The Mac Companion: Are You Serious, Iomega?

Posted on November 13, 2011 by romkey

31Fgc+QBNVL. AA300 The Mac Companion: Are You Serious, Iomega?Over the summer, Iomega announced their latest external hard drive, this one targeted at the Macintosh community: the Mac Companion.
The Companion is a very nice looking external hard drive with both USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 ports, as well as a built-in 3 port USB hub, one port of which can run at high current to quickly recharge an iPad. And the disk comes with a formatted HFS+ filesystem (which can be reformatted to whatever other kind of filesystem you might like, of course).

Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Macintosh | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Neil Gaiman/Amanda Palmer Tickets: A Benefit For Vermont Hurricane Irene Flood Relief

Posted on October 21, 2011 by romkey

The Vancouver auction did not sell and has been relisted on ebay at a lower starting price.

Vermont was hit surprisingly hard by Hurricane Irene. The hurricane didn’t cause much direct damage, but the flooding was shocking. The area I live in had two of its major shopping plazas flood, wrecking many stores and putting 500 – 600 people out of work for months while the stores are cleaned and rebuilt. And that’s small compared to the towns which were completely isolated as roads to them were destroyed by the waters, bridges which were washed out and farms which were flooded and completely lost their crops.

ks afp ng live sm Neil Gaiman/Amanda Palmer Tickets: A Benefit For Vermont Hurricane Irene Flood ReliefWhen I ran across the Kickstarter campaign for Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer’s west coast tour, I had the idea to buy the 5 show package and put tickets for 4 of the shows up for auction (yes, I am keeping the Portland tickets). I checked to make sure that would be okay and received permission. I am not a scalper – Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are aware of this effort and have given their permission for me to use the tickets this way.

Continue reading →

Posted in Entertainment | Leave a comment

Tech Note: Cloudbusting

Posted on October 21, 2011 by romkey

My blog runs on a piece of software called WordPress. I love WordPress; it’s well designed, easy to use, easy to maintain. It’s good for serving blogs but it’s also great for creating small simple web sites. I’ve recommended it to a lot of organizations for their web sites, and I’ve helped several of them set those sites up.

That said, WordPress has a reputation for falling over under heavy load. It creates each page on demand, which is very taxing compared to just having the pages sitting there ready to go. This hasn’t been a problem for me given that my site’s not very active but I’m about to do something which (if it’s successful) will bring in a lot of traffic for a short period of time, and I don’t want the site to fall over during that time. I don’t want it to neilwebfail.

Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Software, Wordpress | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Words of Advice Before Upgrading to iOS 5 and iCloud

Posted on October 12, 2011 by romkey

Today is a big day for Apple. The iPhone 4S is shipping and Apple is doing one of its biggest set of software updates ever. Today they’ll be releasing iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. They’ll also be releasing MacOS X 10.7.2, introducing iCloud, and releasing updates for iTunes (out yesterday, actually), iPhoto, Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

iCloud is the glue that binds many of these updates together. iCloud replaces MobileMe (formerly .Mac) and is Apple’s solution to the synchronization problem – your data lives on iCloud and changes are automatically made available to your computers and devices, so you can do some work on your computer and simply find it available to you on your phone or iPad or another computer without having to do any synchronization.

Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Macintosh, Software | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

I Hadn’t Expected It To Be So Dusty

Posted on August 30, 2011 by romkey

Although I hadn’t expected a flood, either. I usually think of hurricanes sitting off the coast and dumping on Cape Cod and Boston (if they ever get that far). I don’t think of them as chewing their way up through Vermont. Of course that’s the perspective of a former Boston resident.

Like so many disasters and crises, the worst effects didn’t actually manifest until after the actual event had ended. Irene had moved on past us but the rivers continued rising.

Continue reading →

Posted in Life | Tagged , , | Leave a comment