Category Archives: Systems

Hudzee

Or is it Hudzee? A friend of mine is trying his hand at product creation. Based on his 15+ years of systems experience in the world of commercial video production he’s determined a burgeoning need for storage storage: a case for your hard drives. See, hard drives have become so cheap that they’re actually the [...]

Workflow Design

I’ve long described my professional self as someone who designs workflows. And as I design more of these workflows, I find myself more and more creating — and obsessing over — the interfaces to them. I have no formal training in the field of interface design, but I find it fascinating and I’m definitely an [...]

Extending an Airport Network

UPDATE: It looks like there’s actually a better way to extend an Airport network than the one I’ve outlined in this article. A few people have written in to tell me that they’ve had great success using the configuration “wizard” available in the Airport Express Utility. I haven’t tried using this myself, but it does [...]

Google’s Select All Conversations

In my ongoing adventures to move all my mail to Gmail there have been a few snags. One of them is the fact that Gmail only sucks down POP mail, which one of my many numerous email hosts does not support. The other problem has been one of management. Gmail is becoming the de facto [...]

The Case of the Changing Case

Try copying two items whose names match in every way except case from a local drive to another local drive in the Mac OS X Finder and you’ll see something like this: This makes plenty of sense. The Finder (actually, the filesystem on which the Finder resides, in this case HFS+) is not case-sensitive by [...]

Taking My Own Medicine

I’ve long extolled the virtues of network-based home accounts, at least in some situations. And, of course, I’ve written copiously on how to implement such a thing in a lab setting. What I’ve never really done in any meaningful way, or for any length of time, is to use network home accounts myself. Until now. [...]

Final Cut Studio Release Notes

Apple just released an update to the Pro Apps suite of applications. TUAW erroneously mentions that, “No specific details were provided about what the update improved…” but, in fact, full release notes for the past four Pro Apps updates are available by clicking the “Release Notes” link in Software Update. Which will take you to [...]

Too Many Computers

That title’s not meant as a complaint. It’s just that I’ve noticed that over the years I’ve tended to use fewer and fewer system add-ons and customizations than I once did. And I realize that it’s because I use so many different computers. There used to be a time when I would customize the hell [...]

Abandonment Issues

Because of the recent departure of Apple’s Senior VP of Enterprise Sales, John C. Welch claims that “the Mac IT crowd” is wondering if Apple is abandoning the Enterprise. He then goes on to say that this depends on whether or not you thought “Apple was, or wanted to be, an ‘enterprise’ company.” Um… No [...]

Just Open It

One of the new security measures in Leopard is a confirmation dialog that pops up anytime you attempt to open a file or executable bundle that was downloaded from the internet. You may have seen this dialog after downloading and launching a new application, for instance. It looks something like this: Some have hailed this [...]