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John Gruber's rant back at Cory Doctorow has once again painfully reminded me how stupid otherwise intelligent people can be. Not John, but Cory - who brain farts so hard he's got to clean the bowl. Cory's like this sometimes, too. Bits of brilliance mixed in with some of the dumbest commentary you've ever seen. […]

I'm no longer an Apple employee, so I can tell you that all of these are true, along with a bunch of other things. Yes, I spent some time in south Florida as a part-time Mac Specialist at the Wellington Green store. I got discounts and a chance to get out of the apartment - […]

So, apparently, the titmouse is a bird and not a mouse at all. You know people are gonna call that nub the nipple. It's just bound to happen. You can't avoid the inevitable.

This piece at Ars is entertaining, but it falls well short of its billing: If you've been following the Apple-to-Intel transition, you're going to want to read this whole article. Why? Because I'm going to do something that I almost never do: spill insider information from unnamed sources that I can confirm are in a […]

I looked quickly and could not find an AppleScript command to mute the sound on my Mac. Instead, I've had to get by with tell appplication "System Events" to set volume 0. I do this via cron at 10pm. At 7am, I reset the volume to 3.5 (half volume). Being able to mute and unmute […]

I have a smart playlist in iTunes that shows any song that's unplayed and/or unrated. When I import new music from a CD or buy new tunes from the music store, it reminds me to rate the songs. Every one of my 10,067 songs is rated. Still, this playlist shows one item and I can't […]

Steve Jobs: About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I […]

My HP LaserJet 1320 is failing to print. I print, and shortly after the job spools the print queue is stopped. When I log into CUPS (http://localhost:631/) it displays this error text: "The process "usb" stopped unexpectedly with status 233" I clean installed 10.4 onto another partition and it printed fine (with all of my […]

What the heck? I'm offline for three days and Apple moves to Intel? What in tarnation is going on around here?!? Obviously I still have some reading to do on the whole situation (and I may not get to it until next week, as I'm still moving in - so any pointers to some quick […]

In a bash prompt: for filename in * # Traverse all files in directory. do fname=`basename $filename` n=`echo $fname | tr A-Z a-z` # Change name to lowercase. if [ "$fname" != "$n" ] # Rename only files not already lowercase. then mv $fname $n fi done Thanks, Aaron.

I set my parents up last night with Mail on their new Mac. Previously, they'd been using a shared Entourage database between users. It worked well, except that sometimes my dad would delete or mark mail as read when there was no reason to do so, and my mom wouldn't see it. Years ago I […]

Excel's been giving me crap every time I quit it, with the compile error listed in the subject of this post. The fix? Remove the "PDFMaker.xxx" files (where xxx is a varying TLE) from the Microsoft Office 2004: Office: Startup: <AppName> folder. I'm glad to be rid of those stupid toolbars and the error that […]

Last night, my parents lost power for a little while. When the power came back on, their Dual 800 "QuickSilver" G4 refused to. Today, they purchased (via me) a 17" iMac. I think they'll be happy with it. Right now, I'm trying to find an external FW drive enclosure. I don't know if I'm going […]

In iTunes 4.6, you could request the currently playing song with an AppleScript on loop. Every ten seconds or so, you could say "hey, what's the current tune?" This is how Recent Tunes worked, in fact. When iTunes 4.7 (I think it was 4.7.1 specifically) came out, it pushed out notifications on its own. You […]

Woohoo, Taboo! This not only fixes the issue of closing Safari windows with tabs open, but it also fixes the issue of that stupid, annoying warning.