Paul Merrill
Rachel, our 9-year old, wanted some play money. So I took some real money and put it on our all-in-one laser printer. I intended to copy it on just one side, so it could never be used for real money.
What comes out of the machine? Red money! The printer was sophisticated enough to run that automatic counterfeiting routine.
I thought, “Oh no! Everything will have red on it now!” So I copied something else. The result was normal as could be.
Well, not really.
But I was not able to stay away from the iPad. No, I didn’t buy one. But I did visit the Apple Store last night (separate from the opening day, when I did not go in the store, as previously reported). My sons and I tried out the iPad. We all liked it a lot!
A few observations:
– It would not rotate from landscape to portrait in some apps. (The rotation lock switch could have been turned on and I didn’t know it. I discovered its existence after leaving the store.)
– The interface was not intuitive on Pages (the Word equivalent). I couldn’t find tools in the page view.
– The keyboard takes some getting used to. If I bought one, I’d grab a bluetooth keyboard right away.
– I guess I’m used to the traditional Mac interface – not having access to the Finder would take some getting used to. (I do a lot with files.)
Advantages of Amazon’s Kindle? You can read it in direct sunlight. It has longer battery life. More titles are available. Everything else? iPad.
I had fun making my site the home page for Safari on some of the demo units. (My website hits will go up artificially till the store personnel fix that.) Also, one of my sons made the screen background on some of the demo units look like a page filled with app icons – stealth little trick! Alas, though – the Apple Store resets them every morning, so our little tricks lasted just a few hours.
Verdict? It looks like a great new toy (and useful work device, for many). If I could afford one, I’d add it to my toy chest. Alas, not for a while! And finally, David Pogue has a great FAQ page on the iPad here. And don’t forget to check out the great explanatory videos on the Apple site.
I monitor Google Alerts as part of my job. It’s a great tool – and the price is right (free!).
Due to evil spammers, I have been getting a lot of useless links – like the one I’ve highlighted in the bottom snapshot. That linked to a spammy link-bait site. All they got from me was a click – and in this case, not even that!
Top snapshot? I use Lijit to track stats for my blog (one of about three tools). But those four digit results always come up on the list of searches that brought people to my blog. Totally useless. I typed “2017” into the Lijit search field on my blog – and it brought up one of my posts. (Because of a WordPress glitch, I currently cannot name posts by anything relating to their name.)
Since I took that screen snapshot, I contacted Lijit. Their suggestion may work. (Time will tell.) But 404 errors resulted from each filter entry.
And “cute little boys in church”? That’s creepy! Nothing like that has ever been on my blog. (As soon as I hit “publish” it will, though.)
I guess my frustration is that in the days of tools being totally analogue (hammer, nails, etc.) – results were easier to obtain. However, thumbs may have been more bruised than they are today!
Fashion even dictates the design of hard drives.
Witness my roughly five-year-old drive on the right: red and green lights, angular, hard edges, silver-and-black. A bit cyborg-robot-like.
And on the left, a shiny new Seagate drive: organic, flowing, silver-and-white. Roughly 1/10 the price per gigabyte.
Back when I bought the old model, it was cheaper to assemble one yourself. Now the price of external drives and internal drives is about the same. Good thing! Saved me maybe 20 minutes of precious time.
If the Mac user in your life has not upgraded to Snow Leopard, now is the time!
Quite simply, this was the easiest and fastest upgrade of any operating system I have ever done.
If they are going to do it:
1. Make sure they have a current Time Machine backup. (They will need an external hard drive – here’s my choice.)
2. Make sure they first run SnowChecker, the free application that will tell them which applications they have will need to upgrade. (Download the installer for each application and then install them after Snow Leopard is live.)
As of this writing, you can buy Snow Leopard for $25 from Amazon. (Add four pencils to get free shipping.) You can get a family 5-pack for $43 (with free shipping) or the Box Set that includes the latest versions of iLife and iWork for $138 (also with free shipping).
That Mac-user you know and love will hug you! As the reviews have said, it is indeed zippier than the previous operating system, (regular) Leopard.
Disclaimer: Your results may vary. And if a lawyer were sitting in the room with me, they would say that I cannot be held liable for any lost data or system failures.
So, I was cruising the Sunday newspaper ads, as I enjoy doing. I stumbled upon the fact that Intel has a quad processor in the most expensive laptop Staples was advertising. I knew those were in desktop and all-in-one computers, but that was the first time I had seen one in a laptop.
I did a little digging and found out that it runs at 2.0 ghz. At this point, it would be impossible to compare the actual speed of this laptop with a Mac, for example, short of buying it and testing it yourself. Unfortunate, that.
If you are a Windows person and appreciate HP, it may be a good value. If you are a Mac person, you can get a 2.26 ghz Core 2 Duo 13″ for roughly the same money. If you are a regular reader here, you know which one I would recommend.
