Archive for the 'Technology' Category

My experience with OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) on my 2014 Mac Pro

Friday, March 18th, 2016 • 6:16 pm

I haven’t written on this blog since last year and my very traumatic experience with upgrading my 2014 Mac Pro to OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). It’s not that I don’t have anything more to say about OS X or other topics. It’s just that I find it less time-consuming and more immediate to post things on Twitter, […]

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So I just had brain surgery…

Sunday, September 15th, 2013 • 2:09 pm

I don’t usually share personal stuff here, but it went well, and it’s done, so I feel fortunate to be able to talk about it and share some of my (slightly amputated) thoughts on the whole process, especially when it comes to the “user-friendliness” of the thing, and boy, they sure could use some help […]

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Amazon (Canada): More stellar customer service

Monday, April 22nd, 2013 • 1:42 pm

As a long-time customer of the Amazon (France), Amazon (US) and Amazon (Canada) web stores, I must say that I have always enjoyed stellar customer service, and my latest experience is no exception. Back in December 2012, I took advantage of a special offer at Amazon.ca to order a copy of Martin Scorcese’s Hugo on […]

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iCloud’s silent email filtering: What’s the solution?

Thursday, February 28th, 2013 • 5:12 pm

Macworld has a new column by Dan Moren and Lex Friedman about Apple’s use of “silent email filtering” for iCloud accounts. As John Siracusa notes, this is nothing new. Apple’s silent mail filtering “has been going on since the .Mac days”. But I suppose people need to be reminded from time to time. As a […]

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URLs for Google search results: now cruft-free?

Monday, February 25th, 2013 • 6:46 pm

Last week, I wrote about the problem with shortened URLs in Safari’s History feature. A reader wrote to express his agreement and also mention similar issues he was experiencing with unresolved URLs from Google searches crowding his Safari history instead of the actual resolved URLs. I did notice, a couple of years ago, that, all […]

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Bell.ca: A cruft record?

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012 • 4:50 pm

I’ve written about the crappiness of Bell Canada’s web site before. Here’s another very simple illustration. This is a video recording of what is displayed in the web browser’s address bar when I log in: Marvelous, isn’t it? And the whole site is like this. Whenever you click on anything, you have to get through […]

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iTunes and the temptation of ‘good enough’

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 • 8:35 am

There has been a fair amount of grumbling lately about iTunes lately: “iTunes: Time to right the syncing ship” (Jason Snell, Macworld) “iTunes’ ball and chain: Windows” (Allen Pike) I myself have done a fair amount of grumbling about iTunes over the years. With every year that passes, it seems that we are getting closer […]

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Steve Jobs (1995–2011)

Thursday, October 6th, 2011 • 10:00 am

Even though it’s not a surprise, it’s still a shock. Most of us didn’t know him personally, but I think we all felt some kind of personal connection to him through the attention to detail that manifests itself in Apple’s products. We just knew that at least part of it was directly due to his […]

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Word 5.1 Nostalgia: I don’t get it

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011 • 10:05 am

There are multiple examples of Microsoft Word 5.1 nostalgia on the web. For various reasons, many Mac users have come to believe that Microsoft Word 5.1 was the last great word processor for the Mac, that it was a near-perfect product and that it’s been all downhill from there. The latest example comes from Forkbombr […]

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Bell Satellite TV: Too good to be true

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011 • 10:24 am

I am afraid I have to write a major correction to what I wrote last month about the service I received from my satellite TV provider, Bell Satellite TV. At the time, I wrote that I was having pretty serious signal reception problems and that the problems were eventually fixed by repairs completed over a […]

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Bell Satellite TV: Stellar service (continued)

Friday, January 21st, 2011 • 5:07 pm

When I wrote about my problems with my Bell Satellite TV system and the stellar quality of the service I received from Bell TV on January 11, it was right after the repair had been completed and before I had been able to verify that everything was indeed back to normal. It turns out that, […]

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Bell Satellite TV: Stellar service for once

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 • 4:30 pm

I have been rather frustrated with with Bell Satellite TV in recent times. While there have been some programming improvements (notably the addition of a high definition version of the Setanta sports channel and of the CBC News Network channel), there have also been frustrating delays with the introduction of other specialty channels (including Sportsnet […]

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Broadband at last

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 • 4:17 pm

It’s hard to believe it’s taken so long but yes, today is the day that my home office has finally been hooked up to a decent Internet service provider, namely the rural broadband service offered by Eastlink in mainland Nova Scotia. After surviving for ten years (until 2006!) on dial-up and then having to bite […]

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Back to the dial-up grind

Thursday, February 5th, 2009 • 6:09 pm

I am afraid I am being forced to curtail my on-line activities somewhat. Since Monday, February 2, my pseudo-high speed Internet hook-up via satellite has been on the fritz. It might not have been a coincidence that, on that day, after several weeks of very cold weather, we had milder temperatures, which caused all kinds […]

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Bell.ca: The art of wasting people’s time

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 • 7:10 pm

It really is mind-boggling. Bell Canada Entreprises (BCE) is the leading telecommunications company here in Canada. Due to long-standing monopoly or near-monopoly conditions in many parts of the country, including my little corner of the woods, I have little choice but to be one of their customers. For example, they are the only wireless provider […]

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