There’s a question that’s been asked: Why isn’t Siri available on other iOS 5 devices? Answers have varied, but a common one seems to be that it’s an attempt to engage in a scaled rollout. Turning Siri on for anyone with an iOS 5 compatible device would have resulted in much greater load on the […]
I finished reading Jobs’s bio this morning. It’s a fascinating read, and I recommend it to anyone who knows who he is. This post will be mostly spoiler-free; I’m not going to talk about specific things from the bio, but rather his management, and Apple. But it will probably make more sense if you’ve read […]
Windows systems suffer from file system fragmentation and benefit from defragmentation. Windows 7 includes a defragmenter (as did previous versions of Windows) and automatically defragment the file system from time to time. The Mac takes a different approach. There are quite a few mechanisms built into the HFS+ file system to keep the system working […]
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 […]