Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Like many of you, I have an Aunt Vilma. And this Aunt Vilma has the kind of question that’s on the minds of other like-minded Aunts around the world. Specifically:
Dear Topher,
Why should I buy an iPad?
Love,
A.V.
It remains a question that’s difficult to answer in a tidy list of bullet points. And it is because it’s been my experience that you don’t truly understand how useful an iPad will be to you until you live with one. That said, I can provide some observations regarding my use as well how others around me use theirs.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Although I’m the guy others come to for answers, there are times when I have questions of my own. For instance, while discussing beloved movies with a friend I was reminded that I don't own copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest movies. Hoping to remedy that I dashed to Amazon and found Alfred Hitchcock: The Master piece Collection [Blu-ray], which includes the greatest hits of Hitchcock’s later work. The collection looked great, but the price did not—$178.96 as I write this.
Reviews indicate that the collection has been sold for as little as $120—a price I would be willing to spring for. But how am I to know when it becomes available at such a discounted price? I turned to Twitter for answers.
Follower John Coxon (@johncoxon) told me about camelcamelcamel. This Web-based service allows you to enter the URL for the item you wish to track. You can then view a history of the item’s price to get a ballpark idea of how low it’s been priced in the past. Then just enter the price you’re willing to pay ($120, in my case) and choose how you wish to be alerted—via email or Twitter.
A few weeks ago, a small irregularly-shaped object began appearing in all of the photos and videos taken with my iPhone 5. As the object was always in the same location on an image, I assumed this meant some sort of dust had gotten stuck on the exterior of the lens.
The yellow arrow points to an annoying object that began appearing on all my iPhone 5 photos and videos. (Click to enlarge.)
“No problem,” I said to myself, “I’ll just clean the lens and all will be well, at least for future photos.” I was wrong. None of my attempts to clean the lens had the slightest effect. Eventually, I was forced to conclude that the dust had somehow lodged itself on the interior of the lens—where I could not reach it.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Hugh Carter has a colorful outlook on the world and would like to extend it to his work. He writes:
I have tried numerous sources to find a way to establish my own format for text in Pages, TextEdit, Reminders, Notes, and Mail. In each application I am able to set a style including a color but on opening a new document the style has not maintained the color. Is there a way to create a style that maintains colors for new documents?
I’ll address this on an application-by-application basis.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Greg Zambo longs for a feature he once enjoyed in Snow Leopard. He writes:
I am generally happy with Mountain Lion but I remember that there was a feature in an earlier version of OS X that seems to have been dropped. In Spaces, there was a number in the menu bar to tell you which “space” you were in. This is missing in Mission Control. Is there any third party utility that will bring it back?
Yes. But, unlike with some other OS tweaks, it’s not the kind of thing that Apple has simply hidden that you can reawaken with a clever Terminal command. Instead, you must turn to a tool that essentially recreates the Spaces experience of old, and adds a few tricks of its own. That tool is BinaryAge’s $18 TotalSpaces.
Recently, my AirPort network hit a major snag. While my main Base Station continued to function properly, AirPort Utility (on my Mac and iPad) indicated that my three subsidiary AirPort devices had dropped off the network (see image above). Selecting any of the devices in the bottom row resulted in a “Device not found” error. Confirming that these AirPort devices were indeed MIA, none of my wireless devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro) would connect to them. The situation with AirPort Utility on my iPhone was even more disturbing: no AirPort devices showed up at all!
Huh? Everything had been working fine for months. I had made no changes to the AirPort hardware or settings. Why this sudden and unexpected collapse?
One possibility focused on AirPort Utility itself. I had recently updated the application to version 6.3, the version needed to accommodate the new Base Stations with 802.11ac support. However, a software bug seemed more likely to precipitate only a communication failure between AirPort Utility and the AirPort devices, rather than an actual removal of the devices from the network.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Kjeld Sorenson had a nasty shock and doesn’t care to be surprised again. He writes:
I happened to have Disk Utility open the other day and much to my surprise I saw a warning about my Mac’s hard drive—that it had failed something called a SMART test and wasn’t reliable. First, should I replace the drive and secondly, how can I see alerts like this automatically?
S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology and is a scheme built into hard drives, rather than computers. If a drive reports that it’s failed this diagnostic test it indicates that the drive is on its way to giving up the ghost, not that it will seize up in the next couple of minutes. This should allow you plenty of time to back up your data (which you should already have been doing) in preparation for that drive’s eventual demise. Of course, as in your situation, it’s possible that it failed the S.M.A.R.T. examination weeks ago and is that much closer to the grave.
