When my old Apple Mighty mouse got gummed up, I bought an Apple Magic mouse to replace it. It wasn’t that the old mouse was completely useless, it still worked up to a point – it’s just that the scroll functionality didn’t.
Creative – Bas Vellekoop
What was your first Mac?
I came to the Mac quite recently. My first Mac was a MacBook Pro mid 2009. I had been making music with PCs for many years, sampling and experimenting with music, but I discovered that if I took my PC on stage and one of the USB cables fell out, perhaps because someone tripped over it, the program would crash and I’d have to reboot the entire machine. With the MacBook Pro, just the device that was unplugged stopped working – and if I plugged it back in again it would start working again without having to restart the program, let alone reboot the system. That’s the only reason I bought the MacBook Pro – I’ve never been in favour of Macs or PCs. It was a very practical stage reliability reason why I moved to the Macintosh. Continue reading “Creative – Bas Vellekoop”
FizzBuzz
Did you ever play FizzBuzz? If you didn’t, it’s a drinking game. That’s how I learned it, anyway.
It’s a counting game, and the rules are simple enough. Everyone sits in a circle and takes it in turn to say the next number, starting from one and ending at 100. The catch is that if the number is divisible by three the player says Fizz instead of the number, and if the number is divisible by five the player says Buzz. If the number is divisible by three and five the player says FizzBuzz. The penalty for miscounting, mis-fizzing or mis-buzzing is, predictably, a drink. Easy? Surprisingly not, and really rather hard after a skinful.
Happy Birthday, Mac
It’s thirty years since the Mac first went on sale, and twenty-two years since I replaced my MS-DOS PC with one.
It wasn’t that Macs were unknown to me, my uncle had had a succession of Macs (starting with a Mac 128k) by the time I woke up to the revolution. One of my dad’s friends had a demon fast IIfx (paid for by his work, the lucky devil). My dad was firmly in the Microsoft camp though, and that informed my own computing choices.
Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Mac”
The Tragic Verdict of Anthony Hilson and Victoria McClure
I have been following the case of Victoria McClure with interest, and I was dismayed by the CTC’s article in response to it (by Rhia Weston, here). It seems to me that the article shows a lack of joined-up thinking, and also a lack of empathy unbecoming of a campaigning organisation.
Continue reading “The Tragic Verdict of Anthony Hilson and Victoria McClure”
The Xcode 4 Cookbook
The Xcode 4 Cookbook (by Stephen F. Daniel) is the most misleadingly named titled that I’ve read in a while. If you’re after an Xcode 4 Cookbook and you’re planning a little Mac OS X development then, make no mistake, you’re in the wrong place. If you’re after an iOS Cookbook (that name is already taken hence, I suppose, this title) then read on – this book might be right up your street.
Customise your Mac – with USBleat
Everyone likes to customise their Mac, perhaps by sticking a sticker or two on its body, or at least with individual screen-savers or wallpaper. Now there’s a new option for customising you Mac, making it your very own. USBleat.
On the face of it, USBleat is a simple customisation App. Install it, plug in a USB device, and your Mac will bleat (or moo, or bray…) at you. Plug in a whole hubful of devices and it’ll be like the entire farmyard has landed on your desk!
More usefully, USBleat represents your USB device tree in the menubar. So if you want to know where a device is plugged in you can look in the menu – no more hunting through the spaghetti of hubs and cables on your desk. Once you’ve found your device in the menus, click on it and USBleat will tell you about it.
It doesn’t stop there either – USBleat Pro will be available shortly, which can itself be customised. USBleat Pro has more options (and sounds) available ‘out of the box’, and additional packs can be downloaded – just in case the farm yard isn’t your thing, or if you’d like something a little more useful than a fun sound effect.
USBleat is available now (for free) on the Mac App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/app/usbleat/id657950431?mt=12)
USBleat Pro will be available soon, subject to review by Apple.
The Meaning of Liff
Ambridge (n.)
Indecisiveness brought on by a lack of concern for the actual outcome.
Borchester (n.)
The peculiar form of bloated heartburn engendered by eating too many potatoes too quickly.
Felpersham (n.)
The feeling you get on realising that the driver of the car that you are travelling in is an Archers addict, and the time is swiftly approaching 7PM.
MailRaider press release
Switching. Such a little word, and it makes it sound so easy. All you have to do is buy a Mac, copy your files over, and your done. Easy as that, you have a new computer. Except that this is very much a best-case scenario and things are never that simple in ‘real life’.
Take e-mail for example. On your old PC you diligently saved the email that you cared about by dragging it to your desktop. Easy. And when you wanted to open it, you just double clicked on the email icon and there it was.
So you switched to a Mac, copying all those e-mail files, and now you want to read one. No problem. You open the folder and… wait a minute… here is the first clue that something might be amiss because all the email icons have gone, replaced by generic document icons. Never mind, it’s a minor thing. You double click and… Nothing. You can’t read the email. Damn.
Is all lost? Have you lost those emails? Have you lost the attachments? No. Not a bit of it. Just visit the App Store and search for ‘MailRaider’ (or ‘Microsoft Outlook msg’, if you want to check out the competition too.) Download MailRaider and try double clicking on that Outlook file again. Hey Presto. Problem solved, and for the unbeatable price of Absolutely Free. You’re all quite welcome.
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Change to 45RPM Software, Part 2
I have a couple of problems. I’m short on cash – and, in these recession hit times, aren’t we all. I’m also short on time – which is a nuisance for everyone who uses my software because it means that I can’t provide you with the support that you deserve. I have few ideas which might help me solve these problems – and you can explore them from the labs page. Continue reading “Change to 45RPM Software, Part 2”