Posts in Category "tech"

My fiancée persuaded me to go through my drawer of old electronics and I thought I'd post a picture of some of the (working) portable computers that we went through today:

Included:

• Apple Newton MessagePad 2100
• Apple iPhone 3G
• Nokia 770 (running Internet Tablet OS 2006)
• Sony Cliè PEG NX-80V
• Handspring Visor Edge
• HP TouchPad

Combined, they might have as much computing power as the iPhone 6 I recently acquired. Probably not, though. It certainly is interesting to look at what has and hasn't changed over the last 20 years.

Also poked at today (but not pictured)

• Toshiba Satellite U200-160 …

Hello friends. As you may remember from a few years ago, I am an iPhone user. Like several million of you, I decided to upgrade to the iPhone 6 this year. I thought I'd share some really brief impressions:

• The 6 is gigantic. I have no idea how anyone is using the 6+. The photo above shows my 5s (which was already quite large) looking dwarfed by the 6. It still doesn't have anything on the iPad, though.
• The curved edges of the front really do feel a lot better for the forward/backward swipe gestures in iOS when compared …

For a while, I've been using the Moves app for iOS. It's a little application that uses the accelerometer and GPS data from your phone to tell you where you've been and how many steps you've taken and so on and so forth. I've been using it in no small part because of their strong third-party privacy policy, which said:

We do not disclose an individual user’s data to third parties unless (1) you have given explicit consent to each such disclosure, (2) we are required to comply with a legal obligation or (3) if our business or assets …

I was installing MacTeX on my MacBook Pro today and had an amusing realization. First, some background: for those of you who don't know, TeX is a phenomenal family of typesetting programs originally written in 1978 by two of the giants of 20th Century computer science, Don Knuth and Guy Steele. Most people now use it in conjunction with a slightly more modern set of extensions called LaTeX released in 1981 or so. I used TeX/LaTeX to typeset several thousand pages of homework and other assignments in college.

Now, in early 2014, the download for the OS X distribution …

I use Alfred 2 a lot on OS X in order to get things done. It doesn't completely change how I use the operating system, but it comes close. However, one of my pet peeves about it has always been that the built-in calculator is pretty terrible (even with the "advanced" equals-sign calculator). I realized this morning that I could fix this, and, lo, the dc alfred workflow was born.

It just takes its input and runs it through the dc command-line utility, giving you a fully-programmable RPN calculator. It's not quite as great as PCalc, but it's just a …

Shortly after I upgraded to OS X 10.9.2, I was connecting to battle.net, and I got an SSL error. At the time, I didn't think anything of it (after all, sites have bad SSL certificates all the time). However, I noticed it again today when looking at the page for Reaper of Souls, and decided to look into it again. When I did, I found something very unusual: my system has a second copy of the DigiCert root CA certificate in the "login" keychain. For those of you who aren't familiar, OS X uses a hierarchy of …