Aldoblog

In The Mac mini: Comparing Apples and Oranges, Dan Frakes breaks down the pricing for Apple’s low-cost system and a “comparable” $399 Dell system that journalists all over the planet seem to think is a fair comparison. Unlike all those other journalists, he actually compares everything that comes in the box or pre-installed on the hard drive.

Like a lot of other Mac aficionados, I followed yesterday’s announcements by Apple quite closely. A lot of people are writing about them, so I’m just going to jot down a couple of thoughts I’ve had that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

In the three or four years I’ve been fighting unwanted e-mail messages with better tools than the Delete key I’ve tried almost a dozen different tools. This is a quick survey of the ones I’ve used, and why I don’t (or do) still use them.

I was introduced a couple months ago to the work of productivity guru David Allen, finding a glowing review and an overview of his organization system on the 43 Folders weblog. But buying the book has had unintended consequences.

I wrote before about “downgrading” to a slower hard disk, just because it made less noise than the fast disk it replaced. I also spent a lot of time researching parts and putting together two PCs from nearly silent components, just to replace my old server and Rochelle’s aging — and incredibly noisy — PC.

After doing all of that, the noisiest item in the office was once again my Mac, which lost the title when I took out the noisy hard disk, but had a couple of fans that were quite a bit louder than the now-very-quiet fans in the two PCs.

Some of the most useful utilities I’ve found for my system are available as tiny “menu extras.” These little widgets, almost always compact icons, sit on the right side of the menu bar. Here’s my current Mac OS X right-side menu bar, and details on why I like each utility.

I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my test system long enough. LTFP.

OK, this time I really mean it, I’m back online with this weblog.

Problem: For some reason, even though your PHP include_path does contain the location of your include file, PHP cannot seem to actually include() the file. The paths match exactly, and yet you still get errors.

I have a new girlfriend. Rochelle was surprisingly calm when I told her.