The new PowerBooks came out today, and despite some criticism I’ve heard from people disappointed they weren’t dual cores or G5s, this is an amazing update. It’s a full system now, no upgrades needed. But the thing that stood out the most is ready scroll: Scrolling through web pages or large documents on a trackpad can challenge even the most nimble fingers. That’s why every PowerBook G4 features a new trackpad with scrolling capability. Just drag two fingers over the trackpad to scroll vertically and horizontally or pan around any active window. Change this feature to suit your needs: Customize your trackpad settings or turn off scrolling completely via System Read more »

This walks you through the steps of automatically backing up your Mac to an external hard drive using free software. In this case, the only piece of software you need that is not already on your Mac is RsyncX. Sure, Macs come preinstalled with Unix rsync, but RsyncX is needed to preserve Mac-specific resource forks, in case you have any apps that still use them. It also provides a nice GUI that is probably easier for most to use than trying to remember unix commands. Read more »

Steve Kirsch has archived a humorous listings of things to say when you’re, um, losing a technical argument. A few of my favorites: Oh, I played with that approach back as an undergrad. Got a D, too. Yeah, or we could all just plink away on Amigas or something. I like it, but it is too point-oh for my tastes. We need this to fit on a single floppy. I remember that IBM had a project to do that back in the 70s. Read more »

News.com is reporting that Netscape will soon release a browser with built-in anti-phishing measure. Details on how it accomplishes this are still vague, but it claims to be different from how Internet Explorer and Firefox detect phishing sites. In related news, Thunderbird recently had an anti-phishing mechanism checked into one of it’s nightly builds. Read more »

Lately I have been looking around for a text editor that runs on Windows. I tried all of the usual suspects that I have seen suggestions for and they all lack what I am looking for. Usually, the text editors I find for Windows lack one of the following: Speed…it is amazing how slow a program can be that should be so simple and fast. Lack of polish. Clear bugs everywhere. Taking the ‘U’ out of UI…meaning having nothing close to a good user interface. I found one text editor for example that had 15 menus at the top of the screen, about 200 buttons scattered around the interface, and Read more »

This site has lots of tips on keeping your WindowsXP SP2 running clean and problem free. This guy claims to be running his on Celeron-A 466Mhz with 288Mb of Ram. The site offers a pretty expansive list of links to articles offering tips on keeping your XP installation running in tip-top shape. Read more »

The ability to move 4.5 million iPod in a four month period has impressed many ad executives. So many in fact that Apple now reigns as most influential brand, ousting Google from their top spot. This is no surprise to me; Apple clearly has always been amazing at advertising, but thank God, they are finally getting recognition. For those of you interested, here’s the list of the top brands: Apple Google Ikea Starbucks al-Jazeera Read more »

Everyone who has a blog has experienced problems with comment spam. Some have completely turned off commenting to keep from having to deal with the deluge of fake comments. The Register has an interview online with someone in London who does comment spamming, or link spamming as some call it, and actually makes a pretty good living at it apparently. A very interesting look in to who could be behind all those Texas Hold’em comments on your blog. Read more »

After two years in the red, Microsoft’s Xbox department has finally turned a profit. This is exciting both as a Xbox owner and a Microsoft shareholder. Maybe this will push my stock, which was once at $80 and now is at $26, to $30. Strong hardware sales, coupled with the phenomenally successful Halo 2, means that Microsoft made $84 million on total sales of $1.41 billion. This is compared to a loss made this time last year of $397 million on $1.27 billionn [sic]. Read more »

Because soon or later everyone is tempted, here is a guide to using the Terminal Application to take control of the Unix software that OS X is built on top of. Broken out into 9 sections, it covers everything from basic commands (cd, ls, etc.) to shell scripting. Read more »