Tag: upgrade

  • Two small hardware updates are game changers for Macbook Air and Mac mini

    Apple massively upgraded two of its best hardware products today, the Macbook Air and the Mac mini. There are loads of changes and improvements. But only two are real game changers to me: 1. The addition of a Thunderbolt port on MacBook Airs means you finally will be able¹ to connect external hard drives and…

  • Review: Subtle but useful improvements in WordPress 3.1

    WordPress kicked out the latest upgrade to its popular blogging platform software this week and I upgraded GravitationalPull.net yesterday. So far the improvements are subtle and useful. Almost as important, nothing appears broken, particularly among the dozen or so plug-ins I have installed. WordPress posted a complete list of all the new features and tweaks here.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Amazon: Follow Apple’s lead and don’t blow Kindle opportunity

    I think it’s fair to say I’ve been of the earliest, strongest and most prolific fans of Amazon’s fabulous electronic book reader, the Kindle, since the day they unveiled it, just about 14 months ago. I’ve defended the Kindle against reviews from people who’d never actually had one, iPhone fans who like to read their…

  • WordPress 2.7 is the best WordPress yet

    When WordPress 2.5 came out a few months ago, there was a lot to like but there was also a lot to not-so-like. The layout of key parts of the program, including the dashboard and the editing page for new posts, didn’t seem very well thought out. The overall design was visually noisy and distracting,…

  • Bluehost Internet hosting service eases upgrades with SimpleScripts

    I have generally good things to say about my web hosting service, Bluehost. They are very reliable, with uptime for my site of over 99.5% (at least since I started monitoring it in September using the free SiteUpTime service). Bluehost also offer lots of add-ons and free services, like high-end spam filtering and automatic installation…

  • Acrylic Software’s Wallet, great password manager for iPhone

    (Updated 12/3) To keep track of all the various web site passwords, log-ins accounts, serial numbers and other top secret secrets in my life, I’ve been using the OS X version of Acrylic Software’s Wallet program (Acrylic was formerly known as Waterfall Software). It’s one of the best looking and best performing password managers I’ve…