September 26, 2007 – 1:35 pm
Quicksilver’s ace, you all know that. But when switching between an external monitor and your laptop’s built-in screen, it can lose track of where it’s supposed to display itself. You can get round this by trying out the not-often-seen-in-people’s-Quicksilver-screenshots menu interface, which as you might guess, tucks Quicksilver out of the way at the top [...]
September 20, 2007 – 11:46 am
Spent the morning playing with, and writing reviews of SketchBox (sticky notes with timers - nicely made, free, recommended) and Conjure (an attempt to make an interactive desktop thingy - it’s buggy and broken, not recommended at all). Next actions: download the new Carbon Copy Cloner, catch up on some email backlog.
So in the end, I opted for a MacBook. A good friend who owns both a MacBook *and* a MacBook Pro convinced me to go for the cheaper machine. In the end, there was no convincing argument for spending the money on a Pro.
And if the rumors of smaller, sleeker, multi-touch MacBooks (coming soon to [...]
If you’re someone who writes articles about computers for a living, you might recognise a feeling I can only describe as “screenshot anxiety”.
It crops up every time I have to file a story which includes a bunch of screenshot illustrations. Before sending to the editor, I have to open each screenshot one more time and [...]
I keep getting whole-system-down crashes. system.log offers the following. Can anyone spot any likely cause of the crashery? I’ll send you a chocolate bar.
May 24 18:33:38 localhost kernel[0]: standard timeslicing quantum is 10000 us
May 24 18:33:37 localhost memberd[38]: memberd starting up
May 24 18:33:38 localhost kernel[0]: vm_page_bootstrap: 188883 free pages
May 24 18:33:37 localhost lookupd[43]: lookupd (version [...]
Been playing with MacOSaiX again, something I haven’t done since the pre-Panther days, I think. This week’s work also means a review of iScrapbook (on the whole I’m impressed), and an article about fun things you can do with Google Earth. Busy busy!
Not long ago, I conducted a complete strip-down and re-install of my entire system. The whole process took about an evening, including time taken for doing a full backup before getting down to the nitty-gritty, and time for downloading updates from 10.4 to 10.4.9.
There were several reasons for me to take this drastic step:
I’ve noticed [...]
March 26, 2007 – 10:51 am
Today’s work is largely written off, because my son is home from school with a cough and a sore throat. But if I was getting anything done, some of it would be reviews of a bunch of OS X apps, including iGet (above), Trapper Keeper, and Actiontastic.
This has never happened to me before. There I was, sat in my local library doing some work away from the distractions of home, when a smartly-dressed woman approached me and said in an apologetic tone: “Excuse me, I don’t wish to intrude, but is that an Apple?”
“Certainly is,” I said, surprised but rather pleased [...]