Archive for the ‘tech’ Category
Building a Customized MS Office 2007 Install CD
Over the past month I’ve done 3 or 4 installations of Microsoft Office 2007 on different machines and have become increasingly frustrated with all of the tedious, manual steps that are required:
Enter 25-digit product key
De-select all of the various applications and options that I don’t want installed
Use Microsoft Update to download/install Office Service [...]
iPhone 3.0 OS and WiFi Security
I love my iPod Touch, but it hasn’t done any favors for my network security. Before I had the Touch, my home wireless network was secured with the WPA2 protocol and a completely random 64-character security key. Overkill? Perhaps. But I’ve got a healthy amount of paranoia when it comes to the security of my [...]
The Ultimate Gmail Browser
I’ve talked before about site-specific browsers (SSBs) and even mentioned that I’ve become a big fan of the Fluid SSB on the Mac. I’ve got SSBs for all sorts of applications (Google Reader, Pandora, etc.) but the one that I spend the most time in is my Gmail SSB.
I decided to devote some time this [...]
Backing It Up – Everything Else
I’m going to take a little break from my recent Macintosh gushing to finish my Backing It Up series of posts. Previously, I discussed the use of Flickr as a way to backup of your photo collection and Gmail as your email backup. This time around I want to discuss a backup strategy for all [...]
The Switch, Part 2: Applications
In my last post I talked about my decision to trade in my primary PC for a new Mac Mini. When I first started kicking around the idea of making the switch I immediately started to worry about replacing the core library of software that I use on a daily basis. Having worked on the [...]
The Switch
After dabbling in the Mac world for the past couple of years, I decided last week to really make the switch. For a long time now, I’ve been building my own PCs — lovingly assembled from well-researched, hand-picked components and upgraded on a fairly regular basis. These machines always served me well, but over the [...]
Outlook Calendar Syncing to iPhone via Google
One thing I’ve been meaning to do for awhile is to get my Outlook calendar synched with my iPhone (actually it’s an iPod Touch, but the distinction isn’t important here). The company I work for uses a fairly standard combination of MS Outlook and Exchange for email and calendaring. That works fine when I’m sitting [...]
VirtualBox
In my last post about virtual machines I talked a little about the two virtualization solutions that I’ve played with on Windows: Microsoft’s VirtualPC and VMware’s VMware Workstation. Shortly after that post, I came across another virtualization package that nicely bridges the gap between Microsoft’s free-but-feature-poor solution and VMware’s feature-rich-but-not-free solution. The new contender [...]
Virtual Machines: Application Sandbox
I received an e-mail from my auto insurance agent yesterday containing some forms that I needed to print, sign and return to her. The forms came attached to the message as a multi-page TIFF image (something I’d never seen before). I needed to edit some of the pages before I printed them but none of [...]
Home Office – Revisited
After having my home office featured on Lifehacker this morning, I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about my set-up. I’ve been following the comments left on LH as well as Flickr and my own blog and wanted to post a quick entry to address some of the common questions:
In the city of San Diego [...]