Articles posted in December, 2012

Power outage fries DSL modem and brings back kernel panics

Sunday, December 23rd, 2012 • 11:30 am

Sometimes I really feel as if I am somehow cursed. The reality is that I am just too reliant on modern technology, of course, but so is almost everyone else. And the thought that most people have to go through situations like the one I went through yesterday morning is, strangely enough, not particularly comforting. […]

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Pages documents in the Cloud: 5 MB for a blank document with plain text?

Sunday, December 23rd, 2012 • 10:37 am

The one thing I hate the most about cloud-based computing is the sense that I have lost control, that the computer does things on my behalf with very little input or feedback, and that things can fairly easily go wrong. And so I tend to avoid it like the plague. That said, as a tech […]

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iTunes Store Experience: Not for the music lover

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 • 11:36 am

Here is a telling example of everything that is wrong, in my opinion, with the current state of the music industry. Yesterday, I was listening to an Etta James mixtape from 2009. The mixtape included one song that I particularly liked, titled “Quick Reaction & Satisfaction”. So I decided to try and find more about […]

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iTunes 11.0.1: Fixes Column Browser issues and improves performance

Friday, December 14th, 2012 • 9:53 am

Apple has just released an update for iTunes 11 (iTunes 11.0.1) and I am glad to report that it appears to include improvements for two of the issues I mentioned last week. First of all, the View › Column Browser submenu is no longer disabled when the sidebar is visible. And then the egregiously bad […]

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Mountain Lion’s Safari: Does not resume properly after restart

Monday, December 10th, 2012 • 3:33 pm

I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s definitely something that is not right with Safari’s Resume feature in Mountain Lion on my machine. Well-behaved OS X applications follow the “Close windows when quitting an application” setting in System Preferences › General: If the option is not checked, when I re-open those well-behaved applications, […]

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iTunes 11: Pathetic performance when editing tags

Saturday, December 8th, 2012 • 5:43 pm

In recent years, using iTunes to manage my music library has always been, for me, a major exercise in frustration. The Spinning Beach Ball of Death has always been part of my experience using iTunes. While some aspects of iTunes’s performance levels have actually improved in iTunes 11 (notably the execution of AppleScript scripts, generally […]

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iTunes 11: ‘Edit Playlist’ to work around the single-window limitation

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012 • 2:47 pm

Last week, I wrote that iTunes 11 can no longer open playlists in separate windows. This creates annoying limitations for those who, like me, are used to editing playlists in separate windows while looking at their music library in their main iTunes window. In particular, I wrote: So now if you want to, say, copy […]

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