Well, not sure this applies to anyone in the world except me, but it sure lead a bunch of ftp gurus on a wild-goose chase until by brute force I discovered the problem’s solution: the problem: some, but not all, ftp clients (including Apple’s own finder built-in !!!) failed to connect to ftp sites. The […]

Quick tip for Apple’s Mail software: you can have multiple “from” easily – just enter them in the account setup “from:” separated by commas, like this: tracy@someplace.com,  tracy@elsewhere.net, tracy@overthehill.org Doing so will create a popup menu below your “Subject:” line, and allow you to choose which one to use. Handy, for example, when some services […]

Hi folks

I was plagued by this suddenly a few days ago, and now I think I’ve figured it out. It began when I signed into myEbay and got: “There was an error in your input. Please go back and ensure that all fields are properly filled in.” Nothing I could do, over several days, including calling […]

Caveat: I’ve not got proof of what I’m about to say, but the circumstantials are reasonable. YMMV.

Of course, Mail has some settings built-in, via a popup menu in the Mail Preferences. But what if checking for new mail every minute is too fast, and every 5 minutes is too slow? Well, it’s just a plist entry: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist The entry you’re looking for is “Poll Time” and you enter the number of […]

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.) […]