Aldoblog

This year’s MacHeist includes 11 applications in the bundle, which individually would sell for $368.75. When bought as part of the MacHeist promotion, the whole collection is under $50.

Now, it’s a rare person who would want and use every single one of these applications; there’s just too much variety to have everything fit perfectly. But […]

Last weekend I was in Chicago for the first ever RailsConf, a gathering of about 600 people focused on developing web applications using the Ruby on Rails application framework. Other people are posting lots of details and thoughts (try clicking the RailsConf tag below), so I’ll just add a few deltas:

I’m sure a million people will be linking today to the Apple announcement of Boot Camp, a new utility which now makes it both possible and easy to install Microsoft Windows XP onto an Intel-based Mac. I’m also sure most of them will put their amateur analyst hats on, and tell people what they think […]

I upgraded to PGP Desktop 9 because the new version would finally work with Eudora on Mac OS X. All I had to do was install the new version, reboot, and the new automatic mode began immediately discovering and auto-enabling my email accounts as I used them.

Unfortunately, the automatic mode doesn’t work so well if you are also using some kind of network tunnel, such as a VPN or ssh port forwarding, which is increasingly common for me as I take the laptop to clients or on the road. I thought I would document the configuration of manual proxy mode for Mac OS X users, since I found the documentation light in this area.

A while back I took advantage of a special running at Dell, to get one of these 20.1” flat panel LCD displays. It arrived a week later, and I’ve been using it as a second monitor off my laptop since then. The quality of the display is terrific. I dunno about doing color-calibrated print work, but as just extra screen space (which I’ve found I absolutely need to do web development productively), it’s spectacular, and makes the built-in screen on my laptop seem dingy by comparison.

I was recently trying to configure automatic backups for a friend’s computer, the idea being that once a week his important files would be backed up to his .Mac account. The problem is, the backups just keep taking up more and more space on his .Mac account. Eventually it fills up. And Backup stops working.

Two weeks ago I installed a new $80 hard disk drive in my computer, to replace a much more expensive SCSI disk that makes too damn much noise. Last weekend I made the switch, and turned off the SCSI disk, possibly forever. The difference in noise is remarkable, to the point of being eerie.