My nephew Dan—a Computer Science major at the University of Washington—is interning with me this summer. He gets an education in what it's like to create a start-up from scratch and I get a really bright young resource for a low weekly rate. I've known Dan his entire life and he's an exceptional young man. He and I get along extremely well and I've been looking forward to helping him learn the ins and outs of starting up a software business. There's just one catch; Dan is a … [Read more...]

Late in the 20th Century Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott is at the PLEXICORP offices with Dr. McCoy and trying to explain how to construct "transparent aluminum" to Dr. Nichols, the plant manager. Scotty is offered up the use of a Macintosh sitting on a nearby desk in order to demonstrate the design. Scotty speaks out in a loud voice: "Computer..." The Mac Plus sits there. Bones grabs the mouse and hands it to Scotty. Scotty pulls the mouse up to his face and says … [Read more...]

After my last blog post about Quicksilver I got a number of comments and e-mails from people indicating that Quicksilver was not going to be supported much longer and that the developer was working on other projects. I followed up on a lot of the links people provided to me and confirmed the following: Nicholas Jitkoff (aka Alcor)—the original developer for Quicksilver—has released Quicksilver as an Open Source project. While Ankur Kothari has taken up development work on it and … [Read more...]

For the last week and a half I've been trying out Firefox as my primary web browser. Back when I was a Windows guy I switched to Firefox because of the innovations it introduced and most importantly the extensions available for it. Now that I'm exclusively a Mac / Linux guy I figured I would check out the Firefox add-on market and see what's available. It's important to note that the web browser is more than just a device to view web pages. I personally do a lot of data entry through web … [Read more...]

It's now been a couple of weeks since I bought a MacBook Pro and handed my MacBook down to my youngest daughter. In that time I've used the MBP quite a bit and overall I'm quite happy with the upgrade. The only issue that I've had with it has been the heat it generates, though to a large degree I haven't really noticed it any longer. Either my left wrist has adjusted to being slightly warmer than my right wrist or the Fan Control I installed has helped keep the machine running a little cooler. I … [Read more...]

A good friend of mine called me on my cell this morning.   "Yo! Hey brother, I have a problem with my laptop. Can you help me out?"   Walt's a really bright guy but isn't into computers at all. Computers are just another tool for Walter, giving him access to e-mail and the web while he is out on job sites. He works from his truck so it has become his mobile office, with a little Sprint broadband device allowing him to get electronic access from nearly … [Read more...]

It was a beautiful day outside so I decided to grab the MacBook Pro and enjoy the delightful weather out on our screened in porch. I had some online reading to do as I am trying to get a handle on Git, the version control system I am going to be using.   While sitting here enjoying the breeze and working through the Git documentation I remembered that I had left Adium running on the Mac Pro downstairs. Many of my friends contact me through AIM and I usually put up an away message if I'm … [Read more...]

Rarely a day goes by now that Time Machine doesn't produce the dreaded Time Machine Error warning: "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume." Ironically I get this more on my Mac Pro with dual internal hard drives that check out fine rather than my little MacBook with the slow USB based drive for backup.   Since Time Machine runs hourly I'll get 23 to 47 backups that work fine, then the error. It's always a single file that seems to … [Read more...]

Each member of my family—my wife, three children and I—are heavy iPod Nano users. We never got into the iPods with hard drives because they were just too large. When the first Nano model came out I immediately went out and got one for each of us. We do a lot of travel as a family and figured the iPod would be a great way to help reduce the quantity and volume of "Are we there yet?".   At that point we were all still Windows users, each of us running some flavor of … [Read more...]

Though I have only been heavily into Mac for about 4 months now I actually have owned a Mac in the past. In late 1983 and early 1984 I worked at an authorized Apple computer store while preparing to drop out of junior college, selling PCs and Apple computers. I was as excited as anyone when the Mac came out and since I worked for an authorized reseller I was able to obtain a Mac at a heavily discounted price. As I recall I paid $2,300 for a 128K Mac and an ImageWriter dot matrix printer. That … [Read more...]

As I mentioned in yesterday's post my MacBook's palm rest had cracked in an area where this apparently happens quite often. Since the MacBook is only 4 months old (though I have AppleCare just in case) I assumed this would be covered under warranty; it was.   I went to the Apple web site and made an appointment - my local Apple store in Tysons, VA is usually quite busy all the time. I brought it in at noon EST today and, as usual, the place was packed. The Mac Genius I spoke to (Rob) was … [Read more...]