Archive for the 'Apple' Category

iTunes Local Files Playlist

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

I was recently traveling with my laptop and wanted to listen to some music. Most of my music is on a server at home, but when buy new music from iTunes or rip a CD, the default place for it is the Music folder on my laptop’s hard disk. I move music to the server [...]

MacBook Pro: No Batteries Available

Friday, January 9th, 2009

I have nothing but trouble with Mac laptop batteries. First there was the original PowerBook with it’s defective battery, replaced by Apple under warranty. Then my wife’s MacBook Pro battery ran out of ability to hold a charge after just 15 months – far below it’s expected life, but of course, out of warranty. And [...]

Mac Launch Daemon Control

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

Months ago I installed a player for some DRM’ed media from Hiro Media, which was having a noticeable impact on my system. I caught their daemon running in the background consuming ~10% of my CPU when I wasn’t watching any video. I couldn’t find any info on how to get rid of it, and after [...]

Google Desktop for Mac?

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

Google Desktop is available for the Mac. There’s even a demo video. But what they don’t mention anywhere is why I’d want to use Google Desktop when Spotlight already does such a great job on the Mac. I get that it searches your Gmail. That’s actually a nice feature. I have Mail downloading my Gmail [...]

Parallels 4 and VMWare Fusion 2 vs The Sims 2

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

The Mac version of the Sims 2 has a control problem that drives me nuts. I don’t know if it happens for everyone but most people don’t notice or care, or if it’s somehow unique to the two Mac’s I’ve tried it on, but for me, the pie menus don’t work right. I thought I’d [...]

Developer Conference Videos

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

Apple has made the videos from their latest WWDC available for purchase on iTunes, the way Microsoft did for the PDC videos. Except that Microsoft doesn’t charge you $999 to watch them. Crappy move, Apple.

The iPhone SDK, from a Windows developer’s perspective

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

I’m a PC. And now I’m trying to write software for the iPhone. Nothing serious, mind you, just some little toy apps. I did some Carbon development a few years back, but these days Cocoa is hot, Carbon is not. So I’m trying to grok Cocoa. Here are a few fun facts I’ve learned along [...]

Apple TV Impressions

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

“Apple TV is syncing with iTun…” That about sums it up. This is the message that comes up on your TV while Apple TV is syncing with iTunes on your PC or Mac, and because the box for the message is just a bit too small, the product name is abbreviated to “iTun…”. Apple TV [...]

Defective MacBook Pro Battery

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

With all the various battery recalls both for Apple and non-Apple laptops, it sucks to have a defective battery that’s not being recalled. Check this out: coconutBattery is a great little utility that pulls together some battery numbers in a nice UI. In this case it’s telling me that my battery’s maximum charge is 21% [...]

iTunes 8 Terms and Conditions

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Finally, an agreement I can get behind. I wonder if this is a binding contract.