At home, we were missing the ability to print from our iPad or iPhones. While I'm not an OS zealot (anymore), I did upgrade to an iPhone last month, and have had an iPad for a while now. They're very useful for casual computing, checking email, browsing. But if we needed to print something, it was a hassle to fire up a laptop or desktop computer to use our networked printer.

There are a lot of cases where having one computer just isn't enough. If you're a web developer or webmaster, you'll want to view your website in more than one browser. If you're a PHP programmer, you may be itching to check out the new 5.3 release and test your web applications on it. Using virtualization, you can set up self-contained instances of any Operating System configured to your heart's content on your computer.

For a while now, digital cameras have been able to record movies along with just taking photographs.  Camera vendors use different video codecs to compress and save the video you take.  Common codecs include one of Apple's quicktime codecs (usually saved as a .mov file) and a variety of codecs with the .avi extension.  AVI files are commonly associated with Windows Media Player.  To make the situation more confusing, movies encoded with the popular DivX codec might be saved by your camera as a.

You might think that apple is poking fun at windows in this latest Mac advertisement, but you'd be fooling yourself.  But judging by the comments in Very Severe Hole" in Vista UAC Design, its really a documentary, not an ad.  What's the giant security hole - oh yeah - any installer automatically runs with administrator privileges, any installer.  Did it reall

I stayed up way too late last night researching a potential desktop replacement. I'm torn between a DIY AMD64 PC vs an Apple. Up front, the biggest decider will be price, as I want to keep the price at or below $1,000. That rules out iMac's and MacPros, leaving the Mac Mini as my choice from Apple. That fits nicely with my plans to keep my current LCD displays, and keyboard and mouse. The only other real requirement, is that World of Warcraft has to run nicely on it.

Jason says that the most interesting announcement from Apple today was the inclusion of a calendar server based on iCal. As Sandy points out in Jason's comments, Apple will also make the code available under the Open Source Apache 2.0 license.

Lots of good numbers in today's reuters story about Apple profits. I want to focus your brian on the fact that Apple;s share of the US notebook market had "doubled to 12 percent" in the last half of 2005. This means that 1 in 9 new laptops out there is not running Windows. More importantly, 1 in 9 new laptops is not running Internet Explorer.

Mossberg answers a question in his mailbox column today, including the security threat posed by viruses to Apple's computers (unless you choose to run Windows on it, then you're just as vulnerable).  His assessment also applies to computers running Linux.  The common misconception is that virus writers don't target these platforms because they are not very popular.  While this is true to an extent, it's a disingenous argument because it ignores the fact that Unix-like systems (Max OS X is based on BSD) it's much

Preach it Patty!

Sandy's use of MacSFTP to connect to our server, for some unknown reason, was causing a PAM authentication failure - even though it would log him in fine.  Since I installed fail2ban to protect the server against SSH script-kiddie attacks, he got banned a couple times since a line that said "Authentication failure" popped into the log everytime MacSFTP connected to the server.  He's switched to fugu, which didn't cause an authentication error in the logfile.