I've been using the new OSX 10.7 "Lion" for about 12 hours, and there's one feature that really busts my balls. Scroll bars still work the way they always did. Move it up, the window goes down. Move it down, the window goes up. But the default behavior for mouse wheels and two-finger scrolling is reversed ( Read more... )

In a previous post I was discouraged that the iPod Nano was getting "iPhone-ified". I wrote:

I think Apple is going too far with this iPhone thing. The original was and still is a great product. But then they made the iPad - which still just seems like an iPhone for clowns - and now they've made the Nano into an iPhone for dwarves. I don't ( Read more... )

So Apple announced their new OS on Monday and I'm a little disappointed because it looks like the two most exciting features have been dropped.

They've dropped ZFS support. I've been using ZFS at home for about a year and it's one of the most groundbreaking new technologies I've seen in the last few years. It's bulletproof no-fdisk-required stable ( Read more... )

Through old techniques I've time-traveled to this Friday and obtained an early copy of OSX 10.5. After using it for a few days here are my impressions, presented in no particular order ( Read more... )

I suffered some pretty nasty data loss on my motorcycle trip last week. Even more unfortunately this isn't the first time it's happened that an unscheduled reboot has wiped files from my FileVault home directory. While HFS+ is journaled to prevent such data loss it appears that somewhere in the "HFS+ on an encrypted filesystem on a volume that ( Read more... )

I had a surprising pleasant surprise last night. Toitoi and Makibe are visiting from Japan, but Toitoi didn't bring a computer to check her email. I've got a spare MacBook after picking up my black one, so I added an account for her and put it in their room ( Read more... )

I'm posting this from the Windows Firefox browswer, running on my Macbook inside CrossOver, a Wine port for OSX and Linux. The advantage over parallels or vmware is that you don't need to buy a Windows license or run a virtual machine:


( Read more... )

Earlier this month a company called SecureWorks announced at BlackHat that they could hack a MacBook remotely. I announced that their story seemed a little fishy because they used a third party card whose drivers did not exist for OSX, because they wouldn't demonstrate the hack in person, and because their excuses for their behavior didn't make ( Read more... )

Among the new OSX 10.5 features is one absolute hands-down winner: iChat screen sharing. If this works like I think it does it'll cut down on the time required to answer my parents' weekly maintenance/explanation calls to my parents by 90%.

"Can you connect to your mail server? Well, what happens when you click on the 'get mail' button? No, ( Read more... )

A while ago I'd heard a rumor that the next version of OSX might use ZFS. (ZFS is a disk format. Other disk formats include HFS+ (OSX), NTFS/FAT (Windows), or EXT2/EXT3/ReiserFS (Linux). ZFS lets you do fancy things like pool disks and verify data integrity not to mention store very, very large files.)

I'm wondering whether ZFS's snapshot ( Read more... )