Uncluttered Organization

Nothing is more annoying that a cluttered desktop. It is nice to create aliases to your favorite applications and files, but it is not very nice to have them all over your desktop. Just like for a real desk, a cluttered computer desktop can be less functional and can distract you from your work.

Dead (and Undead) People Don’t Use Windows

2001 – In light of the recent admission by Microsoft that “funded advocacy groups” have sent letters from dead people to newspapers in support of the beleaguered* computer software company, Apple Computer has issued a press release noting the tremendous advantages the Macintosh computer has for “the dead or recently unliving.”

Boring Old Software in Paris?

2001: For the first time in recent memory, Apple has announced the contents of Jobs’ keynote for the Paris Expo: Jobs: No New Hardware at Apple Expo 2001 (no longer online) Nouveaux Ordinateurs? Non! (no longer online) Steve Jobs to Keynote Apple Expo, Says “No New Hardware In Paris” Let the games begin.

The Paperless Office

2001 – I remember first reading a review of the original PaperPort scanner from Visioneer* in the mid 1990s. It was brilliant – a tiny sheet-fed scanner that could slurp up a typewritten page and automagically turn it into a word processing document.

Avoid Mac Obsolescence

Low End Mac readers have one thing in common – we are not the biggest fans of frequent upgrades. On the other hand, the computer industry loves you if you keep buying stuff, which is why hardware and software manufacturers work to make their products so attractive. They want you to lust for what they […]

SETI@home: Team 6100

2001 – Team 6100 has 18 members and has completed 301 work units since May 2, 2000. Over the last dozen work units, we are averaging 111 hours, 42 minutes. The total contribution of Team 6100 is 3.68 years of CPU time.

Astronomy on the World Wide Web

As regular readers of this column are aware, I am an astronomy teacher. I teach both high-school and college astronomy for teachers (online) and am involved in several organizations and astronomy programs. I maintain a collection of links at www.AstronomyTeacher.com, which lists dozens of links sorted by category.

Race Is Merely a Metaphor; So Is a GUI

The question of color takes up much space in these pages, but the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of self. – 1961, James Baldwin, expatriated Black-American writer and gay activist Blood, darky, Tar Baby, Kaffir, shine, moor, blackamoor, Jim Crow, spook, quadroon, meriney, red bone, high yellow, […]

Being Ordinary in the Computing World

2001: The fact that Apple is out of trouble is really, really old news. The profits have been rolling in fairly consistently and have put Apple solidly in the black and on the road to long-term financial stability. The problem now, as always, is maintaining and increasing market share.

Palm Power

Last week I talked about Quicken. At one level, Quicken is a boring product – a database – but at another level it is a revolutionary tool for self-knowledge that can improve your relationship with money. Mac users who consistently apply Quicken’s tools are better off than those who don’t.

Not Franchising Apple Stores

McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, and a host of other businesses successfully sell franchises around the country – and sometimes around the world. Last week John Scheeser proposed Apple do the same thing with its retail store in an article published on The Mac Mind.