Update not all that long after I wrote this: I discovered that if I don’t keep too many tabs open while I’m also running a Windows virtual machine on VMWare, Chrome does not get so slow, so I’m back to using it, which is nice because I like it a lot more than Safari. So please just ignore this post. Continue reading “Mac Browser Wars… and the winner is: Safari! [oops, not really]”
Mavericks Upgrade: Go For It
Added later: this is of purely historical interest, if that. I added a category “outdated,” but maybe “obsolete” would be more accurate…
I tend to be a late adopter of operating systems. I went from Windows 95 to XP to 7, skipping Vista, Me, and a number of other dogs whose names I can’t even remember. I would still be running XP except that when my son switched from Linux to Windows 7 I sat up and took notice. Continue reading “Mavericks Upgrade: Go For It”
Pandora is changing my life
OK, I have a bunch of music. Mostly it comes from CDs that I own (really!). At one point I ripped it all to mp3 files, set up a server, and had two Squeezeboxes that I could listen to anything in my collection any time I wanted to. I made some play lists that played over and over in my office waiting room. When I had a party, I would (sometimes) make a big play list and play it as background music. Other than that I hardly use it.
About a week ago, I downloaded Pandora for my Android phone. Pandora bills itself as “internet radio,” but it’s radio only in the sense that it plays a stream of songs that you are not choosing one-by-one, the way you do when you make a playlist. You create a “stiation” by starting with an artist or a song you like, and it goes from there, finding something similar. Every time it plays something, you have the option of saying you like it, or don’t like it, or skipping it without rating it, or just listening without rating it. Based on the songs you do rate, it refines its search. There are some variations but that’s the basic idea.
So I made stations starting with Theonious Monk, Crosby Still Nash & Young’s “Carry On” (don’t ask me why), romantic period string quartets, oh yeah, and Louis Armstrong. I am hooked. I’m listening to the Monk channel right now and a lot of the rest of the time. I don’t listen to it while I’m working because I don’t think my patients would like that, and I don’t listen to it at dinner, but lots of the rest of the time. Continue reading “Pandora is changing my life”
Weird problem with PowerBook G4
So my stepson Walker has a PowerBook G4 that he got from his dad, which stopped booting up. It would get maybe a third of the way through the progress bar labeled something like “Mac OS X” and then it would go to a blue screen (light blue, not BSOD-colored) and hang.
My son Ben discovered that you could boot in single-user mode (holding down apple-S while booting) and repair the disk with “fsck -fy” (perhaps several times), and then rebooting would work. In fact, rebooting turned out to be fine in general, the problem only happened when you powered the thing down. Continue reading “Weird problem with PowerBook G4”
T-Mobile MyTouch (aka G2), one month on
So I’ve had my G2 for a bit over a month now; here are some first impressions.
1. I like it! It’s sleek, it’s cute, it does things. I don’t feel bad for not having an iPhone. The UI is generally well designed, and I’m not easy to please in this regard. Continue reading “T-Mobile MyTouch (aka G2), one month on”
Palm OS to Google/Android, Part 2: What Didn’t Work (4.2)
What didn’t work. Well, what did I try before that? Lots of things, with varying degrees of success (from zero to partial). Continue reading “Palm OS to Google/Android, Part 2: What Didn’t Work (4.2)”
Palm OS to Google/Android, Part 1: What Worked (4.1)
OK, so Thursday I got my spiffy new T-Mobile “myTouch” (I’m going to call this my G2 from now on, to keep from gagging). It looks pretty cool, but of course it’s no good to me without my calendars and contacts, which are on my old Treo 650. For my calendars and contacts, I’ve used a program call Agendus from Iambic Software for a long time (I think it was called “Action Names” when I first started using it, and since then it’s gotten upto Agendus 13, so we’re talking a good stretch of time in dog years). Continue reading “Palm OS to Google/Android, Part 1: What Worked (4.1)”
OK, I give up
Added later: when I started a blog, it was just about technology-related stuff. I started a “general” blog later (about two months later, it looks like). Eventually I merged them—earlier this year (2017), I think. This was the first post on the original tech blog.
So until now I’ve resisted having a blog. “I don’t have time to have a blog,” I thought. Well, I still don’t have time to have a blog, but I’ve been doing various tech-y things lately, relying extensively on postings around the web to solve problems. I decided I would start the blog so that people might see how I did some of these things (and so that I could see how I did them because I forget pretty quickly, I notice).
Of course, thinking about it, I started to think about all the things I could write about… I definitely don’t have time to do those things now, but since they might come all out of order, I’m going to write down the ones I thought about and maybe fill them in later.
1. Me and computers through the ages
2. Me and PDAs through the ages
3. Nat sells his soul to Google
4. Migrating from Palm OS/Agendus to Google/Android