laptop, and making my eyes watery and tired, or printing them out on a zillion pieces of paper, wasting all…

  • How to fix stuck keyboard backlight on Macbook Pro

    Here’s an obscure piece of Mac voodoo that hopefully few people will ever need. I opened up my sleeping Macbook Pro this morning (the 15″ 2.2 GHz mid-2007 edition) and the keyboard backlighting was on full blast. Pressing the F8 key to turn it off did nothing. In fact, the backlight brightness display appeared with…

  • Fixing my blog’s del.icio.us widget without a widget

    I tend to read a lot of web pages every work day and they can all blur together if I’m not careful, or the coffee machine is on the fritz. So I use a couple of methods of saving and organizing my webstream, including Google Notebook for stuff that’s highly relevant to whatever project or…