A few weeks ago, The Tracking Angle posted a YouTube video comparing two turntables, using the same arm, cartridge and phono preamp. The two unit sounded surprisingly different to my ear, given the only change was the ac…
I don’t talk about it much on the blog, but I get an enormous amount of support email. The quantity can be overwhelming at times, and without some automation, it would be nearly impossible for me to do it alone. Which I…
As we plug along with our Catalina changes, I thought I might write a quick post talking about some other stuff I’m enjoying right now. Because, hey, why not. Coffee Related Software Development and Coffee go together li…
Off-topic alert! Over the past few months, I’ve been enjoying brewing beer at home with a Pico Pro. No doubt purists scoff a bit at the automation involved during the mash and boil, but it’s a relatively small part of th…
I think the last time I wrote about the Squeezebox was in 2005 (yikes!), but it’s time to virtually attaboy again: the Slim Devices folks have recently released the Squeezebox Boom, and it’s pretty darn great. (I might b…
For nearly two years, I’ve been using the PC version of the Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard, and I’ve been quite happy with it. I’ve always been a huge fan of the feel of the IBM Selectric typewriter keyboard - perfect key…
It’s not easy to look at the iPhone, let alone touch the thing, and not be enchanted. It’s all planes and subtle, refined curves with a radius (and texture) that feels great in the hand. It’s not light, but not heavy eit…
All those within the sound of my voice, let it be known: I hate the Nokia E61i. Well, hate might be too strong a word. After all, Nokia has done some things right. To start: I decided to give it a try after it got some r…
My friend Jonas Salling has started blogging again, and that’s always a good thing. He’s got some recent posts up there as he tests the WiFi support for Clicker, and the results may surprise you! Jonas is one of the hard…
A little tip for those of you who might have installed Seagate SATA drives into your 3GB/s capable G5, MacPro, NAS device, or whatever. Looks like recent Seagate drives ship with a jumper installed that limits the drive…
I freely admit, right at the start of this post, that I switch cell phones too often. A lot of this is because I try to do a lot with my mobile phone, mostly mail and web based. And I want the thing to work well with my…
tv is in the house — two of them, actually — and, well, it’s good! I’m not using it for music much — my library is much too large for this device, and navigation of large collections, as has been said elsewhere, is quit…
The other day, I was pushing at the limits of my existing Infrant ReadyNAS NV setup, and needed to increase its size. Normally, this would be a huge project, but with the ReadyNAS it was incredibly easy to do. You see, t…
Many of you probably know that, for some reason, iSight cameras can get into a weird state where they start causing serious errors with FireWire drives. The symptoms usually include a bunch of I/O errors while copying to…
When the new Airport Extreme Base Station came out, I was happy to see that it had some support for attached USB drives. It’s a reasonable (though not perfect) way to share data in a home/SOHO situation, and I figured pe…
It wasn’t that long ago that HP had the absolute worst OSX drivers of any major peripheral developer. Their scanners barely worked, their printers sort of worked, the software they loaded was pretty shamefully buggy, fla…
A quick follow-up to my review of the Roomba and US Trilobite. As I mentioned in the review, Europe has a newer version of the Trilobite — v2.0. The description of the 2.0 version from Electrolux indicated 200 changes fr…
Users often ask me for drive recommendations, and while I provide general suggestions for FireWire drives in the SuperDuper! User’s Guide, I haven’t suggested any Network Accessible Storage (NAS) devices, mostly because…
I’ve written before about my Sony VGX-XL1 Media Center PC. One of its big advantages (other than near silence) is its 200-disc DVD changer, and you can chain up to five of them to host 1000 movies. Well, Sony recently ca…
When I was a kid, I used a bunch of string, clothespins and pulleys to rig up a gizmo that was supposed to automatically make my bed for me. The idea — which I think I got out of a book (Thanks, Jake!) — was to attach th…
I was reading Wil Shipley’s recent post about his horrible Comcast DVR experience, which has some kind of Microsoft DVR software on it, and it amazed me how lousy it was, compared to my Sony VGX-XL1 Media Center PC. I kn…
Easy target, I know, but oh so true… What would the Microsoft iPod package look like? Let’s see…
Those who know me know that I’m relatively obsessed with coffee… a harmless vice. I always grind my own beans, but over many years I hadn’t found a really great grinder that wasn’t dedicated purely to espresso. Good ones…
Let’s talk, for a moment, about acquiring music. As you might guess from netTunes, I’m a bit of a music fanatic. I’ve bought a lot of music in my day, and expect to buy a lot more. But, I rarely listen to “music radio”…
Egad, could it be another post about the Sony Media Center? I believe so! I ran into a rather unusual problem with the VGX-XL1’s changer that I wanted to document here, in case someone else hits it in the future. What I…
I’m getting some questions about what Media Center I’ve got, so I thought I’d put up a post about it, as well as some information that I hope will be of interest. My first MCE was an HP z555. This MCE is styled more like…
More heresy, I know, but I’ve got a Windows XP Media Center Edition box connected to my HDTV, and — after about six months of use — I’m prepared to say that it’s actually pretty good! We all know — from direct gotta-use-…
I’m sure I’m in the minority here, but I’m a fan of the i-mate SP3 Windows Mobile Smartphone. Mobile phones are one of those things that are difficult to generalize: your reaction to the phone is likely based entirely on…
Most of you probably don’t know about it, but I contributed to the OSX portion of Slim Devices’ Squeezebox — I wrote the Preference Pane, Installer… basically, a lot of the Mac-specific stuff. I’m happy to see that Dean…
I’ve posted before about my personal “boat anchor” that keeps a Windows machine close by — Microsoft Money. There was just nothing close enough on the Macintosh to allow me to move. I was a bit more successful replacing…