Category: Uncategorized

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

John Nack, Adobe’s Photoshop product manager, recently compiled a list of 10 guides, one article, and one Photoshop action commissioned by Adobe. The Role of Working Spaces in Adobe Applications A Raw Workflow in the Real World: The March of the Yellow Penguins Preparing Images for Delivery Digital Image Integrity Calibrating the Digital Darkroom Environment Black and White…

Dave Winer (who appears to have given up implying that he invented RSS, as long as nobody else can have invented it either) recently made a surprising mention of the movie Idiocracy. Do I dare admit that I’ve seen the great movie Idiocracy? Nahhh. I haven’t seen it. But if I had, I would say the funniest part…