Apple: “Do be evil.”
July 18th, 2010
Apple still makes exceptionally good and cool products, many of which may be the best in their classes. That’s not the issue. Apple’s antenna problems with the iPhone 4 are negligible even seen on their own, and piffling when compared to the quality of the iPhone 4, which is an astoundingly good smartphone. That’s also not the issue. The issue is that Apple is becoming an increasingly obnoxious company that it’s almost impossible to like.
The iPhone 4 “Antennagate” fuss is a perfect example of Apple’s dysfunctional public persona. A couple of years ago leading CNET podcaster Molly Wood summed up the same observation in her classic Apple is my bad boyfriend rant, and things have been getting worse rather than better since then. You just can’t help getting the impression that this is a company that is being prevaricating, arrogant, slippery and disingenuous to and frequently beyond the point of dishonesty in almost everything they do.
Convert TextExpander snippets for Windows
July 9th, 2009
If you use both Mac and Windows you may have wished you could use your Mac TextExpander snippet files on your Windows computers or virtual machines. TextExpander radically speeds up your work if you often need to use the same text blocks, and having the same texts with the same hotstrings available on Windows makes life a lot easier.
This post provides a free Perl converter script and instructions for converting your Mac TextExpander snippet files so that you can use them on a Windows machine with the free, open-source AutoHotKey program. In addition to this I will show you how to manage your snippet files for multiple machines in a free Dropbox account. Dropbox is a much better solution for synching your snippets than MobileMe and if you combine these two strategies you’ll never have to worry about synching your snippets again – both on multiple Macs and across Mac and Windows machines (including Windows virtual machines in Parallels or Fusion).
Version 1.2:
Cursor position: The 1.2 version now supports the caret/cursor position macro. This will work reliably provided your snippets don’t contain the clipboard pasting macro or date macros that use full month and weekday names or date numbers without leading zeros. All these things will throw the position count off (AHK doesn’t have a “put cursor here” macro).
Version 1.1:
The 1.1 version adds the following improvements:
Expand mode (immediately, at delimiter with keep/delete) is read from TextExpander and exported to the AHK script.
Abbreviation mode (case sensitive/ignore case) is read from TextExpander and exported to the AHK script. However, “Adapt snippet to case of abbreviation” does not work in AHK – at least, I haven’t been able to make it work.
The keep/abandon delimiter macros in individual snippets are now evaluated and work correctly in AHK.
MediaLink: Make the PS3 a Mac media center
February 6th, 2009
For a long time I was frustrated that I couldn’t access the media files on my Mac with my PlayStation 3, which has everything needed to be a great multimedia center, in addition to being one of the best BluRay players around (and incidentally allowing you to play some pretty good video games as well). Recently I discovered Nullriver MediaLink, which comes close to making Apple’s own AppleTV unnecessary. With one small but important restriction, MediaLink is a perfect solution for accessing all the media on your Mac on your TV. At just $20, it’s worth every penny and more.
The restriction? MediaLink can’t (yet) play anything with Apple’s copy protection on it, which means all movies, TV series and videos bought in the iTunes Store, in addition to any iTunes tracks you still haven’t converted to non-DRM. This is currently where the AppleTV still has a major advantage, but I’ve corresponded with Nullriver and they indicated that they’re working on a solution. My guess would be they want to somehow make it possible to register the PS3 as one of the up to five “computers” that are allowed to play your iTunes protected content. If and when they manage that, MediaLink is going to be the kickass solution for PS3/Mac integration.
First few days with Office 2008
February 16th, 2008
I’ve now been using Office 2008 for about five days and I’m already ready to remove it from my Mac. It is painfully, embarrassingly, frustratingly bad. Either the Microsoft Mac team screwed up completely and lost all track of what they were trying to do or Microsoft is consciously trying to force users away from the Mac and back onto Windows. Possibly a little bit of both. This isn’t just my opinion — c’t, Germany’s most reputable professional computer publication, comes out very strongly and warns all users against installing Office 2008 in their new issue due to be published on Monday.
The iPod Touch as a Bluetooth Phone
December 27th, 2007
I just got a nifty little gadget from Gear4 called the BluEye that adds Bluetooth, an FM radio and a wired remote to my iPod Touch and effectively transforms it into a phone with voice dialing. When calls come in anything playing on the Touch is automatically paused and you accept the call by pressing Play on the remote. If your phone supports voice dialing you can use that too, you just press the Bluetooth button on the remote once and speak the name to dial. This means that you can leave the phone in your pocket pretty much all the time and you don’t miss calls because you’re listening to your iPod. You also have the added advantage of the wired remote, so you can pause, skip tracks and adjust the volume without having to futz around with the touchscreen.
Boiled Frogs: Apple gets into nickel and dime crime
September 14th, 2007
Apple is the latest major company to get into nickel and dime crime, which is safe, legal and fantastically profitable. Their new iPhone ringtones function gets people to pay 99 cents for something they already own, and money for nothing is always the best best profit margin you can have. It used to be called theft.
Robbers used to hang out in the woods and collect loot from unwary travellers by threatening to insert sharp instruments into their soft parts or banging them over the head with a heavy stick. This is no longer necessary, there are much better ways to boil a frog nowadays.
Apple’s grey screen of death
July 23rd, 2007
Blue or grey – it’s still a screen of death!
Yesterday I had my first grey screen of death on my Mac Pro. It was probably caused by Parallels running in Coherence mode, with all the XP windows as discrete windows on the OSX desktop. At least, that’s my guess — it seems that it happened so fast that no logs were stored, I’m unable to find any of the panic logfiles that my searches suggest you should look for.
Interestingly, the same searches would seem to indicate that grey screens of death (normally referred to as kernel panics, apparently) occur just about as frequently on the Mac as they do on Windows machines, and for the same reasons: Read the rest of this entry »
The Sony K800i as an MP3 player
December 4th, 2006
Steve Jobs and everyone else at Apple must sometimes wonder why their competitors make everything so easy for them — it must feel like shooting fish in a barrel. I just updated my cellphone account and got a new Sony Ericsson K800i as part of the deal. Among other things, this phone has full MP3 player capabilities, and since you can insert a memory card with up to 1GB of storage you could theoretically put quite a few songs and podcasts on it.
If only…
The dangers of getting friends to switch
December 3rd, 2006
Like many geeks I tend to be treated as the universal computer guru resource and free support line and repair shop by many of my friends, at any time of the day or night. Liked many others in my position, I’m always trying to find ways to reduce my FFSO in an effort to get a life back. The Mac’s easy-to-use operating system and programs once seemed to be the ideal solution.
The real reasons for switching to Apple
November 12th, 2006
Even though I work in the Windows software industry, I’m still planning to switch all my hardware from PC to Mac as soon as possible. I know that there are a lot of “practical” reasons to switch, but if I really look at my own motives those aren’t really the reasons. The real reasons are more emotional than practical.
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