HUNTER-GATHERER

Until recently, I made my living on the road. Everything I bought involved size and durability as the leading consideration. As a result, I have always only enjoyed the view of a laptop screen. But several hours a day hunkered down in front of a screen and the prospect of my [...]

[Read more →]

Last week during a ride down the west side bike path, I was stopped dead in my tracks by this vision of high grade low tech. The owner of the creation, Roman (a soft-spoken, friendly gent), mentioned that he liked to tinker. At first glance I thought that extra cladding adorning his bike [...]

[Read more →]

A screenshot of Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 is making the rounds today at MacRumors. Versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth have been out in beta public release since May. The actual release date of CS4 is still murky, but October may bring a 32-bit Mac version. For the record, Adobe is not [...]

[Read more →]

If you have ever wanted to do a little quick editing of a video file but lack the chops or the software, then today is your lucky day. I recently came across Squared 5’s Mpeg streamclip, a very tasty bit of freeware, that is a swiss army knife-like player/editor/converter. The user interface on [...]

[Read more →]

So you have amassed a hard drive full of AVI files that possibly did or did not come to you by some nefarious means. Burning them to a disk may bring a result in a DIVX enabled dvd deck, but what if you want to make sure they play in just about [...]

[Read more →]

One of the most prevalent complaints I hear about Apple’s Ipod line is that the enclosed earphones or “buds” are almost immediately replaceable. The ubiquitous white headphones were a trademark of the Ipod craze’s early days and immediately branded early adopters as Ipod owners. Apple,after all, is not a headphone company, and although [...]

[Read more →]

In a few recent post I have mentioned region-free dvd players. To clear up any confusion, the dvd’s that are available in the US and Canada are all coded to region one and the vast majority of dvd players sold here are coded accordingly. For most folks this is not an issue but [...]

[Read more →]

If you are an owner of a MacBook Pro, or a Laptop equipped with an ExpressCard/34 slot, you may not be aware of the options available to enhance your productivity or just expand available port options. As an owner of one of the early editions of the MacBook Pro (2.16 duo/100gb), I had a [...]

[Read more →]

Here is the story of a what I thought would be a great deal from the online retailer bikesdirect.com. What followed is a bit of a horror show. Behold the 2006 Motobecane Fly-Pro in Ferrari Gloss black.

She’s a real beaut, isn’t she? But after under two years of very light service, guess what happened?
One day [...]

[Read more →]

If there is one truth in this world, it is that given enough time, every hard drive will fail. This digital grim reaper has yet to darken my door, but I have had enough close calls to worry. With a carefully manicured 130 GB itunes library, ever-growing video files and ten years of [...]

[Read more →]