It kind of amazes me what shortcomings the people who buy Windows computers are willing to live with. It used to be the case that Macs were more expensive than other kinds of computers, pound for pound. This is no longer true, of course, and hasn’t been for some time, but even if it were, it seems like it would be only proper. It seems like people who buy Windows computers have to spend a lot of time finding and downloading (or buying) programs to make their computers do stuff my computer does all by itself.
Tag: tech
Relax, mouth-foamers, we’re talking about software. I like Michael’s system, sequestering apps for a specific amount of time to see if they’re truly needed or not. I need to do something along these lines, though I’ve already pared down to 110 items in the Applications folder from a clearinghouse earlier this year.
Today’s “Too Much Time On Their Hands” episode is brought to by TUAW:
Stick the guts of a modern optical mouse in to a classic Apple ADB mouse.
And thus Apple’s plans at world domination were dashed.
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Regarding HTML in e-mail: what Tom said. I’m not even an admin like Tom that has to deal with this crap on a day-to-day basis. E-mail is for text. The Web is for graphics. No co-mingling of the two. I realize I’m in a rapidly dwindling minority on this issue, Jeff, but that’s my area of Ludditism, I guess.
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The Tetran doesn’t look too terribly comfortable to be sliding in to one’s front pants pocket. [Via Lee.]
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I’ve noticed the severe lack of updates to Apple’s iCal Library section, too. Now I just get whatever I want from iCalShare.
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Google continues to intrigue me. Really.
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I pronounce it like the peanut butter, with a hard J. [Via John.]
Yeah, it’s been up a few days, but I’m just getting to it, okay? John Gruber has come around, much as I have recently, to the notion of PowerBook-as-main/only-system, a concept Lee has been a proponent of for some time. John also has an in-depth review of the latest 15-inch PowerBook, outfitted just as I would like, with his usual attention to detail.
It’s Monday evening, and I’m still sore from the neighborhood tree planting from Saturday morning. Eleven ten-gallon trees to go in the neighborhood’s greenbelt area. Seventy homes, with an average of two adults per home. Seven people showed up, including myself. Yeah.
An interesting tip I picked up from No Plot? No Problem! shows an innovative use for all that spam that gets collected for me. This one writer keeps a list of names that show up in the From field of spam e-mails, so she always has a pool of character names to pull from. I really like this, since usually when I’m working on fiction, I can come up with two or three good character names, then I start really pulling stuff out of bodily orifices. A simple text document in BBEdit now has 305 names, one per line, and the built-in Kill Duplicates filter ensures I don’t have the same name twice.
It’s nice to know the school district my son will enter in about three years is fairly hip to current technology. The district’s superintendent, Dr. Jerry Roy, has a blog, and in another attempt to get information out to parents, the district has a podcast.
In The Messenger, a small local rag, Roy says:
I’ve had a few folks talk to me and tell me they are happy that we are utilizing the technology. I wouldn’t say we are cutting-edge, but we are trying to find the best ways to communicate with the public. We are used to hard copy, but that is expensive. We are always looking for inexpensive ways to communicate our message, especially in these times when we are hard-pressed for funding. This gives us access to a lot of folks.
Dr. Roy and his staff need to be commended for their fiscal responsibility in leveraging these Internet technologies. Dr. Roy is using the free Blogspot service from Blogger for his weblog, and it is incredibly cheap to produce a podcast, which is one reason why the medium’s popularity is exploding.
Property taxes in Texas are much higher than they are in Louisiana, where we moved from seven years ago. One reason for that is, with no state income tax, school districts need to get their funding from somewhere. I’m not sure what the actual percentage is, but a very high percentage of the segment of property taxes earmarked for education goes in to your local school district, rather than disappearing in to some budgetary black hole at the state level. I see these efforts on the part of LISD to be a responsible use of my tax dollars when it comes to communicating with parents.
While my child is still years away from entering the school system, Dr. Roy and LISD have made it easier for parents like us to keep track of what is going on, and for that, I thank them.
I’ve been trying to send some e-mails with attachments via Gmail, from within Safari. Frustrated, I launched the 1.0b1 version of Camino, and it worked the first time I tried.
If Camino could mimic the easy subscribability of Safari when it comes to RSS and Atom feeds, there would be no looking back. Based on my own usage, Camino is consistently faster than Safari at rendering, uses less RAM over time, and remains more stable.
Then Tom has to go and remind me why Safari kicks butt when it comes to designing for standards.
An article in the latest Macworld has prompted me to look seriously at del.icio.us. My personal work habits have evolved to the point where I’m no longer worried about keeping bookmarks synced between two systems, but the prospect of an online backup of my bookmarks, that I could access from any where, is appealing. I’m coming closer all the time to my own personal death knell for .Mac.
Anthro’s eNook is so cool it almost makes me wish I didn’t have enough space to get one. Almost.
A happy belated to Tiffany.
Finally, my thanks to Tom. He knows why.
…the more they stay the same.
[Via Dan.]
Erik links to the Speakeasy Speed Test, so I figured I would give the Verizon fiber connection a go.
Using the Dallas server:
Download Speed: 7400 kbps (925 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1634 kbps (204.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Los Angeles:
Download Speed: 6301 kbps (787.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1599 kbps (199.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
New York City:
Download Speed: 7928 kbps (991 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1637 kbps (204.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Seattle:
Download Speed: 4436 kbps (554.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1540 kbps (192.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
(What is it about sucky connections from the Dallas area to the Seattle metroplex?)
Chicago:
Download Speed: 8227 kbps (1028.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1633 kbps (204.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
(Faster to Chicago than across town!)
Washington, D.C.
Download Speed: 8870 kbps (1108.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1650 kbps (206.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
San Francisco
Download Speed: 5354 kbps (669.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1577 kbps (197.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
(Silicon Valley sucking off the bandwidth?)
Atlanta
Download Speed: 7676 kbps (959.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 1619 kbps (202.4 KB/sec transfer rate)