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Learning How to Use It

Troy (admin) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:27:26 +0000

So you decide to buy a copy of Things from Cultured Code. You’ve read great things about it (no pun intended), and you’re ready to graduate from chaotic analog scratchings on a notepad to an elegant digital management process using an award-winning application. Impatient, you give the instructions a cursory glance, then begin madly entering [...]

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VMWare 3: Good Product, Terrible Ordering Process

Troy (admin) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:53:01 +0000

Here is an example of a confusing, muddled online purchasing experience. It began well enough. I decided to upgrade to the latest version of VMWare Fusion 3 prior to installing Windows 7 on my Mac. I had heard that VMWare’s virtualization offered faster boot times, better integration with the Mac OS, and best-in-class support for [...]

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Free albums from Amazon

Troy (admin) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:01:28 +0000

So, I visited Amazon.com this evening to download a free-for-a-limited-time Philip Glass album, which I learned about via Twitter. To my surprise, I discovered 140 other free MP3 albums on the site. I had no idea. I’m a big fan of international/roots music, so I was thrilled to find many free albums in this genre. These are [...]

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NaNoWriMo: Write a Novel in 30 days

Troy (admin) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:24:29 +0000

On November 1, National Novel Writing Month kicks off for its tenth year. Entrants (you could be one of them!) commit to completing a 50,000-word novel in one month, completing the effort by midnight on Nov. 30. The rules are simple: start your oeuvre from scratch, meet the the minimum novel length, and submit your [...]

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NetNewsWire Alternatives

Troy (admin) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:47:24 +0000

This week, I decided to seek out alternatives to NetNewsWire, the popular feed reader from NewsGator. My disenchantment with NetNewsWire began soon after NewsGator updated the app, switching from a private syncing service to Google Reader at the end of August. I didn’t have any trouble migrating my feeds to Google Reader, as some users did. [...]

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Lessons Learned: essential apps, a few tips

Troy (admin) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:50:17 +0000

I spent the past month on a ship out in the Gulf of Mexico serving as a data manager for a research expedition. I won’t bore you with details about what I was doing, but I want to share some observations about my computing experience. I brought aboard a new 15″ Macbook Pro running Leopard [...]

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10.5.8 Airport Airport Bug Fixed

Troy (admin) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:06:14 +0000

If you attempted the temporary fix to get your wireless working correctly on your MacBook after the recent Mac OS 10.5.8 update, check out this MacFixIt post before you try to install the patch issued by Apple earlier today. I reinstalled the 10.5.8 Combo Update, then applied the Airport patch, and all is now working well.

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Kayaking to Costco

Troy (admin) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:34:55 +0000

Last week, we discovered that my wife had not updated her Google Maps home location on her iPod Touch since our move to Maryland last year. As far as the little device was concerned, we still lived in Ewa Beach, Hawaii. We found this out because we had to travel to a Costco in Virginia [...]

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Temp Fix for 10.5.8 AirPort Bug

Troy (admin) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:19:07 +0000

If you are one of the many people experiencing AirPort connectivity problems after upgrading to 10.5.8, here’s a solution that worked for me, found on the Apple Discussions forums from user SpacePirate. This solution allows you to revert to the 10.5.7 AirPort kernel extension (kext file) without reverting the entire OS back to 10.5.7. It [...]

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QIDO: Hardware Qwerty to Dvorak converter

Troy (admin) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:18:25 +0000

Review of the QIDO, a hardware Qwerty to Dvorak keyboard convertor

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Going Offline in Maine

Troy (admin) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:57:55 +0000

We’re about to head North to my home state of Maine for a couple of weeks, a place I haven’t lived for 20 years. Over the past two decades, I’ve moved from Colorado, to Boston, to Guam, to Germany, back to Boston, to Germany again, to Hawaii, and (most recently) to Washington, DC. For work [...]

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Podcast Production Video

Troy (admin) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:12:34 +0000

As I mentioned in a previous post, part of my job is to produce a bi-weekly audio podcast (for the National Ocean Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Recently, I was asked to put together a presentation about what it takes to produce it. To that end, I made the following video [...]

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TheMacBundles.com

Troy (admin) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:34:13 +0000

It seems that all I’ve been posting about as of late are notifications of Mac software discounts, but there’s a new bundle deal on the street that I want to highlight for two reasons: (1) the business model is notably different from the rest; and (2) the first grouping of applications are quite good. You [...]

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Interesting stuff

Troy (admin) — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:29:08 +0000

A few notes of interest. 1. MacUpdate Spring Bundle: Yet another bundle for $49. Standout included applications are TechTool Pro, Parallels, Circus Ponies Notebook, and NetBarrier. 2. Google Wave: What would E-mail look like if it were invented today? Check out this video preview from the Google I/O developer conference. Pretty interesting and ambitious (and it’s open [...]

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Three Day Panic Sale

Troy (admin) — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:45:33 +0000

Just in case you haven’t heard, Panic software is offering all of their applications at a 50 percent discount through 11:59 Pacific, May 29th. The folks at Panic make some of the best software out there for the Mac, so it’s worth checking out. I’m a huge fan of Transmit, their FTP client. I think of [...]

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Audio editors for podcasting

Troy (admin) — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:02:50 +0000

In my work life, one of my tasks is to produce an audio podcast. I use Soundtrack Pro and GarageBand to do the job. However, I recently tried out a few audio editing alternatives. I evaluated Adobe Soundbooth, Adobe Audition, and Audacity. I thought I’d share my conclusions: - Adobe Soundbooth CS4 ($200). I found Soundbooth [...]

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SpaceTime3D Public Beta

Troy (admin) — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:44:55 +0000

When I first installed VMWare Fusion on my Mac last year, I was surfing around for some free and interesting applications to try out on Windows to test performance. One of the apps I came across was a desktop search alternative called SpaceTime3D. I was intrigued, and E-mailed the developer to ask if a Mac [...]

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MacHeist=Apple App Store? (+Twitter postscript)

Troy (admin) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:28:24 +0000

Earlier today, MacHeist sent out a blurb on Twitter with a link to a blog post from Fast Company. This article posited that the app-bundling phenomenon that is MacHeist could serve as a model for an Apple desktop App Store (similar to the iPhone App Store). I don’t see it. MacHeist is a lot [...]

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Yep, another MacHeist

Troy (admin) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 04:03:30 +0000

In case you haven’t heard, MacHeist 3 is here. There’s a lot of controversy about the pros and cons (for developers of Mac software) about steeply discounted bundles of Mac applications, and MacHeist is at the core of it. The controversy revolves around what these kind of steeply-discounted bundles portend for third-party Mac developers. Will [...]

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Mac Security

Troy (admin) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:33:53 +0000

Just came across an interesting article on MacWorld. Here’s an excerpt: Two well-known Mac hackers are updating a widely used hacking toolkit, making it easier to take control of a Macintosh computer…Although there are still many more exploits available for Windows software than for Macs, the new payload code means there is now “more or less [...]

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