/dev/random

I finally got disgusted with my Wireless Mighty Mouse, which will only scroll up even after repeated cleanings, so I got a new mouse to replace it. None of the Logitech or Kensington mice I like are available in Bluetooth and I don’t want a wireless mouse that uses a dongle. After looking around I [...]

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Since NewsFire is now free, I decided to take another look at it. After only a few minutes I went back to NetNewsWire. Since both are free, I see no compelling reason to switch to NewsFire.
Although NewsFire is attractive and fast, it lacks many of my favorite features of NetNewsWire. Most notably, there’s no way [...]

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David Watanabe came up with a great idea to make money on the new free version of NewsFire: include three paid-for feeds that the user cannot unsubscribe from. Site owners can bid for a spot as one of these feeds, bringing Watanabe revenue while offering a great product for free.
Recently there was an uproar when [...]

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Since Scoble praised VMware, I decide to take another look at the latest version. I own both VMware and Parallels, but I currently use Parallels.
The new VMware converter made it easy to move my Parallels VM to VMware, so I was able to run my most recent Windows VM with it. Although there’s very [...]

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Rainer Brockerhoff explains how the snowball effect resulted in some of the often-criticized design features of the MacBook Air.

From what I can tell, the Air was designed from the outset to be extremely thin and rugged, while maintaining adequate battery life and performance. These considerations snowball to the extent that the battery uses up 2/3 [...]

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My AppleTV arrived today. The setup was quick and easy, although it took about 20 minutes to sync with my MacBook Pro over 802.11n. The picture quality is excellent, even though I’m using component video rather than HDMI, since the lone HDMI input on my TV is being used for my Comcast HD DVR.

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This morning I had two kernel panics while my MacBook Pro was sitting idle. In both cases it was caused by backupd (Time Machine). I had it set to back up wirelessly to a drive attached to my Mac Mini, but I shut time machine off for now. I also back up my home directory [...]

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I took a few photos this afternoon, mostly to practice using manual focus with my new lens. One shot I took of the sky facing the sun came out pretty dark, but Aperture was able to do an amazing job of bringing out color & detail.
Here’s the original image:
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
Since I was shooting [...]

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I tried Firefox 3.0b3 today and I really like it.
I change browsers fairly often, because I usually get annoyed with slowness, bugs, or quirks in each of them. Until today I was using Safari. Before that it was Flock, until I got annoyed with its window and tab handling bugs.
I had tried other [...]

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I got a 8GB SDHC card, since my D40x creates very large images and can only hold about 500 in large (10MP) JPEG and less than 200 RAW images on my old 2GB card. The SDHC card worked perfectly in the camera and can hold about 600 raw images or about 2000 large JPEGs.
However, when [...]

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I’ve used BBEdit for years, but TextMate blows it away (except for one thing). TextMate’s bundles and plugins really make it shine. The only thing I miss in BBEdit is the FTP browser, which lets me open files directly from an FTP server, rather than using a separate FTP client.
Ciarán Walsh offers some great TextMate [...]

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Here’s a nice AppleScript to send the selected headline to your Instapaper account to read later.

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iPhone Atlas warns that the 1.1.3 jailbreak may prevent official third party apps from working.
iPhone firmware 1.1.3 includes a mechanism for approving signed applications. Signed apps use private keys to authorize themselves for installation on the iPhone/iPod Touch. This gets damaged by the jailbreak, although it’s reversable. It does mean that official and unofficial [...]

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Someone came up with a jailbreak for iPhone 1.1.3. I don’t understand why they even bother, when Apple will be releasing an official SDK very soon, which will provide the same capabilities.

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I’ve made a few changes at MacMegasite and there will be more coming in the next few weeks.
First of all, Daniel Brusilovsky is officially a staff member! Hopefully we’ll add more staff this year. Look for a staff bio page to be added soon.
I’ve also added the mysite module, which lets users set up their [...]

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I picked up an Eye-Fi card at Macworld, but I didn’t really get a chance to try it out until now thanks to the crappy WiFi connection and not having my D40x. It works exactly as advertised. I can take a photo and have it uploaded immediately to Flickr without using my computer, and also [...]

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The last day of the show is crazy even though the crowd is smaller. I got a lot more swag today since everyone wanted to get rid of stuff. I spent most of the afternoon in Moscone West, where the smaller and more fun booths were. One company was selling headphones half price. I got [...]

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The only place I could find good connectivity in Moscone South is the corridor outside the exhibit hall. My hotel’s Wifi sucked even worse than usual - I couldn’t obtain an IP address at all.
Instead of buying the overpriced food in Moscone, I took a walk to Metreon for lunch. They have a really cool [...]

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Connectivity was a lot better today. Today I discovered that they have a “hidden” network (no SSID broadcast) outside the exhibit hall, so I was able to get online at Moscone South. I took advantage of it to update my iPhone to 1.1.3. The upgrade went smoothly and my iPhone didn’t get bricked.
I went to [...]

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I was up at 4:30 AM and on line before 5:30, yet I only got into the overflow room. I was very disappointed with the lack of internet access and power. I was able to plug in my MacBook Pro a few times to charge it, but I wasn’t able to get online for more [...]

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