Two Kinds of People

There’s a saying among computer folks that rang true again last week: There’s two kinds of people, those who do backups, and those who’ve never lost data (usually due to a hard disk crash).

I’d add a third type, those who’ve lost data and perform occasional backups. Other than my photos, which are backed up …

I spent some time today managing my digital music collection, adding tags such as artist, album, date and so on. I have a variety of mp3s of live concert recordings. As such, I get no help from the online CD information services like CDDB and freedb as they are only aware of commercial releases. Adding information such as artist, date, etc. by hand would be extremely tedious and error-prone; that’s where tools such as Media Rage come into play.

Here, in the extended entry area, are my notes from today’s experience; if the past is any guide, it may be days or weeks before I work on my music collection again, and hopefully these tips will get me up to speed a bit more quickly.

I’ve tried a number of blog editors, such as Ecto and a couple of others, and none offered enough value for me to switch away from typing posts directly into the standard MovableType textentry form. Occasionally, I’ll edit using BbEdit, but that’s rare.

I’ve been hearing enough about MarsEdit, a new blog editor …

First, if you aren’t using Firefox as your primary browser, why not? It works better than Internet Explorer, it’s free, and it’s an easy download. It works on just about any computer, including PCs, Linux and the Mac. One measure of the maturity of Firefox is that I use it on a corporate intranet …

The G5 Powermac was introduced a couple of months before I bought my first ever Apple computer, a G4 Powerbook. I knew at the time that the G5 offered much greater performance, but the need for portability indicated that the Powerbook was a much better choice for me. In addition, I …

Though not supported by Apple or Motorola, it is possible to use the Motorola V600 mobile phone with an Apple computer, in this instance a 15″ Al PowerBook. This article describes setting up a bluetooth connection; no doubt using a USB cable would be different.

While it’s true I had no problem finding info on how to make the mac/phone connection, in some ways I found too much info. The resources linked to below have a tremendous, though somewhat overwhelming amount of information about all things cellular. What I wanted was a simple, direct guide to setting up the V600 to work with my Mac. This document is my attempt to provide a reasonable summary of the steps required to make this connection.

Here’s a list of the sites that I found to be useful in putting together this guide:

AT&T Wireless forum

Phonescoop V600 site

HowardForums

Fracture is a fractal screensaver for Mac OS X that creates some of the most fantastic, richly detailed fractal images I have ever seen.

I don’t normally configure a screensaver; preferring instead to simply allow the energy-savings mode to kick in. Fracture creates such lovely images that I not only spent the …