Apple Peelcolumn at Applelust.com
My latest “Apple Peel” column is up at Applelust.com. It’s entitled “The Mac OS X Hall of Shame – Part 3” and deals more specifically with issues such as file name extensions, repairing permissions, and other maintenance tasks. Feel free to comment on it below.
This was a real treat. The first part of the show was a short instrumental piece by Prince on acoustic guitar. Then there was a 15-min interview about various topics: the Grammy performance with Beyoncé, the music industry, Prince’s audience, the evolution of his art, raciness in hip-hop today, etc. There were no ground-breaking revelations, […]
According to this VH-1 News article, “between February 9 and February 15, over 17 million albums were sold in the U.S.“, thanks to the impact of Norah Jones’ new release, the Grammy Awards, and the typically strong Valentine’s Day sales. This apparently makes the week SoundScan’s “biggest non-holiday-season sales week since the organization started tracking […]
You would think that, over the years, Amazon would have had the opportunity to fine-tune the algorithms that they use to come up with “recommendations” for you as a regular Amazon.com customer. First of all, even though I have been purchasing stuff from Amazon.com for years and my shipping address has always been a Canadian […]
Ever since I have owned a digital camera, I have felt the need to use a powerful piece of software for managing my thousands of digital pictures. The early versions of Apple’s iPhoto were woefully inadequate in that respect. The performance levels were just unacceptably slow. I hear that things are better in iPhoto 4, […]
As indicated a couple of days ago, I recently encountered a misleading problem in Panther Server that caused me to fiddle with my firewall settings when the problem was actually a mail database corruption problem. The problem with this is that there is no easy way, as far as I can tell, to force Panther […]
Well, I guess it had to happen sooner or later… After a fairly smooth experience setting up our new Xserve with Panther Server as a mail and web server 10 days ago, I just experienced my first major troubleshooting nightmare. All of a sudden, I became unable to check my email on the server (POP). […]
Quite a game. Quite a goal. Once again, Arsenal live up to expectations and leave an indelible mark on this year’s competition. It was without doubt the worst possible draw for them. They had already faced Chelsea in the FA Cup in the past four years, and had beaten them every time. Chelsea were obviously […]
Here’s a very simple example of how Microsoft Word breaks fundamental user interface conventions on the Mac. When you hit cmd-F or select “Find” in the “Edit” menu, Word opens a new window called “Find and Replace” (even though it should actually be called “Find and Replace and Go To”, since these are the three […]
… And I am not talking about speed. Whenever I have to launch Virtual PC to use a PC-only application or preview a web design or Word document, I am reminded of how painfully backward that computing environment really is. You need to understand that I use the system as little as possible, which means […]
Eighteen months ago, I bought a subscription to MacFixIt Pro, because I had benefited from the site’s wealth of information in my daily Mac tech support work for several years. As a special offer, they also threw in a subscription to VersionTracker Plus, one of several flavours of “premium” services from the TechTracker network that […]
I am not sure exactly when Mail decides to update the (invisible) index for a mailbox — apart from when you are actually viewing it. Unfortunately, this means that if you select a message in box A move the message to box B have a Mail application crash or freeze that forces you to relaunch […]
Weird problem today. I haven’t burned audio CDs with iTunes in a few weeks, so I don’t know if it’s related to a recent software update. I created a playlist of AIFF files in iTunes, and clicked on “Burn” to burn a CD of it. I inserted a blank CD in my built-in SuperDrive and… […]
A few days ago I wrote about the Backup 2.0.1 update and the fact that it appeared to have fixed the problems I had been experiencing with automatically scheduled backups. Well, it now appears that I have spoken too soon… For the past couple of days, at the scheduled time of the backup, I have […]
After kicking Arsenal out of the lowly Carling Cup (also known as the League Cup) in the semi-final last week, Middlesborough just did the Gunners a big favour by winning 3-2 at Old Trafford against Manchester United in what must have been a thrilling game. Manchester United’s defensive frailties were made obvious in their last […]