SteveX Compiled

MacHeist runs occasional deals on Mac software and right now there’s a pretty good one: Get six Mac apps, absolutely free. I’m not familiar with most of the apps but the one of them that I am makes the whole bundle worth getting. WriteRoom. WriteRoom gives you a completely distraction-free screen to write in. It [...]

Looking for a Twitter client? Own a Mac? Get Tweetie. That’s an ad up there at the top of my feed. Tweetie puts those in until you pay for it, and I haven’t paid yet. Likely I will, though, even with the great free clients out there like TweetDeck. There are two things that make [...]

I picked up a UPS. Now that I’m living in a house in the country and on a hill, I figure I’m more susceptible to power anomalies and wouldn’t be surprised if the lines on the street get hit by lightning someday. The UPS I picked up is an APC Back-UPS XS, on sale for [...]

If you’re looking for information on how Apple is trying to solve the concurrency problem for programmers (on the Mac anyway) check out pages 11 through 13 of John Siracusa’s review of Snow Leopard. In a nutshell, they added a feature called blocks to C (and Objective C and soon C++) which are basically what [...]

Somehow when I configured my Mac 500gb drive, I ended up with a drive partitioned using the Apple Partition Table. I don’t know how I did it, but turns out, it was a mistake. The Mac installer, and Snow Leopard will likely be no different, refuses to upgrade an Apple Partition Table-partitioned drive. And you [...]

I spent the last few days trying to migrate from the Unibody MacBook Pro that I originally ordered to the refurb 2.4 that I have now. The Unibody was a MacBookPro 5,3 and the 2.4 refurb is a MacBookPro 4,1, in the parlance that the Mac uses in the boot screen you don’t normally see. [...]

My wife’s MacBook Pro broke and was facing a $1700 repair out of warranty. Fortunately my Visa features extended warranty protection which extended the warranty by a year, and gave me the opportunity to replace it with a newer model. My wife volunteered (okay not exactly willingly but in the end it was her choice [...]

I have had tethering working with the iPhone betas (I’m in the developer program), but now that I have the GM version of the OS installed, I don’t have the option to tether. It just doesn’t show up. My theory on what’s happened is that the iPhone betas didn’t use the carrier settings file (which [...]

it’s odd to be posting a pleasant surprise concerning Rogers and the iPhone but here it is: Rogers was one of the carriers listed as supporting iPhone tethering with iPhone OS 3.0. Makes me glad I held onto my 6gb $30 “limited time” data plan. Rogers even has text on their website that explicitly allows [...]

I don’t understand the new iTunes pricing model. Even songs on the same album can be priced differently: Albums in Canada used to be $9.99; now some new albums are $11.99 or $12.99. I know they aren’t Apple’s idea, but these pricing games are going to hurt sales.