Tag: apple
-
The Watch
I got an Apple Watch this week – it was an anniversary present from my wife. I’ve vaguely wanted one, but wasn’t sure. I’ve used it for a day now, and it’s interesting in the same way all new Apple products are interesting to me. I’ve had two different experiences with new Apple products: either…
-
The Death of Aperture
So Apple has killed off Aperture, the photo program I’ve been using for the last few years to slog around the 30,000-some pictures I’ve taken. iPhoto is going to die soon, too. They’re replacing both with Photos, a dumbed-down port of the featureless picture program that’s on the iPhone. Oh, but that has The Cloud,…
-
Ode to a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro
My MacBook died yesterday. Shit. It wasn’t a full-on, catastrophic death, the kind with no backup and fire and smoke and no hope. It was more of a long goodbye. I replaced the battery last fall, the third battery in its almost five years of heavy use. It looked like the battery was holding a…
-
Dropping computers
My Mac is back in the shop. It has TS4088. When it switches GPUs to save power, if the computer is hot enough, it crashes. It’s common on this specific make and vintage, and it’s the problem with buying a computer on the first day of a major revision. I complained to the right person,…
-
iTunes Rating Bankruptcy
Last night, I declared iTunes rating bankruptcy. I did a Cmd-A Cmd-I, then set the ratings to just over 12,000 songs to zero stars. I’ve been talking about this for a while. Actually doing it gave me the combination of exhilaration and terror usually reserved for when you accidentally delete an entire hard drive. It…
-
Lack of computer
My computer is in the shop. It has some random reboot situation, which is either from a bad motherboard or bad memory, and because it’s still under warranty and it has aftermarket memory, they want to prove that it’s the memory’s fault, although I’m pretty sure it’s the motherboard. This is the first generation to…
-
Nuke from orbit
I did my first clean installation of OSX today, which is weird, given that I’ve been using OSX Macs since 2005. The reason I’m not in the habit of nuking a machine and reinstalling everything is twofold. One is that I’ve bought three Macs in that time period (a Mini in 2005; a Macbook in…
-
Apple TV
So last night, as an early anniversary present, Sarah got me the new Apple TV. Not the rumored buy-a-whole-TV-from-Apple Apple TV, but the third-generation set-top box from Apple. My first impression is that this is an interesting little piece of machinery, and will largely replace my first-gen Roku, plus do a whole lot more. The…
-
What happened to hypercard?
Hypercard was released 25 damn years ago. Has it been that long? Back in college, I spent a lot of time screwing around on the Mac, and there were certain programs that welded that old-school 68K Classic Mac experience in my mind. One of them was Aldus PageMaker, which was the desktop publishing program of…
-
Patents, Apple, Whatever
There’s been a lot of coverage in the news about Apple’s various patent wars against Samsung and others, and the gist of the coverage is that the patent system was 100% fine up until Apple woke up one morning and decided to destroy anyone making a rectangle-shaped touchscreen phone. I have no real arguments for…