In my last post I was lamenting the premature demise of my old Squeezebox server, caused by a nasty plague that afflicts tech gear: burst capacitors. After a long search, sifting through eBay listings, reading the fine details of each offering, comparing options, I was able to find a nice newish Shuttle server, sporting good [...]

I have tons of old photos that I am always in the process of scanning in. Some are pictures from childhood, others are from my time in the Navy, and still others are from family life before digital photography (somewhere around the end of 2000 I bought my first digital camera, a Canon G1). I [...]

Most of the time I don’t really bother with the timestamp information that my camera embeds in each digital photo. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I checked to see if the clock was right. Scanned photographs are an entirely different brew. They typically represent events from the distant past, and scanner software [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Thanks to its face-recognition tool, iPhoto ’09 can now put names to the faces in your photographs, letting you quickly sift through your library based on content rather than how photos are arranged. But putting this feature to work requires some effort on your part. A few months back I received my copy of iLife [...]

“How a lifestyle experiment and a disaster made me realize the value of turning atoms into bits” — Mike Elgin A couple of months back, Mike Elgin of Computerworld posted an article on his foray into the paperless world: Paperless office? Ha! How about a paperless life? In this followup article, he considers how lifestyle changes and [...]

Even in a paperless home we occasionally need to print something. Why put up with all of the aggravation that comes with the care and feeding of a printer when there are so many other options available?