In case I haven’t made myself clear in other posts, I like PDF documents. I mean I Really Like PDF documents. And I want to be able to treat a PDF file exactly as I would a sheaf of printed pages. Then along comes someone who exploits yet another bug in someone’s PDF renderer. A [...]

If you live in a slightly older home, such as mine, you occasionally might want to know which circuit breaker or fuse controls a particular outlet. Besides making it more convenient to disable the power for repairs, some of us have to deal with easily overloaded circuits that weren’t meant for all of the modern [...]

Do you still have an old machine kicking around in the basement or the back room, long forgotten? For no cost and almost zero effort, you can set it up as a dedicated network appliance, using one of the many turnkey products from the open-source TurnKey Linux project. I’m serious. You don’t need to know [...]

I have to admit that I mocked the device from the outset. I sort of chuckled as I said “Boy, they really hit the ball out of the park with the iPhone, but this thing doesn’t know whether it is a laptop or a iPod Touch. Why would I want one?” I have a nice [...]

Show me a musician and I’ll show you someone who has at least a three foot stack of sheet music squirreled away somewhere. My situation is worse—both my wife and I are musicians, to one degree or another. Throw in the fact that she is a music teacher and you can imagine just how many [...]

Jim Robinson over at Money Talks News has put together a nice article giving five basic steps for getting a jump start on your paperless life. Among other things he discusses options for prioritizing and cutting down on the total volume of stuff you plan on keeping, digital or otherwise. “Backup, backup, backup” made number [...]

A while back I had a rare opportunity indeed: I went on a business trip to India to visit our offshore team. We knew it was a once in a lifetime trip, so four of us took some vacation days and paid our own way on a side trip to some of the great cities [...]

Recently I have been mulling over the possibility of commuting to New York—owing to a hazy future at my current employer. Whether or not I am ready to trudge there and back every day of the week is still an open question, but the siren song of the city has its draw. With such a [...]

One of my pet peeves in software is the black-box application that calmly sucks in all of your files and does everything for you, until the day you want to swich apps. This is the iTunes model, followed by many other products. I am of the opinion that rather than allowing an application to shuffle [...]

Several weeks ago I was sitting at the dining room table with a family friend going through a stack of documents and letters. Her husband had passed away suddenly some weeks before, and I was doing the best I could to help her untangle the paperwork and understand what was what. This unfortunate scene made [...]