I finally got my Dell Mini 9 that had I ordered last week!! Spent a few hours setting it up last night and a couple of hours this morning tweaking it to mimic the functionality of my desktop. In short – this is the best thing ever! (I’m posting this blog entry using Ecto on the Mini 9.)
Category: Tech
I just found out about a feature in Mac OS X that I think is absolutely great — the ability to create encrypted volumes to store confidential data. My father and I needed to exchange some sensitive financial information over the internet recently and we both looked around for a solution to do this securely with email. Of course, much to our confusion/delight, there are a ton of solutions out there. One of the solutions I found was to create an encrypted disk volume — we didn’t use this particular method for our email exchange, but there isn’t saying anything that we could not have.
I’ve been meaning to post this blog entry for some time – but better late than never. In late February, as the kids were getting ready to leave for school in the morning, they mentioned to me that the TV in our Sunroom was not working and it had a blinking red light. I went downstairs sure enough my 42″ Philips Plasma TV (Model: 42PF9631D/37) would not turn on. After the jump I’ll explain how I fixed the problem for under $30.
I just love seeing these types of positives steps in the American Education System (and not just b/c it’s Apple Macbooks) :
Despite the economic turmoil, Maine is expanding its program to provide laptop computers to students.
[From The Associated Press: Maine expanding school laptop program with Apple]
Hopefully they will be able to negotiate a reasonable price for the laptops — and then the associated software/infrastructure improvements to make them usable in a classroom environment. Oh and possibly train any teacher that doesn’t have any computer experience (are there any left? If so, why?) to use the new tools. It’s going to be an expensive undertaking, but it’s good to see at least one government body that has made preparing their students for the new world a priority.
I know that this video has been around, but it doesn’t hurt to promote it a bit more… A colleague of mine sent me this link to a video called “Did You Know?” . Updated version (v.4) that includes some citations and updated data. It’s worth the 10 minutes to view them if you are at all concerned with the future of our students in the US. To be honest, it’s a good video to watch no matter what walk of life you’re in (white collar slug, corporate exec, blue collar worker, etc.) – as you can derive a lot of facts that pertain to you and your competition.
However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that these videos are to promote pro-American nationalism. The videos were not to design for that purpose – but rather to deliver some actual hard facts and ask some serious questions about where the US education system stands. It actually makes me a little sad to see the internet flame wars (which no one ever wins) that are posted in the comments of the YouTube pages of those two videos — a lot of people missed the point of the videos, and were stupid (yeah, I’ll go with ‘stupid’ as a term here) enough to put their thoughts down in writing.
-JT
I was going to write about this on my blog as I just downloaded the application today… but I I like the way The Apple Blog put it:
That sound you heard across the Internet late Tuesday night was every tech blogger on the planet clicking on iTunes to download the new Kindle for iPhone app. This free app lets you read any of the hundreds of thousands of books that are available in Amazon’s Kindle Store. The Kindle for iPhone boasts the following features…
The only two cents I have to add is that I connected both my wife’s 3G and my 2G iPhones to the same Amazon account and we can now share any online purchases. I’ve already purchased Divine Justice by David Baldacci.
-JT
You must be logged in to post a comment.