If you’ve ever adopted any of Apple’s early technologies, then you know the story: You pay a premium to be the first. Then after six months or a year, you discover that you’ve been a fool. I’ve been there.
(more…)
March 16, 2015How to Blow $10,000 in Six Months
Comments Off on How to Blow $10,000 in Six Months
Setting the ClockYour computer, your phone, your tablet, and pretty much all wireless electronic gizmos keep good and accurate track of the time. That’s thanks to something called NTP. It’s the Network Time Protocol. The NTP has been in the news recently because it might suddenly disappear.
Comments Off on Setting the Clock
March 13, 2015Screen Saver HistoryIt’s 1985. You have an IBM PC with a monochrome monitor; the color, or CGA, monitor is just too expensive. You work on VisiCalc. It’s up there, on the screen for about 8 hours a day. It even shows up when you turn off the monitor.
Comments Off on Screen Saver History
March 11, 2015The Saga of Pre-Installed SoftwareSome call it crapware. I prefer bloatware. Whatever you call it, the name applies to software pre-installed on a computer. Sometimes the software consists of useful tools, such as anti-virus, the Acrobat Reader, or even a productivity suite. Recently the trend has been for actual malware to be pre-installed, which I find a bit unsettling. March 9, 2015But the Word isn’t Spelled Correctly!My spelling is atrocious. I initially spelled that word “attrocious,” which is one T too many. And how I knew the word was misspelled was that a red zigzag appears beneath it. So what happens when you knowingly misspell a word and the red zigzag doesn’t show up?
Comments Off on But the Word isn’t Spelled Correctly!
March 6, 2015Mobile Bookmark Speed TrickI’m all for creating bookmarks of your favorite web pages. Building such bookmarks on a phone or tablet works the same as on a computer. Using the bookmarks, however, works excruciatingly slow on a mobile device. So I’m offering a clever shortcut.
Comments Off on Mobile Bookmark Speed Trick
March 4, 2015Ooops.The file I wanted was in a weird format. TZ. I searched the web and found a compressed file extraction utility that would deal with it. Being in a rush, I failed to read the dialog box before I clicked the Install button. Hello, unwanted crap!
Comments Off on Ooops.
March 2, 2015Microsoft Word 2016Sometime this year, Microsoft will supposedly release the next version of Microsoft Office. Along with it comes the next version of Microsoft Word. In my mind, that looming event raises one singular question: What will they screw up now?
Comments Off on Microsoft Word 2016
February 28, 2015Thoughts on Net Neutrality
Like many controversial issues, it’s difficult to filter out the political noise from the reality. Since President Obama weighed in, the consensus is that if you’re Republican, you hate “net neutrality” and if your Democratic, you support it. Both positions are preposterous. February 27, 2015Computer Book Publishing, Part IIAfter the slaughter of 1982, no big New York publishers would touch computer books. That job was left up to independent publishing houses. They thrived, of course. After all, the computer hobbyist of the day still wanted good information.
Comments Off on Computer Book Publishing, Part II
|
