From the not-sure-how-useful-this-is department comes a simple method of changing the default desktop wallpaper shown when logging into OS X Leopard if space and stars aren’t your cup o’ tea. All you need to do is replace the file DefaultDesktop.jpg located Continue Reading »

Disqus, the 2-person, YCombinator-funded, San Francisco-based startup I’ve written about before, has just opened up it doors to everyone. Disqus adds spice to blog comments with innovative comment display techniques including threading and comment rating but goes further than that by mirroring Continue Reading »

Just tonight Erica Sadun, a well-known iPhone tinkerer and TUAW blogger, announced the launch of jailbreakme.com. The site enables its iPhone/iPod Touch visitors to “jailbreak” their units in mere minutes, with a single touch. Jailbreaking is a term for opening Continue Reading »

While I was content with my BlackBerry Curve mainly for my ability to type rapidly on the keypad, recent events including the ability to easily change ringtones through iTunes and Google providing free IMAP access influenced me to pick up an iPhone along with Leopard this weekend. I was going to wait until January to see if any GPS and Continue Reading »

If you’re anything like me, for the past few days you’ve been checking the settings page of your Gmail/Google Apps Gmail account hoping to see an IMAP settings page. Google is slowly rolling out free IMAP access to all Gmail accounts. This is huge. IMAP support has generally been ignored by free email providers Continue Reading »

Prediction: Hard drive manufacturers will love Apple for boosting external hard drive sales. Apple’s upcoming operating system, OS X Leopard, contains a powerful system backup tool that makes use of an external hard drive rather than using a portion of the main hard drive’s space, as Windows Vista and XP do for “System Restore” points. Continue Reading »

Sling Media, a company known for set-top boxes that stream video, recently unleashed a third Slingbox into their lineup, the Slingbox Solo. It is priced above the Slingbox AV I reviewed over the summer and below the Slingbox Pro. As the name implies, the Slingbox Solo only connects to one device Continue Reading »

The latest web craze seems to be centered around FriendFeed’s service that, well, lets you view your friends’ feeds from other social services and share your own. It seems a little abstract but if you’re familiar with the news feed on Facebook, you know where this is coming from. After you’ve setup a FriendFeed account, you don’t really do anything differently - Continue Reading »

Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University well-known for his digital ethnography studies, has put together an excellent video delving into technology and the state of education today. Prof Wesch is known for these types of videos and in my opinion he first broke out with his video The Machine is Us/ing Us that dealt with the evolving technology and how Continue Reading »

By now you’ve no doubt heard that the latest Mac OS X version dubbed 10.5 Leopard will be dropping on Friday, October 26th at 6pm. Usually I don’t need convincing when new software comes out, and I upgrade regardless. However, when reading through the new Leopard features list on Apple’s site, one thing became apparent - I could care less about every single Leopard feature with the exception of Continue Reading »

Today is Blog Action Day where thousands of blogs and companies have united to increase awareness about the environment. Now would be a great time to share a few energy saving tips I attempt to employ daily. Using less energy with your daily routines means there will be less demand for power and therefore less coal being burned to provide that power. Continue Reading »

People have been saying that DRM is going to die for a long time. Steve Jobs went out on a limb last February and urged record companies to cease using the crippling technology. It’s been quite some time since then and the music industry is still relatively reluctant to comply with every end user’s request to ditch DRM. Apple’s DRM-free success Continue Reading »

Tired of using sketchy sites to find mediocre ringtones to replace the default one on your new phone? ToneMine attempts to solve this problem by building a community around people who create and share their own ringtones with their mixer tool. There is a decent library of sound effects you may use to Continue Reading »

I hate to solicit things on this blog but I’ve been selected as a top 20 finalist for the $10k blogging scholarship I wrote about a while ago. If you’ve got the time to spare, I’d really appreciate your vote. Compared to last year where there were only 10 finalists, there seems to be considerably more competition this year. As I’ve mentioned in the past, out-of-state Continue Reading »

For one of the first times in my college education, I have the option of writing a term paper on a topic that actually interests me. It’s for a required computer science course about computing, society and professionalism. I will be writing a lengthy paper delving into the Continue Reading »

While many illegal music downloaders and file-sharers have been pursued by the RIAA, most have settled outside of court. This past week, the RIAA dealt with the first real trial where someone fought back and denied any wrongdoing. While Continue Reading »

I recently discovered RefactorMyCode, a developer-oriented site aimed at letting others critique, or refactor, your code snippets. Up until now, it seemed that the only communities based around helping others with their code were mundane programming forums. Continue Reading »