I, like many people I suspect, use email for more than just informal discussions with friends. I use email for work, and therefore depend on email messages arriving to their recipients on a reliable and timely basis. I suspect it is the same with people with whom I am working. How is it, then, that […]
I purchased my Nikon Coolpix 5000 a year and a half ago — right after the camera model was first launched. What I didn’t know at the time is that, just like LCD screens, digital cameras — more specifically their CCD (charge-coupled device, the circuit that responds to light and effectively captures the image) — […]
File sharing: Finally the truth comes out… It’s about time: “File swappers ‘buy more music‘”, BBC News Of course, the BPI (the UK’s equivalent of the RIAA) is still in denial about the whole thing, and is quoted far too extensively in the article. But the last word is by the market research company that […]
Further to an item posted earlier today, I’ve found that the problem with Mail falsely including trailing punctuation marks in URLs is not limited to periods. It also affects commas, parentheses, etc. In fact, it looks as if the algorithm is pretty dumb and looks for the next space or return character to decide that […]
Put your blinking cursor in a field area in Word — for example, a page number reference such as the one below: (I have field shading always on in Word, hence the gray shading behind the number.) If you use the cursor keys to move to the right or to the left in the number, […]
I know that Apple will provide a brand new utility for font management in Panther, but it’s not clear yet how this will integrate with Mac OS X’s existing Font Panel feature. And boy does this Font Panel need some work. The issue is very simple. Just look at the following picture: What’s wrong with […]
It’s a bit sad that, after all the excitement caused by the introduction of “plug-and-play” technologies such as USB and FireWire to REPLACE the aging and fussy ADB and SCSI ports on Mac computers, and after half a decade of Macs shipping with these new ports, we are still experiencing far too many fundamental problems […]
I have several folders in the Dock which contain aliases to files that I need to access often. Usually, the contextual pop-up menu displaying the contents of the folder appears instantly after clicking on the folder. Lately, however, for one particular folder, I’ve noticed that it’s taking Mac OS X several seconds to display the […]
If you’ve followed the news about the upcoming Panther release of Mac OS X (10.3), you know that it’ll feature a revamped iDisk feature, where the “disk” will actually reside on your local hard drive and automatically synchronize with the copy on Apple’s servers in the background. This obviously addresses an issue with iDisk that […]
This is just a note to let people know that UserLand’s comments server appears to be down (has been unaccessible from here since July 9), and it causes my blog page to LOAD much slower on the Web, because your browser desperately attempts to LOAD the comments counts from UserLand’s servers and is not getting […]
Mac OS X’s Mail frequently has a problem with URLs in plain text messages. It detects them automatically (when they start with the protocol, i.e. “http://”, etc.) and turns them INTO “live” links that can be clicked on. If, however, the URL happens to be the last thing in a sentence and is immediately followed […]
Currently working hard — in addition to my regular translating job — on putting together the Spring issue (yeah, we’re late) of the academic review published by our local French-language university. (I am not involved in the web site.) There’s something immensely gratifying about designing such a document. It must have to do with the […]
Ever since Safari hit the version 1.0 landmark, I’ve been experiencing printing issues that didn’t exist before with the beta versions. More specifically, for certain sites — but only certain sites — when I choose to print the page, the font size for the printed text is disproportionately big, for no apparent reason. For example, […]
A minor, but annoying bug in Mail for OS X: Open Mail Select a message in IN box. Click on “Reply” button. Start typing the reply and press Save. Quit Mail without sending the reply. Relaunch Mail. Resume typing reply. Send reply. Mail fails to flag the original message in the IN box as a […]
I regularly have to disconnect my external FireWire hard drive to take it with me. Most of the time, it’s not a problem. It’s just a matter of dragging one of its partitions to the trash or ejecting it. But sometimes I get the dreaded “Cannot be ejected because it’s in use” alert. While in […]