Garbage In Garbage Out

Apple’s Mail.app utilizes a SQLite database to manage the mail index. In my case, that’s approaching 10,000 email messages. Constant deleting and moving wreaks havoc over time on this database, resulting in slow-downs and hiccups (or, in the worst case, failure). You can force Mail.app to rebuild its index, resulting in much snappier performance, a [...]

Apple’s new AppleTV appears to have been modded by several early adopters, who have gotten file-system access to the device (surprisingly easily), and enabled it to play XviD, AVI, FLV, DivX, 3ivX, and every other media type supported by Perian.

So, you’ve installed Apple’s Boot Camp, partitioned your hard disk, installed Windows XP, but now you have the Windows volume showing up on your Mac desktop. You can hide it (but keep access to it), by doing the following:

I’m sick of Apple’s snobbery. As an AAPL stockholder and customer, I’m fed up with Apple alienating and insulting PC users.
Now, I’m not a Mac-hater; far from it. In fact, I’m a recent re-convert, having come back to the Mac platform after leaving it for Windows 95 when Microsoft was turning itself around based [...]

A hearty laugh followed by a short moment of pondering followed my reading of Bill Gates’ comments in the obligatory Newsweek interview upon the release of Microsoft Vista. In the interview, Bill is asked a series of questions about the inevitable comparisons between Windows Vista and Apple’s OS X operating system, and Apple’s very pointed [...]

I’ll admit I’m unfairly targeting Vista, but in this day and age, there’s no excuse for this sort of error message and its mumbly-crumbly error text (”might be useful if…”). Might be useful if Error 0×8000FFFF meant anything to the operator.

The energy saver preference panel in Mac OS X offers a simplistic approach to managing energy saving settings, such as sleep time for the computer and disks. A user might think that by deselecting “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible”, the drives would be prevented from spinning down. This is not, however, true.

As [...]

On January 2nd 2007, I accepted a position as Director of Online Technology at Northern Kentucky University’s College of Informatics. This role is exciting from the standpoint that the College is brand new, fusing multiple diverse disciplines with a wide range of technologies, as well as because of the disjointed state of their current online [...]

Today Apple has announced a new multifunction quad-band GSM+EDGE hand-held phone, incorporating Wi-Fi, a wide-screen video player, with MP3 and AAC music player. It automatically senses whether it is held in portrait or landscape mode. The phone itself sports a 3.5-inch screen with 160 pixels per inch (ppi). The entire face is LCD, so all [...]

Parallels release yesterday of a new beta (build 3094) further blurs the distinction between rival operating systems. With the new release, Windows applications appear independently in the Mac OS X dock, and even in the application switcher. Better still, Windows XP apps can be dragged to a permanent spot on the dock, and when clicked, [...]