From the monthly archives:

March 2006

What you see right now is the product of several weeks of brainstorming, tinkering around in Photoshop, staying up late with SubEthaEdit and a significant amount of trial and error. I had planned to get this done by spring break, but it took much longer than I expected. Thanks for everyone that gave me feedback on my works in progress, whether it be from flickr, the K2 or 9rules forums.

Before I continue, I would like [click to continue…]

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Okay so first it was the Core Solo to Core Duo CPU swap that was all the rage. Now it appears as though Intel’s upcoming mobile processor, codenamed Merom, works in the Intel Mac Mini flawlessly and boasts up to a 19 percent speed increase over the 2.16GHz T2600 Core Duo (keep in mind, the Core Duo Minis that Apple sells only sport the 1.66GHz model). My friend and roommate for next year, Chris Morrell, has the rest of the story on his site.

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Apple Computer has recently joined the ranks of BAPCo, the Windows benchmarking consortium. While still only speculation, Gearlog seems to think that this means Apple will now concentrate on Windows drivers to help the benchmark scores of Windows XP loaded on Apple’s Intel-based computers. From other news I have read, I can support their stance. Other rumors indicate OS X 10.5, dubbed Leopard, will feature Virtualization Technology or VT, as I talked about a while ago. [click to continue…]

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Today I will be looking at a set of iPod accessories from the so-called experts in iPod connectivity, the German company Sendstation. They specialize in small and affordable products that are all about convenience and functionality as we will see shortly. There are the PocketDocks, which as the name leads you to believe, are small, portable adapters you can use to connect your iPod to any computer via standard USB and Firewire cables that any geek should have lying around whether at home or work. Then we have my favorite of the bunch, earBuddy. Simply stated, it is a safe home for your treasured iPod earbuds. [click to continue…]

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A little while ago, I had mentioned that Sprint had invited me to be a member of their Ambassador program. Well today, the Samsung A920 phone had finally arrived. So what is the Ambassador program all about? To the best of my knowledge it is Sprint’s attempt at guerrilla marketing, targetting the real news makers, bloggers themselves. They equip tech bloggers with a Samsung A920 and unlimited Power Vision (Sprint’s net/media bundle) service for 6 months and only ask for simple feedback in return. [click to continue…]

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PMR Technology Means More Efficient Hard Drives

March 26, 2006

As hard drive storage has started to dramatically increase, now with up to 500GB on a single drive, manufacturers have had to research alternative methods of storage to yield these outcomes. Traditionally more storage meant more platters, and not touching the platters’ density. Take for example my favorite hard drive, the Western Digital [...]

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Why Adobe Hasn’t Gone UB Yet

March 24, 2006

One of Adobe’s employees, Scott Byer, maintains an Adobe blog named Living Photoshop. Yesterday he discussed some of the reasons why there will not be any current versions of Adobe software released or patched to be a Universal Binary to run natively and therefore faster on Intel Macs. Scott brings up some good [...]

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YAMT, Yet Another Mac Tip

March 22, 2006

Browsing MacUpdate late last night for some universal binary goodies, I ran across a rather neat application. Bye Bye Dashboard lets you disable the dashboard, which is notorious for being a system resources hog. I can see this type of thing coming in handy for the IT guy that wants to make all [...]

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Shuttle XPC x100

March 21, 2006

Spotted at the CeBIT convention, Shuttle will be releasing another SFF computer, this time based off of Intel’s Core architecture. This might be the Mac Mini equivalent on the PC side. Yes, I do remember that AOpen MiniPC, but that’s slow compared to the new Shuttle x100. Here are few specifications to [...]

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It’s Been Good Thunderbird

March 20, 2006

After at least 2 years of being faithful to Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client, I am switching to Apple’s Mail. This might be temporary if Mozilla comes out with a universal binary soon, but Mail is just so much faster. Thunderbird takes a while to launch and even longer to display messages that have [...]

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First Impressions: Intel Mac Mini

March 19, 2006

After arriving home for spring break, I was greeted by several packages that I had ordered. I opted for an Apple Intel Mac Mini with a SuperDrive and a 1.5GHz Core Solo processor. Before you start knocking on the Core Solo, I must say that this is only temporary and will be replaced [...]

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Linkage of the Day: CSS Tweak

March 17, 2006

Andy Peatling’s project, CSS Tweak, is a fantastic online tool that can optimize your CSS files. Simply provide CSS Tweak your CSS file, either by pasting (temporarily disabled currently) it or selecting it to upload and configure the options to determine how tweaked you want your file to be, ie to remove comments, whitespace, [...]

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XP on Mac Contest Over, Solution Released

March 16, 2006

It’s finally been done. With the recent news and video of narf2006 running Windows XP on his Intel iMac, everyone was wondering when his solutions would be verified. Well today, Colin from OnMac.net, where the contest is held, verified narf’s solution and it was made public in a nice zip file with all [...]

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Database Restored.

March 16, 2006

I’m not exactly sure why but my WordPress database went haywire overnight, presumably around 5am as told by FeedBurner’s FeedMedic. I should have seen that coming, I had a few database hiccups yesterday and the day before. Out of desperation, I immediately filed a support ticket with Media Temple and called them to [...]

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Amazon S3 – Simple Storage Service

March 15, 2006

With all the hype surrounding online storage services such as Box.net, Amazon has decided to get in the game with their new service S3, Simple Storage Service. Before I go any further, I must say that S3 isn’t aimed at the same market as Box.net. S3 integrates well with REST and SOAP interfaces [...]

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