inluminent

My wife was trying to print something the other night, and she was complaining that the printer was broken. I figured out what the problem was for me, so I’m posting this in case others have the same sort of problem (the answers I found on the web weren’t all that readable, and I spent [...]

I gotta figure out how to use this word spotted in a recent Daring Fireball ‘Jackass of the Week’ article:
frigtard - as in “socially maladjusted frigtards”.
Love it.

The Austin American-Statesman reports:
Dell exits MP3 business
Computer maker quietly discontinues the last of its digital music players.
By Dan Zehr
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Dell Inc. quietly axed the last of its digital music players last week, pulling the DJ Ditty from its Web site and leaving the MP3 business to Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod and [...]

My favorite reaction to Apple BootCamp announcement is this one from FuckedCompany.com:
Hell’s doors are now open
Apple’s new Boot Camp software will allow Mac users to run Windows XP.
When: 4/5/2006
Company: Apple Computer Inc
Severity: 30
Points: 130
Discuss in the Happy Fun Slander Corner
Yes, I still read F’dCompany… you don’t? It reminds me of the good old days… [...]

Sorry Scoble, gotta go here after I read this:
“I’d rather have a slipped date than a cruddy product.”
Problem with Microsoft’s OS is that typically you get both. - Zing!

Gruber does it again (brings a smile to my face) with his witty analysis of the Dell DJ Ditty
14. Sit back and recall, with tremendously smug satisfaction, a decade’s worth of tech industry punditry holding that superior design would never get Apple anywhere, and that Apple should instead, you know, be more like Dell.

WTF?
I downloaded a vCalendar file from the Hilton website onto my Powerbook, after booking a hotel room.
I then emailed the vCal file to my WindowsXP machine. I saved the file to my desktop, then doubleclicked it to open it in Outlook and save it. I got this error message:

Here’s the transcript of the [...]

I just sent this email to the customer service folks at Mobility Electronics:
TO: iGoCustServ@pfsweb.com FROM: johnengler@gmail.com SUBJECT: Juice Problems DATE: October 21, 2004
I bought a Juice product through Amazon.com about a year and a half ago, and lately I’ve noticed that it hasn’t been charging my laptop very reliably… then, today I plugged in [...]

Last night I bought two Airport Express units from Fry’s Electronics. I did this, because I finally surfed on an 802.11g base station over at my buddies house last week and was amazed at the speed of the connection.
I had been using an 802.11b Airport that I bought when they first came out (years [...]

My best friend from high-school got an iBook this week for his 3rd wedding anniversary. What a kick ass wife!
So, now he’s got a Desktop PC in his home office, next to a wireless base-station and a 14″ iBook. Just for reference, I called it a year ago in a post about iTunes [...]

I sent an email to my company’s IT department Tuesday. It said:
The little “windows update” icon popped up in my system tray today, and I learned that XP SP2 is now available to me as an update. Do you want me to install the update?
I asked them about this particular update, because I’ve [...]

I did it. I cleaned out my Outlook Inbox today (well mostly). (Back in April I had 700+ emails in my inbox.)
I’m now down to 78 email messages in my inbox, all of them requiring some sort of follow up or action from me. A few from more than 30 days ago, but [...]

About once a month, Outlook becomes a pain in the ass for me to use for about 2 hours.
Inevitably, it’ll hang on me while I’m doing something else, or some other process will hang while I’m using Outlook, and Outlook will refuse the shut down properly.
(I’m normally in the middle of about 15 things when [...]

Wow: this one from Damien Barret:
“Color me not surprised. It appears that Microsoft is paying SCO to file all those ridiculous lawsuits against the users of Linux. I’ve seen low before, but this is pretty damn low. Scumsucking low.”
I have no idea if any of that is true, but, it’s truly sad that I could [...]

Lookout looks really cool. It’s a plugin for Outlook that lets people search super fast on Windows machines and in Outlook files…
But I’ve got a problem with reading these comments by a Longhorn evangelist about how this product gives us a glimpes of what WinFS will bring to the Windows Operating System, not because [...]

I’m always confused about whether or not to install Apple’s Security Updates as soon as they’re available. Today’s latest release…
Security Update 2004-02-23 delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users. This update includes the following components:
DiskArbitration IPSec Point-to-Point-Protocol tcpdump
Ok, first, I don’t know what any [...]

