Category: General

  • 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…

  • 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’…

  • Windows Vista "RC1" release (still) doesn't install on my (ordinary) desktop PC

    I was fine when, after several hours of churning away, Windows Vista Beta 2 decided that it couldn’t install itself. I was a bit surprised, since there’s nothing unusual about my system and I’ve never had a problem installing various flavors of XP, but it was nice that the installer didn’t trash my computer. However,…

  • Gave my PC a heart/spine transplant

    Ah, the joy of PCs. Mine had been acting up for awhile, randomly freezing at progressively shorter intervals — days at first, hours by the end. For the last few months I’d incrementally ruled out everything but the motherboard and/or CPU. Eventually I arrived at the “acceptance” stage of PC death, and took the requisite…

  • Sun's Scott McNealy doesn't get .NET

    According to News.com, the CEO of Sun Microsystems recently told the Singapore press: > Sun ONE runs on every system and processor. .NET runs only on Windows. It’s mankind versus Microsoft. .NET is a joke. Wow, you can practically smell the desperation, can’t you? First, Sun ONE hardly runs on “every system and processor”. For…

  • Game over, Atari

    Asteroids. Centipede. Crystal Castles. Gauntlet. Marble Madness. Missile Command. Pong. Tempest. Robotron: 2084. Star Wars. Some of the finest arcade games ever made were created by Atari Games Corporation, the arcade division of Atari. In 1996 Midway purchased it and renamed it Midway Games West. Sadly, Midway recently decided to close down Midway Games West.…

  • Why Microsoft bought Virtual PC

    Mac users are a teensy bit concerned about Microsoft acquiring the most interesting assets of one of the last great Mac companies, Connectix. Among other products, Connectix makes Virtual PC — the only thing between many Mac users and a shiny new Wintel box. Execs from Microsoft’s Macintosh Business unit are being very careful to…

  • Anti-TiVo Turner exec "steps down"

    Jamie Kellner, the anti-viewer Turner Broadcasting exec famous for saying that skipping through commercials with a TiVo is “stealing” and that a “certain amount” of going to the bathroom during commercials is “tolerated”, is leaving AOL Time Warner. (Thanks, Chris!) reference

  • Color management for digital photography

    Even if you don’t use a Mac, this Apple-sponsored tutorial on color management for digital photography is interesting for anyone who’s wondered how it’s possible to get consistent color across radically different devices. The Windows equivalent to ColorSync is ICM (Image Color Management), a barely-realized version of which first appeared in Windows 95. The first…

  • First impressions of a second TiVo

    Sometimes, TiVo-the-Company pushes low-bitrate advertisements to TiVo-the-DVRs when they make their daily call. (They really need MPEG-4 for this, as low-bitrate MPEG-2 is not pretty.) Recently, a one-minute “Switch-to-Series2” ad was sent to all customers who purchased lifetime (your TiVo’s lifetime, not yours) service rather than paying by the month. The deal is that TiVo…