Technocrank

Well, this is weird.  A recent bug in the OSX 10.5 Unit Convertor Dashboard Widget which some believe was introduced by the Safari 4 beta has caused millions of dollars to go missing.  Okay, not really.  Just me thinking I was losing my mind when trying to convert currencies.

The fix has been documented on Mac OSX Hints.

Google‘s CEO Eric Schmidt is on record here and here saying that Twitter is a “sort of poor man’s email”.  I respectfully disagree.

Twitter is email lite.  Twitter is the icing of email’s cake without the heavy filling.  Twitter is the top of the muffin.  Twitter is the sex without the wet spot (was that too much?).

Basically, Twitter is email – except without the Body of the email.  It’s all Subject line.  You don’t even have to specify the recipient.  Ever wanted to send a message to somebody (or everybody) without specifying anybody and didn’t really want to say anything other than “I made it home”?  Twitter is perfect for this.

Picture this:


From: Crankie Tech <dont@spam.me>
To: Everyone I Know <*@internet*.*>
Subject: I Made It Home
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 17:08:27

Well, I made it home.  That is all.

Sincerely,
Me

It’s short, but it’s easily 700 bytes longer than it needs to be, not including firing up the email client or web client, blah blah blah.  With Twitter, on a single data-light web page you get:

I am home.

Or occasionally:

Twitter also relieves you of having to fish the odd spam out of your Inbox because, well, honestly, it’s all spam.  However, it’s spam from people you know – which makes it only slightly less annoying because you asked for it.

Continued from How Apple Enriches My Life…

So no less than 24 hours later, I’m called by the Apple Store, Regent Street, and informed that the replacement optical drive has arrived and is awaiting my return to have it put in.  I was told that if I didn’t think I could make it in the requisite 7 days I could just call and tell them when I could and they’d hold the part.

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Geist reports that Rogers seems to have contradicting standpoints when referring to its smart/dumb pipe status. Actually, their smart pipe is also a dumb pipe.

I was having problems transferring files from one external USB drive to another. They were both attached via a powered USB hub. I tried running TechTool Pro on the drive I suspected with having a problem but it kept hanging.

The system.log showed this whenever it happened:

AppleUSBEHCI[0x6dfc000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 0xfa, timing out! 

I finally switched cables and removed it from the hub and plugged it directly into the computer. Seems to work fine now…but I should check it with the old cable again…