Networking is one of those topics that generates a vast number of questions. How fast is my Internet connection? What IP addresses are in use on my network? How can I improve the performance of my wireless network by adjusting the position and orientation of my AirPort base station? Is my ISP on a DNS […]
The venerable
AirPort Express now sports 802.11n, the fastest flavor of Wi-Fi, while weighing in at a light-on-the-pockets $99 in the United States. Apple released its revised compact base station today. The AirPort Express can also stream music from iTunes over a network through a built-in combo analog and digital optical audio port using AirTunes, […]
Victoria voice for text to speech — A reader correctly points out that the voice of an Apple video mentioned in a recent article is not Victoria. That leads to pointers to other text-to-speech voices available for the Mac. (4 messages)
Grooming a Jobs replacement? During the recent Apple event to unveil the iPhone development roadmap, […]
Recently, I discovered that a file of whose existence I previously had no clue was responsible for a mysterious phenomenon on my computer. The phenomenon was simple enough: an application I don’t use and don’t want to use (RetroRunSL, a part of
Retrospect) was launching every time I logged in to my Mac. What I […]
In “
Word 2008 and the Paste Plain Text Dance” (2008-01-19), I described a tiny AppleScript I use in Word 2008 to paste text without style information, so that the pasted text adopts the style of whatever is around it. From the feedback I’ve received, the lack of a built-in command to do this with one […]
Several months ago I complained in “
Stewing Over Safe Sleep” (2007-07-30) that my laptop took far too long to go to sleep, thanks to Apple’s default Safe Sleep settings; I also shared a shell script that I used to disable Safe Sleep and return my computer to a more sane state. After quite a bit […]
Author Scott Knaster and editor Caroline Rose, who have collectively written and edited for Apple, NeXT, Microsoft, and Google, have been hard at work on a major update to “
Take Control of Switching to a Mac,” and the fruits of their labors are now available for us all to enjoy.
What’s to enjoy about switching […]
Our ebooks have tons of Web links in them, and for a long time, one of the most tedious production tasks was verifying that the links were still valid since the author added them in the manuscript. In an effort to simplify this task, I came up with the following process.
Unfortunately for those trying […]
I know, there must be a special place in hell for people who use an ultra-portable laptop in bed, but I don’t care: it’s like having Mac OS X served to you on a tray. The MacBook Air has a great feel to it, and its instant power on and sleep makes it easy to […]
Ars Technica helped clear up some confusion related to the new unlimited voice calling plans offered by the four major cellular carriers in the United States (see “
Three Cell Carriers Offer Unlimited Minutes for $100 per Month,” 2008-02-19, and “
Sprint Nextel Adds $90 and $100 Unlimited Monthly Plans,” 2008-02-28). Initially, it seemed as if iPhone […]