The boys in and around the Windy City who volunteer on ATPM decided on a get-together last weekend. Wes Meltzer has the complete story, along with a photo of the gang in front of the North Michigan Avenue Apple Store.
One of the things I love about ATPM is getting to see pictures of folks who I only correspond with via e-mail. Now Evan and I have been pals for a while; we’ve even spoken on the phone once or twice. I’ve seen pictures of him, to boot, and trust me, his looks haven’t improved with age. 😉
It was good to see Chris L. and Paul, though, of course, they looked nothing like I imagined they would. I don’t know why, but I always figured Paul would be more of a clean-cut sort of fellow, and thought that Chris would be shorter. Wes, on the other hand, pretty much looked like what I thought he might. Isn’t the Internet cool?
And we’ll have to work on Wes’s Cajun-French; it’s actually “les bon temps roulez.” I also can’t imagine anything north of the Louisiana border being remotely close to real Cajun/Creole-style food…
Tag: Mac
ATPM staffer Kirk McElhearn’s latest book, How To Do Everything With Mac OS X Panther, has been released.
Congrats, Kirk!
So PalmSource has decided to discontinue Mac support in upcoming versions of the Palm OS, despite the fact that they have a larger market share percentage-wise in the Macintosh side of the computing world than out. Mac users will be left to third-party solutions to sync future Palm devices with their Macintosh systems, costing us more money. Palm Desktop (which Palm bought from Apple as Claris Organizer) will no longer be updated.
Last night, I migrated all of my Palm Desktop data to Address Book, iCal, and BBEdit-created text files. I then proceeded to use iSync to sync my contact and calendar info,first on my iPod, then to my .Mac account, the latter of which was a first for me. I then synced my new-to-me, work-provided 1.42 GHz dual-G4 to my .Mac account, so that my Address Book info and Safari bookmarks matched with those on my Cube. All syncs worked without any problems, just as they should.
I have been debating over what kind of phone to move to. My wife’s law firm makes extensive use of the Blackberry RIMs amongst the attorneys, and she will be getting one soon, with service through T-Mobile. I had been considering the Treo 600, but now I’m not so sure. I may go with the Sony-Ericsson T630 when U.S. providers begin carrying it over the next month or two.
I don’t think Address Book and iCal will fill all of my PIM needs; I already feel like I’m going to butt against the limits of the applications, and am looking at alternatives. For now, however, Palm no longer has a place on my systems’ desktops.
Whew. You know it’s been a hectic month when you’re ten days in and you’re just now getting around to noting the release of the February issue of the Macintosh e-zine you help manage.
Yes, About This Particular Macintosh 10.02 is out, featuring first-time cover art by my pal Lee. Ellyn discusses technology and values, Wes has the monthly Mac blog run-down, and Raena continues her discussion on web accessibility. The usual rogues’ gallery provides reviews, cartoons, and other columns for your Mac-using noggin.
A lot of third-party keyboards for Macs don’t have an eject key on them. This is an oldie but a goodie from the fine folks at OWC on how to always have an eject button at your disposal, via the menu bar.
Well I hope no one out there is relying on me for up-to-date SpamSieve release information. I have been woefully remiss this week in my completely unpaid, totally biased evangelism of SpamSieve as the ultimate spam killer for the individual Mac user. Complete list of changes are here, and Michael notes full support for Apple Mail and the release of a Japanese localization.
SpamSieve is worth twice what Michael prices it at in terms of time saved in dealing with e-mail spam. (And I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if anyone wanted to send him extra dough on top of the normal SpamSieve registration.) As the Managing Editor for About This Particular Macintosh, I deal with all of the mail sent to the public ATPM e-mail addresses, and let me tell you, those addys get the bejeezus spammed out of them. SpamSieve makes it a breeze to deal with my ATPM e-mail each day.
If you’re still looking for a worthy spam killer for your Macintosh e-mail client, or you’re new to the platform and want a great product to deal with the spam you will eventually receive, you can’t go wrong with SpamSieve.
So yesterday afternoon, my boss hooks up an external LaCie FireWire hard drive to one of our G5s. We’re working on a project for the Apple retail stores, and we need to take some screenshots. My boss was going to boot the G5 off of the FireWire drive, then use Snapz Pro to take said screenshots.
After attaching the drive, we saw it pop up on the desktop. My boss went in to System Preferences –> Startup Disk, and selected the FireWire drive. Hit restart.
And the G5 reboots, but doesn’t start up from the FireWire drive. Hmmm. We know the image on the FireWire drive is good, and the G5 can boot off of it’s alternate internal partition, where the same boot image is loaded (but doesn’t have Snapz Pro or any of the other tools my boss was planning on using). Certainly an oddity.
Boss powers down the G5, but the FireWire drive stays on! Is it still sucking power from the G5, even though said G5 isn’t powered on? The conversation went something like this:
Boss: Can you unplug the G5 for me?
Chris moves behind the rack, steps up on the stool to get to said G5; pulls power cord.
Chris: Power cord is pulled.
Boss: Dude, the drive is still on!
Chris: No way!
Boss: Come around here and please tell me I’m not hallucinating! (Always a strong possibility, as said boss used to be heavily involved in the music biz. Just kidding, boss!)
Chris moves around to front of rack, and verifies that the FireWire drive is still powered on.
Boss: You’re sure you pulled the power on the right G5?
Chris: Positive.
Boss: Can you please verify? This is just too f&#@*$g weird.
Chris moves back behind rack and verifies that the correct G5 is unplugged.
Chris: G5 in slot #19 is unplugged. Ah! I think I see what the problem is.
Care to venture a guess before we move on?
In an article for the New York Times (free registration required), David Pogue discusses iLife ’04 and looks at the GarageBand component. He says:
It won’t be long before the GarageBand creations of no-name singers and players start popping up on Web sites – indeed, it won’t be long before Web sites start popping up just to accommodate them – bypassing the talent scouts and gatekeepers of the American recording industry. GarageBand and the Internet give tomorrow’s stars their own democratic recording and distribution channels.
That prospect of new artists growing from grass roots is probably what inspired Apple to name the software GarageBand, abandoning its lowercase i naming tradition. But when you consider both the fledgling state of the 1.0 version of this program and the immense musical and commercial forces it could one day unleash, you might conclude that there is, after all, an i-name that might have suited this remarkable software: iPotential.
Breaking down the barriers musicians face, in light of the way the recording industry does things, would please me to no end. It would be great to see the next Yo-Yo Ma or Eric Clapton emerge from the shadows, thanks to what they can do with something like GarageBand or its higher-priced, better-featured brethren. Any day you can get your product to those who would listen, without having to go through the labels’ convoluted process, licking the heels of record execs, is a good day.
One of the features touted in the upcoming Office 2004 for Mac is the on-the-fly-editable Page Layout view in Excel. Too bad Gates’ Macintosh Business Unit is only 13 years behind the times.
From Bob Hearn, co-creator of ClarisWorks, as posted in a MacInTouch reader report:
bq. Another of MS Office 2004’s touted “key features” is more than a bit behind the times. I must admit that I like the idea of a live, fully-editable Page Layout view, as Excel now has. I like the idea so much that I put that feature in ClarisWorks 1.0, in 1991 – for all document types. It has been in every version of ClarisWorks and AppleWorks since then. You can see comparison screenshots at: “A Brief History of ClarisWorks.”
One of the Cube listers pointed us to a friend’s Macquarium, built in a G4 Cube shell. There’s even a phischy Mac-head named Steve!