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- On Digital Organization: Things, Google Cal & iCal SyncingYesterday
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Believe it or not, I have never used a calendar to keep track of events or anything in general. For one, I just didn’t have enough stuff going on in my life that couldn’t be wrangled by a simple to-do list kept on my (physical) desktop. That’s changing. I’ve moved from physical to-do lists to using Things. That’s one less thing always cluttering my desk.
One of the primary reasons for using Things as my to-do list and organization application is that it has an iPhone counterpart. I just hop on the same Wi-Fi network as my primary Things computer with the Things app open on my iPhone and it happily syncs my list items. However, it would be nicer if it synced through a Things server, or my own, so it didn’t rely on using the same Wi-Fi network.For Skribit organization and productivity, I use a different set of tools but some overlapping between the two toolsets does exist: Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, Lighthouse and GitHub.
I’ve been using Things for
- Holiday Giveaway: 1.5TB of Seagate DrivesNovember 27
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Xavier of Notebooks.com has been gracious enough to extend his hard drive giveaway to PSTAM readers as well as 9 other websites, courtesy of Seagate. Up for grabs are a 1TB FreeAgent Desk hard drive and a 500GB FreeAgent Go hard drive. If you have a Mac, let me know and we’ll send you the Mac versions of those drives.
The contest ends December 6th at 11:59PM EST. To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment answering the following question: Have you ever lost important data on your computer - what happened and how do you backup your data now?
The winner will be picked at random, so don’t feel pressured to write a parable about your data loss and what you learned from it, although I would enjoy reading it.
The last time a hard drive died on me was with my first Mac: a Mac Mini G4. I was hosting PaulStamatiou.com on it from my dorm and after only a few months of overstressing the drive it gave up. After that I
- I Can’t Live Without My Vudu BoxNovember 23
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Over a year ago I first got my hands on the innovative Vudu set-top box and reviewed its movie streaming capabilities. Unlike the countless gadgets and devices that I come across, I have not outgrown the Vudu box. I use it a ton. It instantly streams rental movies in HD, with the option of even higher resolution ‘HDX’ with a delay. Of course, the Vudu also lets me purchase movies for keeps and store them on the hard drive but I don’t buy movies often as I generally don’t find much value in rewatching movies unless it’s a quotable classic like The Fast and The Furious.
My home theater might have changed over the year but the Vudu box still remains an integral part of my setup.
ThenWhy do I pay up to $5 to rent a movie when I can very easily
- How To: Create an OS X Icon from a Vector GraphicNovember 19
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Back in 2005 I wrote an very basic article on how to change icons in OS X with ones you find online at sites like Interface Lift. Unfortunately, that method of icon swapping only works with actual embedded icon files. I quickly discovered this when I wanted to make my laptop more work-oriented and use the Skribit logo for my drive icon. This post shows the steps I went through to get my drive icon to be that of an Adobe Illustrator vector graphic.
First off, what is a vector graphic? In a nutshell, a vector graphic stores information about defined points and lines whereas a typical raster graphic as found on the web only contains information about pixels. The end result is that vector graphics are always at their best quality and can be resized without any repercussions like pixelation that occurs when enlarging a raster graphic. If you ever hire someone to create a
- Apple Repair Remains DismalNovember 17
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I am only speaking from my own past experiences of having Apple repair my Macs, but this has to stop somewhere. For the past 2 weeks (I was quoted 5-7 days) Apple has had my MacBook Air to repair a bent screen bezel and dead micro DVI port. What I got in return was a German keyboard. Thanks Apple. I didn’t know I wanted to learn German.
I had given it to Apple with a clean install of Leopard so that when it’s booted it loads the installer, as I was planning on selling it sooner or later. Of course, when I got it back they decided to go ahead and run the installer and create an “apple” user for me instead of leaving the pristine install I had originally. Also, the fan is now dead and makes interesting sounds, the screen bezel remained bent and the display is misaligned and closes oddly.
Don’t get me wrong, Apple repair at the Genius Bar is almost always top-notch as long as you’re not an ass to the Geniuses. It is just when they send it off to their repair centers that quality of the repair suddenly stops becoming a priority.
So when you take your Mac to get repaired and they have to
The Skribit logo, now as my drive icon. Originally created by