Category: how to

  • Getting Verizon’s Actiontec to play with Airport Express and Remote App

    (Updated 5/13/2010) With Apple’s new Remote App for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the teeming masses who couldn’t afford hyper-expensive schemes (cough – Sonos – cough) to connect their digital music collections to their stereos suddenly had an alternative. If you load Remote onto your iPod, you can control iTunes on the Mac in your…

  • Making my WordPress site legible on my crummy mobile phone

    Stuck with my Treo “smart” phone in an airport recently, I decided to navigate over here to my blog via its wimpy browser. The Treo is on Verizon’s 3rd-generation broadband service so even though I have a fair number of pictures on the front page, I figured all would be okay. Nope — the experience…

  • Tivo tip: Shut down everything to transfer shows off a TivoHD

    For a while now, I’ve been trying in vain to move a copy of the film Notting Hill off my TivoHD and onto my iPod. It’s all legit. The TivoHD allows such a transfer using a Mac and Toast’s Tivo Transfer software. The Tivo itself is networked with one of Netgear’s Powerline HDX101 adapters, which…

  • What to pack in your computer bag?

    Dan Frakes has an awesome piece over at Macworld’s “Mobile Mac” blog today about gadgets and junk that he carries around with his laptop. I hadn’t seen Kensington’s rechargeable Portable Power Pack for Mobile Devices before. Only $60 and 3.5 ounces for 14 hours of additional VIDEO playback on my iPod? Sounds like I need…

  • Apple’s Time Capsule plays nice with Verizon’s FIOS

    Wow, that was easy. Sometimes Apple’s auto-magic, self-configuring stuff works just as advertised. Sometimes, it’s Apple’s penchant for knowing how to simplify the front-end to hide the wacky back-end that carries the day. In the case of the new Time Capsule wireless base station with hard drive, it’s both. Phew. I’ve been using OS X…

  • Zenfolio, Lightroom and the art of digital picture maintenance

    The intersection of everything with magical, behind-the-scenes connections continues to blow me away. Today, I’ve been admiring the photo archiving and display site Zenfolio along with a nifty, high-powered plug-in for Adobe Lightroom written by software consultant Jeffrey Friedl that makes uploading photos a snap. The cool thing about Lightroom’s export system it that can…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Blaspheming in the temple of the Mac: Boot Camp

    Ah, the crazy things we do to play a silly computer game known as Civilization, or in this case Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword expansion. Each and every version of Civ comes out first for Windows and some months later for Macs. And so, each and every time, I have to obtain, borrow…