Computers, personal electronics and all other tech items
OK, this is brand new. As new as it gets, actually. I haven’t even had time to watch the first episode yet, but I sure I’m going to like it so I’m including it here. It’s a production of the This Week in Tech (TWiT) folks with Amber MacArthur, Leo Laporte and others. In case you didn’t guess, it’s about Macintosh issues and news.
Their site is www.macbreak.com.
You can subscribe at http://www.macbreak.com/macbreak_rss.php.
You may have heard of Brett Larson. He’s a Mac guy who’s been seen on TechTV in the past. Now he does a 30 second daily podcast about technology. It’s a quick listen with interesting content. This is courtesy of 1010 WINS in NYC.
The feed is at http://podcast.medianext.com/stations/wins/rss/?c=18
Every week (or so) Patrick Norton (formerly of ZDTV/TechTV and currently ot TWiT) joing Jim Louderback (also a ZDTV/TechTV alum) discuss the newest technology products. They cover a wide variety of products that isn’t limited to computer stuff at all.
Their site is at www.whatsnewnow.com
Their feed is http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/audioblogs/whatsnewnow.xml
After many months of of ignoring it, I finally upgraded my blog to WordPress 2. It’s a pretty significant update. You probably won’t notice any changes on the front end, but the back end it much different. Thanks to a bunch of new Ajax content you can now drag components around the screen much like you can on Google’s Personalized Homepage. It also features a WYSIWYG editor so you don’t have to tweak the HTML code f you don’t want to. Now of course, I still go into the HTML and make edits from time to time, but many of the functions that I always did by hand in the past are not automated. Of special interest to me are the graphic alignment and the link target parameters.
Following up on a post from about six months ago (see post here), Googgle has finally released a MAcintosh version of it’s very cool Google Earth software. It requires MacOS X 10.4 Tiger to run, so I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but kudos to Google for getting a Mac version out there.
Get it now at earth.google.com
I just found out something disturbing. H&R Block is not producing TaxCut for Macintosh this year. I’ve been using their software for a couple of years now and while it wasn’t the most user friendly software in the world, it did work.
Now when I went to order it for this tax season I found out there is no Macintosh version! Of course, they are spending the money to mail out free copies of the Windows version to people who didn’t even ask for it, but they can’t develop a Mac version. What a great way to alienate your customer base!
So, I’m switching to TurboTax. It’s from Intuit, the people who make Quicken. I’ve been using Quicken for years, so I’m sure their tax software will be just as great.
I just updated Michael’s Guide to Choosing Passwords with a new service from Steve Gibson’s (of the Security Now podcast) site.
The following is an excerpt from Michael’s Guide to Choosing Passwords…
A good place to go for a totally random password is GRC’s Password Generator (www.grc.com/pass). This website generates a totally secure, unique and random password everytime you refresh the page. It will generate a 63 character password. If you need a shorter one, just grab as many characters as you need.
If you want to add a clock to your website, you can do it easier than ever now. You can also add countdown timers. Just haed over to www.clocklink.com. You just paste some code to embed a Flash animated clock into your site. There’s an advertisement on rollovers, but it’s not intrusive at all and worth it for the free clock. I just have to find a place for it on my site now!
Thanks to Amber MacArthur’s blog for pointing this out!
A few days ago I went to a birthday party for my friend’s daughter. She’s three years old. I was taking photos of the event with my digital camera, but someone else was using a disposable film camera. The birthday girl ran over to her and asked to see the pictures she’d just taken as she pulled down on her hand to see the back of the camera. I thought it was pretty funny to see that in her mind all cameras are digital cameras. Maybe film cameras are going the way of vinyl records. (You know, those black frisbees that your parents have in the basement.)