I can just see it now: Mechanic: “What seems to be the problem?” Customer: “I’m not sure. My car just freaked out yesterday. The windshield wipers started wiping, the lights were flashing on and off, and when I turned on the radio, I got a BSOD.” Mechanic: “Hmm, sounds like you caught a virus.” Customer: “Again? Geez, that’s the third time this month. I just installed Norton Mobile Anti-Virus® last night!” Mechanic: “Well, we’ll have to reformat your car and reinstall Windows XP Automotive®. You can pick your it up in about 39 minutes…” Read more »

Back in the late 80s, when I was in college, I owned an Amiga 500. The OS booted off of a floppy, but it had loads of memory (relative to all my dormmates PCs), had awesome sound and graphics, and it was all native. Even that was an upgrade from a Commodore 64, so I had yet to even really see a “PC compatible”. With what I could do on the Amiga, I found it difficult to comprehend why anyone would mess around with a PC. Sometime later I gave some guy on the internet the 500 and some cash and got myself a 2000 with dual floppies and a Read more »

Saturday was a day of disappointment and excitement, all wrapped into a mini package (you’ll get the pun in a bit). I got up super-early—well, for a Saturday—stood in line for over an hour before the Apple store opened (an hour earlier than it’s normal 10am time), and was one of the first few into the store. The line was a couple dozen long or so, but most were there for iWork ’05, iLife ’05 and the newly released Mac mini. Me? Since I haven’t quite got my free iPod yet, I was there for the iPod shuffle, two 512mb versions to be exact, one for me and one for Read more »

No, this isn’t a call for help or a desperate plea for attention. Now that the Mac Mini is out, my life has reason and purpose. Forty-four years ago, someone wrote an article in some obscure magazine (well, obscure to me, at least) about what life would be like in the year 2000. That was a long time from then, 39 years to be exact, so the “future” seemed a lifetime of technology away. It is a pretty interesting read, really. A lot of technological forecasts and predictions, some of which may actually exist now in some form or other. But given the relative slow advancement of technology in the Read more »

This may not be a big deal for the most part, but to some, it just might very well be. By default, iChat exposes your personal information, which is available to any other Mac user via Rendezvous. At home this probably wouldn’t matter, but at work, a conference, or school — well, you might not like other people snooping your info. Fortunately, the fix is quite easy: Launch iChat and under “Privacy” in Preferences, check the box labeled “Block Rendezvous users from seeing my email and AIM addresses.” via O’Reilly Read more »

Sometimes in a shopping center or mall, I’ll come across a kiosk that obviously runs some version of Windows, obvious from the fact that it’s crashed and all that’s visible is the BSOD or an error dialog and a familiar cursor. Certainly it’s not everyday, but when I do, I can’t help but chuckle at the statement that makes. Not just about the operating system, but also about the maintenance, or lack thereof, of the system. Maybe it’s only been down for a few minutes when I’ve seen it, but whether it’s been a few minutes or a few days, the end-user has seen something they shouldn’t. Here’s an interesting Read more »

I can’t wait for this. Sonnet, a big name in Macintosh accessories and upgrades, announced on Thursday the Tempo Bridge, a SATA to Parallel ATA adapter. Essentially, the little board plugs into the back of most 3.5″ hard drives, allowing G5 user’s to take advantage of the often cheaper parallel drives. Just slide the drive into the second slot, plug in the SATA and power cables and you’re done. I recently just picked up a Seagate ATA 200GB for $69 after rebate and came across (but didn’t buy) their smaller 160GB drive for $49 after rebate. Granted, the $50 price tag for the adapter effectively puts even a rebated drive Read more »

Based on it’s specs, the Gmini XS200 from Archos looks like it has potential to be competitive with the iPod Mini. At just a tad larger than a business card, but with a 20GB hard drive, while it can’t play music from iTMS, it can store a heck of a lot more music than similar-sized flash and (much smaller) hard drive based players and it can play both WMA and WAV music files. It’s even priced the same as the iPod Mini, but with five times the storage. Read more »

I love comic book movies. No, make that I love super-hero comic book movies, ones where the main character(s) has some special ability caused by a spider bite or coming from a distant planet or even another realm. Sure, the Caped Crusader is a super-hero by his own right, but no one has managed to capture him quite as well as Michael Keaton. I’m betting Christian Bale dethrone him, but we’ll just have to wait and see. That said, this one looks just sweet. No, not because it stars Jessica Alba in a skin-tight suit, but because we finally get to hear “It’s clobberin’ time!” from The Thing, see the Read more »

I won’t say much about these other than some of them are downright hilarious. I’ve seen things like this in my past programming days and I’m probably guilty of one or two myself. When you’ve been up all night coding, sometimes your brain just doesn’t work right. There’s probably even been a time or two when I forgot to remove my debugging code for production and ended up with strange variables and output that shouldn’t be seen by an end user. Oops. I didn’t read through every one of them, but from the ones I did, this is my favorite: Once I had a junior programmer writing VB code that Read more »