Perpendicular storage, who would have thought we needed it? We can remember turning our old Mac IIci’s on their side, and our external drives run upright. Surely that’s perpendicular enough for any man or woman? Read more

Those of us lucky enough to get a new Mac from time to time (hum hum) will be thanking Apple for Time Machine. It takes all the hassle out of setting up a new Mac, a task that used to take days to install, register, configure and upgrade all the applications. As our recent experience found, Time Machine archives are a rich ground for ardent tinkerers who never RTFM. And if they do they don’t believe all they read. Read more

Apple’s products are often derided as over-priced and over-hyped even though real-life comparisons of like-for-like computers would show otherwise. Certainly, Apple’s products are never cheap but there is a way to get them at a considerably lower cost and it doesn’t mean talking to a bloke in the pub.

How does saving 65% off the cost of an 8-core 3.0GHz Mac Pro sound? The usual price would be nearly five grand but it could be could be delivered to you for fifteen hundred quid, complete with Apple’s cast iron guarantee. Maybe you are looking for a laptop or iMac or even an Apple Xserve – all available at huge discounts, ready to ship in 24 hours. As the UPS delivery man said, “Even the boxes look good”.

On the button
The Apple Store web site has a little button called Special Deals hidden in plain view down the right hand side of the screen. Stock changes on a daily basis and includes iPods, iPhones as well as other Apple kit and special offers.

Just to sweeten the deal, there is a very helpful chap at Apple named Gerard McPartlan, who if you ring him on 0800 039 9901 ext 89664, he will do his best to make you a happy shopper before and after your purchase.

The only problem with Apple is they just can’t do tacky. What was the first thing that came to mind when they announced mac.com’s name change to ‘MobileMe’? Mini-Me of course. Unless they were thinking of the Britpop one-hit-wonders Me Me Me or the iTunes track of the same name sporting an ‘Explicit’ warning tag. Read more

In the week following the latest Mac System upgrade to 10.5.3, the next upgrade to 10.5.4 is already under test and rumours populate the Net of the next biggie, Mac OS X 10.6 also currently known as Snow Leopard. The biggest surprise is that 10.6 will drop support for PowerPC processors and for Carbon – both yet unsubstantiated – so it can move to pure 64 bit addressing. Read more

The latest Mac OS X upgrade is available at a Software Update near you. Apart from fixing loads of glitches, it also messes with Time Machine and some upgraders, this one included, have had mixed results after the upgrade. For more details go to the Discussions on Apples Support pages, here. Read more

When the temperature outside starts with a 3 you know you have problems. A single digit, Fahrenheit, or preceded by a minus (as is often the case in Montreal and other under-developed parts of the world) means it is what is technically known as bloody freezing. A single digit after the 3, as in the southern half of the UK this weekend, the correct term is bloody hot. Unless you are measuring in the Rømer scale in which case you will be dead. Read more

We are more likely to get a white Easter in England than Christmas so it’s almost refreshing to pretend to be back at work. The best TV could offer was old films and the so-called family entertainment my kids never wanted to watch when the films were first broadcast. It’s become a tradition to see Bruce Willis growing older, losing more hair and clothes in yet another action movie. He’ll be able to get his elderly person’s bus pass in five years time. Das Boot made submarine life look like living on a 24 hour building site and David Coulthard is starting to resemble Jürgen Prochnow, especially when he doesn’t shave his greying stubble. Read more

We were at my mother-in-law’s recently and needed to look up a map to the hospital I was taking her for an appointment. We grabbed her Vista laptop (as recommended by Windows-centric brother-in-law), connected it to the outside world via modem and tried to dial into Google maps. Read more

According to latest reports, us Southerners prefer moggies to doggies while Northerners are more likely to assume we refer to their affectionate name for benzodiazepine.

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