Author: Charles

  • Fix Lightroom's odd Vista incompatibility

    If you’re using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 on Vista, it’s likely that you’ve been frustrated by its inability to import anything. (The error message is a not-very-helpful “Could not copy/move a file to the requested location”, along with a list of every file you tried to import.) Assuming you’re Lightroom’s import defaults, the workaround is…

  • Drobo now $200 cheaper, just as gooder

    As more and more of my media goes digital, hard drive management becomes more and more of a hassle. At this point I have a couple terabytes worth of storage, but it’s spread across multiple PCs and external drives, and that makes it difficult to manage and protect. One of the NAS-like devices I’ve been tracking is…

  • Burned by Vista

    A few weeks ago some neighbors got married at home, surrounded by family and friends. I took a few photos. Today I thought I’d burn a CD for them. My CD/DVD burner can burn CD-Rs at 48X, and I’m using good-quality 52X-rated media, so I figured it would take about five minutes. At this moment,…

  • Make iTunes (mostly) work for multiple users on Windows

    Been waiting for most of the decade for iTunes to become multi-user savvy? Yeah, me too. Since iTunes’ Windows support is (and will probably continue to be) a bit weak at the edges, here’s how to fool iTunes into playing nice with multi-user Windows installations. To do this, we’ll need to do two things: Move iTunes’…

  • What the heck is happening at ATI?

    As a long-time ATI customer, it was ominous to see ati.com get redirected to a sub-domain of amd.com — a huge marketing/branding mistake, on the order of moving the Jaguar site to a tab under ford.com. (Ford owns Jaguar, for those who may not track that kind of thing.) Since being absorbed by AMD, ATI has been stumbling from a quality…

  • Devil's in-box

    Demonstrating that not all religions take themselves too seriously, today is known by Catholics as “Good Friday”. (“Worst…Friday…Ever” lost out as being too much of a downer since by the time we named it we already knew that it turns out pretty well, and “Ohhh, Great Friday” was ruled out as being a bit too…

  • Gmail + POP + mailing lists = broken

    My hosting provider (DreamHost, which is generally great) has a webmail interface that can only graciously be called “classic”. They use SquirrelMail, whose user interface was pretty cool in the early 90s but hasn’t evolved since then. One path to better webmail is Google Apps for Your Domain‘s Gmail, which is the very model of a modern major…

  • Steve's Macworld keynote: What you need to know about the iPhone and more

    2006 was a first — Microsoft was way more interesting than Apple. Microsoft had Xbox 360, Windows Vista and Zune. All Apple had were slightly better Macs, slightly better iPods, and slightly better iTunes. (There was something about an Intel transition, but that was a been-there, done-that for long-time Apple fans and uninteresting to everyone…

  • It's not just you: Vista can't reliably unzip files (0x800704C8)

    If you’re one of the few, the…well, maybe not proud…running Vista, this should look familiar: If you’re not running Vista, this is what happens — multiple times — when you extract files from a .zip archive. (To unzip this particular archive, I had to click Try Again to get past this error more than 30…

  • Maybe Büyükkökten.com wasn't available

    Hey! Valleywag finally posted something that warranted having it in my feed reader. Orkut Büyükkökten, creator of the Google social network that bears his name, dashes into CEO Eric Schmidt’s office and says, “We have a million Brazilian users!” Eric says, “Keep up the good work.” After Orkut leaves, Eric calls VP Marissa Mayer and asks,…