It was only $30 on Black Friday, and the 4″ screen on my iPhone 5 wasn’t particularly kind to my eyes. Facebook on a small iPhone is not a great experience, Clash of Clans and Euchre 3D, about the extent of my gaming, can be hard to read. Ideally, I’ll have an iPhone 6S someday […]
Monthly Archives: February 2018
QacQoc is making a name for itself for its environmentally friendly and very affordable line of accessories, most of them with USB-C ports. None of my Macs have USB 3, let alone USB-C, so when QacQoc contacted me about reviewing their very nice USB-C hub, I had to share my predicament. They sent two items […]
It’s not particularly easy to create a bootable USB flash drive so you can try running Linux on a PowerPC Mac. It took me a couple weeks of research, asking questions of our Linux on PowerPC Macs group on Facebook, and experimenting before I could finally boot into Linux 14.04 from a thumb drive. I […]
QacQoc is making a name for itself for its environmentally friendly and very affordable line of accessories, most of them with USB-C ports. None of my Macs have USB 3, let alone USB-C, so when QacQoc contacted me about reviewing their very nice USB-C hub, I had to share my predicament. They sent two items […]
When Steve Jobs debuted the MacBook Air on January 15, 2008 at the San Francisco Macworld conference, he famously demonstrated its thinness by pulling one out of a manila envelope. He claimed it was the thinnest laptop in the world.
Apple made an unusual decision when it designed the original iBook, the one with the handle. Unlike most Macs before and since, iBooks do not have a PRAM battery. Neither does the 12″ PowerBook G4, which is based on the iBook G4. Instead, the parameter RAM (PRAM for short) is maintained by using the charge […]
If anything, Apple’s success in getting the Apple II family of computers into elementary schools was a mixed blessing. The education market kept the Apple II line going, prevented DOS PCs from getting a foothold in most elementary schools, but it also kept schools from buying Apple Macs because they couldn’t run all that Apple […]
No, it isn’t a typo. Compleat is a legitimate, albeit archaic, spelling for complete. As Kenneth G. Wilson says in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English: “This obsolete spelling of the adjective complete suggests an air of antiquity that seems to please some of those who name things….” We find that fitting for Low […]
When Apple designed the original iMac‘s system board, it left a connector marked “mezzanine” without explaining its purpose. The official explanation is that it was used for testing logic boards before installing them in the iMac’s swoopy case. But once people saw prototype iMacs with video output, the cat was out of the bag and […]
I’ve been doing a bit of reflecting lately, and it’s hard to believe that the G4 Cube is turning 18 later this year and that it’s now been over 8 years since one of my earliest articles was published, Reimagining the Mac Cube for the Intel Era.
Back in 2015, a proof-of-concept piece of Mac malware arrived under the name Thunderstrike. The name was chosen because the software specifically used the Thunderbolt port in newer Macs as its infection vector, and it was designed to use an ethernet adapter as its carrier. Apple addressed the issue with the Mac OS X 10.10.2 […]
