Category Archives: Apple

Catherine Uses Synergy+

Program:Synergy+ Purpose:Two Computers, One Keyboard Price:Free (Open source, GPL) Platform:Mac OS X, Windows, Linux How often do you find yourself in front of your two computers, forgetting which mouse belongs to which, transferring files via FTP or USB flash drive, moaning in agony as you save the contents of your clipboard on one computer to [...]
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Notational Velocity and Simplenote Part Two: Making a good thing better

Last week, I wrote about my experiences using Notational Velocity and Simplenote to turn a collection of text files into a quick, searchable, cloud-based notetaking system. Today, I’m going to complain about what’s wrong with it. Now, to be fair, I’m quite pleased with the whole Notational Velocity package. Simplenote’s team are quick to respond to [...]
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Catherine’s Guide to Backups, Part 1

So there I was at Best Buy, finally taking care of that “backups” business.1 Since Apple added their super-convenient Time Machine app to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I’d been meaning to get around to using it. A year later, I bought a simple external USB drive, a Western Digital MyPassport. Easy. Tiny. USB-powered.2 So [...]
Also posted in Catherine, Gadgets, Learning is fun! | Comments closed

A decade in the life of…

January 1, 2000 The Y2K bug does not result in airplanes falling from the sky, stock markets crashing, or nuclear missiles launching on their own. Pundits decry the wasteful spending of billions to ensure nothing significant happened. IT departments worldwide sputter in bewilderment. “But! But!” October, 2000 I come out to a few select friends and [...]
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Blogathon 2009: Catherine’s Safari 4 Review

So I switched to Safari 4 from Firefox recently. The end. Yeah, there’s more, actually. First, the good parts, the ones that were enough to make me give up Firefox: It’s fast. Really, really fast. Pages you visit get indexed in OSX’s Spotlight. It’s like Google Desktop for Firefox, only not totally ridiculous. While Safari doesn’t [...]
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Blogathon 2009: Refueling

Ahh, delicious, delicious food. Courteously donated by Dairy Queen, as it happens. They just delivered it so we’re currently all chowing down. A few people here raised the point earlier that 6am-6am is a pretty difficult schedule to keep, and I definitely agree with that. I usually like to eat lunch 3–4 hours after waking [...]
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Trackballs: A part of our heritage

In the summer of 2007, I learned I had a bit of an RSI problem when a can of Coke I was holding suddenly slipped from my grasp and plummeted to the ground. I couldn’t apply enough pressure with my thumb and fingers to hold it in my hand. One short diagnosis of tennis and golfer’s [...]
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Sickgue: backups are spiffy!

I’m sick. Sure, I’m getting over it now, but it’s been a couple of days. I’m not actually sure what I have, only that it sucks. So far, I’m pretending it wasn’t due to my walking to the pharmacy in the rain the day before I started seeing symptoms. No, that’s crazy talk. Recently, it seems [...]
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Maki Mac Mitt!

Fear not, citizens! To better help me fight crime do my new job, I got a new MacBook Pro for work. It’s pretty shiny. And scratchable, by the looks of things. To protect its finish and maintain a sharp, professional image for meetings, it’s important to always travel with the MacBook secured inside a durable, [...]
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Correct Home/End functionality in Firefox on Mac OSX

How cool is this? Jim Mendenhall at Starry Hope offers some help to us Mac Switchers. Long one of the top Google results for “osx home end”, Jim developed a small app to replace the Mac’s default key behavior with that of every other windowing system ever. (That’s right, nitpickers. Ever.) Unfortunately, it didn’t work [...]
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