Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Finding an alternative to blogger

Movable Type

Movable type now owns TypePad, Movable Type and LiveJournal. I'm looking first at these as I try to figure out how to replace Blogger. I'm also looking at OS X clients and seeing which services they tend to support.

Dark side of Apple: why you shouldn't bother with AppleCare

MacInTouch Home Page

More on Apple's increasingly dismal customer service -- this time it's their 'bad RAM' policy. At this rate they'll rival SONY.

The bottom line is that it may be preferabel to work with a non-Apple Apple authorized service center. Instead of paying for AppleCare, look for a credit card insurance program and look for a private service center to work with.
I run an Apple Authorized service center, and on occasion, we need to send laptops into Apple for various reasons where they will not allow us to do the repair, or it is not cost effective for us to do the repair on our own.

I can verify the fact that if non-Apple RAM is installed in a machine, it is Apple policy to pull the RAM and send it back with a nasty note. This happens 100% of the time.

In many cases, they pull the memory, send the unit back to us, and the problem has not even been addressed. The most insane case was a PowerBook G4 that had a broken hinge. You guessed it, bad RAM caused the problem. It is now policy to remove non Apple RAM before sending any unit to Apple for service.

Outlook: Gregorian vs. Lunar - the rematch

Weirdest error message of the year, from Microsoft Outlook 2003

Cannot import vCalendar file.

This error can appear if you have attempted to save a recurring Lunar appointment in iCalendar format.
To avoid this error, set the appointment option to Gregorian instead of Lunar.
More information about this error message online.
Wow.

How a firewall works

MacDevCenter.com: Exploring the Mac OS X Firewall

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Ejecting a stuck CD in OS X

OSXFAQ - Technical News and Support for Mac OS X

There are several odd OS X weaknesses. One of them is trouble ejecting CDs or DVDs. In some states, esp. with fast user switching, a CD fails to mount and it cannot be ejected through standard means. The CD is "stuck" in limbo.

This page has a number of tricks. The one that recently worked for me was to fire up Disk Utility. There, and only there, I could see the CD. Then I was able to select it and eject it.

StickyBrain

StickyBrain is a pretty active OS X personal information manager. I'm interested because it syncs with Palm, so it might work with my Samsung i600 phone. I also read on Macintouch that it supports some kind of iPhoto browsing. I'll update this post if I try it out.