Yesterday my CD-ROM drive on my year old Dell Latitude starting having issues. It won’t stay closed and sporadiacally opens on its own. It’s very annoying to be sitting in a presentation and have the CD-ROM drive just pop-open. You initial response is to just push it back in, but when you [...]

This morning, I was subjected to a rant against Microsoft Office 2003 by my wife. She hates it. I’ve never used it, so this is my recreation of her story to me.
Setting: We’re both on the couch, about to watch some Saturday morning College Football, when a commercial for Office 2003 comes on [...]

Now that everyone has commented on iTunes for Windows and Microsoft’s reactionary statements, I figured I’d take a stab at sharing my own comments.
The WSJ published an article [sub. req.] that talked about the iTunes profit margins:
Consider the economics of the iTunes store. Apple charges 99 cents per song that is downloaded by a consumer. [...]

Here’s a few links to stuff I’ve read over the past month or so:

Advertising
Deciding On The Advertising Media - good pros and cons list of different advertising mediums, but leaves out online advertising
The On-line Marketer’s Secret Weapon: A Site that Works
Salted Wound : Perfect Weblog Ads
Seth’s Blog: Why Web Ads Don’t Work
Fresh Inc: [...]

Gruber hits the nail on the head with his latest “Dell’s Dud“:
This idea that the iPod’s position is precarious — that any day now, some cheaper weak-branded knock-off will knock Apple off its perch — is exactly backwards. The iPod doesn’t just lead in market share; it leads in mind share. Any competing player that [...]

John Gruber takes issue with Microsoft, and Outlook, and the virus issues allowed by Microsoft, in his latest article “Good Times“:
We, as a society, have decided that indoor plumbing should be held to high standards of reliability and maintenance. And somehow weíve been convinced that indoor computing should not.
And in the follow up “Dynomite!“:
Complexity [...]

Did you know that on Windows unscrupulous marketers can make Notepad (the text editor included with Windows) open and display a message using javascript or other forms of auto-execution in IE? Did you know they can make Notepad open specific files on the hard-drive of that unsuspecting PC? They can. While [...]

If you use Outlook XP as your mail client, you’ve likely run into the problem of having bad addresses show up in your auto-complete options when you’re typing a new email to people. It’s usually really annoying, and there’s no way to really fix the problem from inside Outlook XP that’s intuitive (to me [...]

A few months ago, I asked my SFA Manager to get me access to my email from outside the company firewall. He gave me a RSA keyfob and set up two dial-up connections in XP for me to use to connect to the company intranet, so I could check my email from outside the [...]

While I was at CompUSA buying the Linksys Ethernet Bridge, I also picked up a Linksys WPC 11 (Instant Wireless Network Adapter - Version 3.0) or 802.11 card. It was only $80, and since my company said I couldn’t have one, I bought one with my own cash. It’ll be worth it, as [...]

Thanks to a tip from Noel, I went to CompUSA today and picked up a Linksys WET111 (a wireless ethernet bridge) this evening. I brought it home, and realized what he meant by “These are a bitch to setup the first time, but work like butter…” as the damn thing doesn’t come with a [...]

This is sad, according to Scott, who cites another source, Office Depot will only sell computer products (hardward and software) that’s certified by Microsoft to run well on their computers…
I like my Apple made hardware, software, and finely built peripherals… That’s the difference between the majority of Apple developers and Windows developers. [...]

I have 128 message in my inbox at work. All of them are ‘important’.
This morning, I cleaned up my inbox and must have filed at least 100 old message that weren’t really all that important anymore… and I still have 129 messages in my inbox (yes, I got one more while typing this).
The sad [...]

Are you annoyed with Windows? I am sometimes… Like, “Why does XP always ask me to report a crash to Microsoft?” or “How do I customize the Start Menu?”… I ask myself these questions a lot it seems.
It’s nice to know about websites like Annoyances.org:
Annoyances.org is the most complete collection of information assembled [...]

Excuse the harsh language in the title of this post, but this is just too good not to mention. I heard about this earlier in the week from a co-worker that’s a Mac-zealot, and thought that it was funny…
From C|Net: Houston: We have a problem with Office
Amazingly (to me at least) “Houston has begun [...]

I’m a big fan of Screen Catcher from St. Clair Software. Back when I was part of the team at a little know Macintosh website, I used St. Clair’s software to create media kits and marketing materials for our advertising sales efforts. The full page screen shots of websites (which are most often [...]