My friends, I am the GADGET DAD!

Charlie White and I are putting the final touches on a book about blogging for Focal Press. Why? Because we’re bloggers, that’s why. Watch this space.

I’ve been doing some searches for OS X tracking apps in case of theft and I came up with the most popular, an app called Adeona. Sadly, it’s been down since 2009 and the status hasn’t changed so I’m using the Prey Project, which seems far superior. The app runs every 20 minutes and keeps an eye on everything including your webcam, running programs, and nearby hotspots. Once it’s set as missing, it shuts the laptop down and starts reporting its location. Very cool stuff.

I still love VisualHub for the Mac and I just lost my copy when I reinstalled OS X on a clean disk. My attempts to find other transcoders were sadmaking so I decided to mirror the software here for you.

You can download a copy here for as long as it lasts.

UPDATE – Scratch that. Try Media Converter. It’s free, open source, and still supported.

Go into Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location "~/Path/To/New/Location/"

killall SystemUIServer

Change the path, obviously. I always forget this so maybe you and I both will be helped by it.

This came from a nice lady who needs to find better friends. She read this article and then sent me this note:

Hello,

I just read your article “Storing computer data in the ‘cloud’. Here’s a naive question: When you say that it’s a celestial hard drive, a storage medium that exists solely in the electronic ether, do you mean that the information is just stored in the air and not in anything that one could touch or feel?

Thanks.

Lynne

I wrote:

oh wow. No, not at all. It’s stored on hard drives. Although I’d love to see whatever you’re thinking about.

JB

She wrote back:

Hi John,
Thanks for your prompt response. A friend who is much more tech savvy than I am said that our data was just electrical waves and was stored in the atmosphere and was somewhat like radio waves, etc. I was skeptical but when I read your article and you mentioned “electronic ether” I wondered if she was right. That’s how some of those in their 70’s interpret articles when they are much beyond our scope. Thanks for the clarification. I’ll tell her that the info is not stored in the vapor of the clouds in the sky.
Lynne
(A senior citizen. Some places consider anyone over 55 a senior but I’m 21 years past that!)

The Logitech K800 illuminated keyboard is pretty cool but it has a weird Alt/Windows key behavior that is impervious to changes in the standard Keyboard preferences pane. I downloaded DoubleCommand to simply swap the keys more permanently and it’s been working fine.

Being that I’m a clever girl and decided I liked the “feel” of the Windows key better than the flat feel of the Alt key, I swapped those physically on the keyboard.

What fun! I got to hang with Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmor, Andrew Keen, and Kevin Marks and talk about entertainment media and the future of media.

So Civ V for Mac just dropped last week and I bought it thinking that hey, why don’t I play a little Civ V now and again on my Mac? Sadly, the version made available to the general public apparently does not work a lick and freezes during cinematics. It’s apparently a problem with 10.6.5 and one of the ways to kind of fix it is to hold down command when you start the game to run it in windowed mode. There are also some goofy suggestions to run the PC version under Parallels. But I paid for the Mac version, people. GOSH!