Category: General

Have you ever taken an ants-eye view of a track on a familiar vinyl album and noticed that you could actually see the dynamics of the song? Then you’re probably at least 30, a geek, and once had too much time on your hands. (Me too!) If you’ve taken for CDs for granted your entire…

Have you ever not had to fix the metadata that your CD ripper gets from Gracenote/CDDB? Neither have I. Besides the fact that the quality of their metadata is a crapshoot, there are other reasons that Gracenote is generally distrusted. Some don’t appreciate that they claimed all rights to a community resource built by users,…

Andrew King, the founder and geek-behind-the-curtain at WebReference.com and JavaScript.com, has written a book on speeding up your web site with the refreshingly straightforward title of Speed Up Your Site

I needed to buy a DVD burner last week — it is the Year of the DVD Burner, after all — and unfortunately I had to do so without the benefit of the DVD burner roundup published recently by Tom’s Hardware Guide. Fortunately, I’m more confident than ever that I made the right choice. As…

From browsing through the logs, I know that many of my Mac readers use the wonderful (and free) NetNewsWire Lite to read PlaybackTime. Today, Ranchero released NetNewsWire, and you can buy it right now for an introductory price of only $30. Brent has released a wonderful 1.0, and there are lots of goodies — for…

My friend Jonathan Peterson recently started a new blog called Amateur Hour, meant for folks who create digital media for love rather than money. The term amateur, Latin for “one who loves”, has taken on the unfortunate connotation of un-professional or sloppy. But there is no better term for the rise of media content created…

Dell, the canary in the coal mine of PC manufacturers, has started to phase out diskette drives on their desktops. Unless they ask for them, customers won’t have a place to stick their floppy in their shiny new top-o’-the-line (“Dude! I’m gettin’ a”) Dimension PCs. Apple stated phasing out diskette drives in desktops in 1998,…

POTS is industry jargon for Plain Ol’ Telephone Service — the kind that comes to your home via copper wire that may be older than you are. Fiber to the home was supposed to be the path to digital media nirvana. But that was a meme borne during the dot-com bubble, and it turns out…