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Microsoft Love — Finally

I’m totally shocked and amazed by some of Microsoft’s latest offerings. If you are a Mac user, do yourself a favor and check out some of the Microsoft offerings. They have been quietly been making advances on a number of fronts:

Windows Live Office -> Windows SkyDrive: I signed up for the Windows Live Office when it first came out because I was testing all sorts of cloud based apps at the time. Microsoft has recently decided (for better or worse) to closed out Live Office and migrating all accounts to SkyDrive. While there seems to be some complaints online about this move, for the limited uses I have found for Live Office, I’m just happy about going from 5GB of free disk space to 25GB!!

Office 2011 for Mac: OMG – that pretty sums it up. Awesome features, very similar to Office 2010 on PC (which is actually a good thing for those of us who have to use PCs at work.) Connects to SkyDrive and SharePoint! I’m still playing with it and I’m pretty impressed so far with the overall functionality. I’ve delved into a little VBA coding and i’m trying to decide if I should try out the Outlook client. The only negative to adding this software to my machine – it doesn’t have anything to do with the product itself, but more my comfort level — I re-installed ClamXAV. Yeah, I’ve been burned too many times in the PC world. Now with this product (with VBA) being on the Mac, time to start thinking about security again.

Silverlight 4.0: Okay – in the past this was always a pain to install. However, I’d like to personally thank the install wizards for finally changing the install script to:

`/usr/sbin/system_profiler SPHardwareDataType -xml | grep “PowerPC”`;

Yup.. that’s right. It’s not looking for Intel chips anymore. It’s looking for PowerPC chip before erring out. Latest version installed without any hacking. Woohoo!

-JT

Tags Mac, Reviews, Tech

General

I am NOT a camper ….Day 3

Post author By JT
Post date August 17, 2010
No Comments on I am NOT a camper ….Day 3

DId you know it rains in southern Florida almost every day? Generally there’s a small shower that passes through on it’s way to more important places. This all well and good as the rain does bring down the temperature and the humidity – at least for a while. What we experienced yesterday was nothing like those nice gentle showers. Ever since we crossed into the state, every afternoon rain shower was more akin to a monsoon with pelting, hurting rain than a gentle shower. Yesterday’s afternoon shower was the worst yet and it decided to stick around for awhile.

Tags Life2.

General

I am NOT a camper….Day 2

Why, oh why, do campsites insist on installing an oscillating ceiling fan beneath a light in a bathroom? Random flashbacks of 70s slasher flicks went through my head as I prepared for the morning at the KOA campsite in Sugarloaf Key, Fl. I am not a camper, clearly. The wife decided with local friends in the Florida area to go on a week camping trip for the family summer vacation this year. “Sure! Why not go h.elp clean up the gulf from the oil spill?” wasn’t the appropriate response, so I conceded. Besides Life 2.0 (more about that in another article) was my idea and I better make good on it. Of course, none of this was going through my head at 7am standing at the urinal as a large burly man came into the bathroom. No. I’m thinking this is where I’m going to die.

Tags Life2.

General

Great article on Dell’s past

Post author By JT
Post date June 29, 2010
No Comments on Great article on Dell’s past

Now this was an eye-opener for me. At one time I thought Dell could do no wrong. Even now, if I hadn’t read the article, I would have recommended one of their machines. Now? I’ll be even more eager to push Macs. Want a gaming rig? buy an xbox… just kidding – build it. Anyway, great article:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/In-FaultyComputer-Suit-Window-nytimes-2375403564.html?x=0

Mac Mac Goodness Tech Tip

Sharing via iTunes Playlists

Post author By JT
Post date June 28, 2010
1 Comment on Sharing via iTunes Playlists

Now that I’ve pretty much ended my quest for a great calendaring solution for the family, I’ve turn my attention to sharing our media. Like a lot of families, I have a ton of music, pictures, and video scattered acrossed a number of machines. I’ve corralled a lot of this data to one SAMBA share on my Ubuntu server. This is good – as now I have one central place for all data that my family can now avoid on purpose. “What server?”, “uh, where can I find that movie/song/pic?”, etc. No matter, I will win them over soon (well… eventually.)

In any event, my wife asked me last night to put some new songs on her iPhone as all she has is older music – her musice dated back to circa 2009. Biting back the first sarcastic comment that came to mind (“You can find it on the server..”), I said sure. This little exercise was going to eat through my evening. Just because everything is in one location, everyone has their own iTunes database and none of them are up to date with the contents of collection. I thought I would have to blow away her iTunes database and import everything in the library again, or I would have to at least manually add every new song. However, I found a neat little procedure that save a ton of time and thought I would share it.

Tags iTunes, Mac, Mac Goodness, Tech, Tip