I ran across this a while back: http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/12/17/toshiba.512gb.ssd/ …in which the author breathlessly proclaims: “Longevity is also a focus with about one million hours (114 years) between failures thanks to reduced wear on potentially short-lived memory cells.” Wrong. I often get asked about MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) and it’s amazing how many “industry people” […]

3 years, on average. OK, if it’s warranted by the manufacturer to last three years, it should last three years. If it’s warranted for 5, it should last 5. You can add maybe as much as a year if you never turn it off, but remember, the warrantee is only as long as it is. […]

Most people understandably don’t have a clue about how a hard drive stores information, and therefore don’t have a clue about what it takes to repair it when something goes wrong. Think of a hard drive like a book. There is a table of contents which points at the chapters. Let’s say that chapter 2 […]

My own solution to too much documentation (ie instruction manuals, reference files, PDFs and so on) is FoxTrot Pro. (There is also a less expensive personal edition, and an upgrade path.) I’ve been around the block on this (Spotlight; HoudahSpot; SOHO Notes; Devon Think Pro; Yojimbo; Shove Box; Eagle Filer… and probably several I forgot.) […]

Here’s my setup: cable modem goes to standalone firewall, which goes to gigabit switch. Plugged into the switch are my wifi unit, as an access point, and my main mac. My wifi iPod has a static IP address. iPod works just fine to access the internet and news sites, etc. Now, there are also a […]

Simple: game changer, if the software arrives.

How TimeMachine works in simple terms, and why you should NEVER….go into it and start deleting files!!! Someone just asked me “how do I delete files from my TimeMachine drive to make more room?” The answer is, you don’t. YOU don’t do anything – TM does it. The issue is that if you go willy-nilly […]

Well, I discovered 64 gigs of worthless information on my hard drive today… and I’m passing the discovery along just in case it applies to you. Re: TechTool Pro Directory Backup – it hangs around forever. TechTool Pro offers any number of features, one of which is Directory Backup. It uses this to help recover […]

For some people with eyesight problems the menus and other User Interface (UI) presentation is too small to see in comfort. Apple’s “public” solution to this is via the System Prefs, Universal Access and Zoom. But that isn’t very appealing, since it just enlarges all the pixels, making everything blocky. They have had a far […]

If you’ve updated to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) then you’ve likely noticed that the binding between documents and the applications that created them is frequently broken. That is, create a document in BBEdit and save it to the desktop. Now double-click that document. It may open in Safari, in Textedit, in Word, or, if you’re lucky […]