Scott Gruby’s Blog

The other day I mentioned the Sony Reader for reading stuff on the go. After a little more research and wading through tons of negative comments about Sony’s offering, I came across The iLiad. Similar concept, but may be better executed. It appears to read PDF, XHTML, TXT, etc. as well as having 802.11g built [...]

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I restored my PowerBook’s hard drive to the state it was on Saturday before it crashed using the most excellent SuperDuper!. If you aren’t doing regular backups (daily), then you are asking for trouble. There are 2 kinds of computer users; those that have lost data and those that will.

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I have a pile of stuff to read on my computer’s desktop (technical stuff) that I just haven’t gotten around to reading. I don’t want to print it out and I don’t want to read it on my computer. I never considered a dedicated “eBook” reader, but the Sony Reader device announced at CES looks [...]

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Today on my way to run some errands, I passed by Serra High School and read their fairly new electronic sign. One of the messages on it had the current temperature listed as +266 degrees F. Wow! That is really hot and sure didn’t feel like it. My car’s thermometer indicated it was about 64 [...]

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I managed to replace the hard drive in my PowerBook with a Hitatchi Travelstar 7200 RPM, 80 GB drive. The instructions from www.pbfixit.com were excellent as well as their screw guide which I used to dutifully place and tape all the screws I removed. The drive is now formatted and appears to work. I [...]

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As I had some time to kill today, I decided to go ahead and get a new hard drive for my PowerBook and replace it without waiting until tomorrow. The choices on a Sunday for getting a laptop hard drive are pretty limited, basically only Fry’s Electronics. Fry’s is not my favorite store as their [...]

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One of the worst things that could happen to a computer happened today to me. The hard drive on my PowerBook failed. It started making funny noises yesterday and then today it stopped spinning. Given that I’m a bit paranoid about backups, I said to myself, “this isn’t a problem as my backup is 2 [...]

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Stuffit products have been on my Macs for years and have done a wonderful job of compressing and decompressing. Stuffit Expander shipped with all versions of the Mac up until OS X Tiger. Now that zip is built into the OS and even has extensions for keeping the Mac resource fork (newer applications don’t use [...]

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It amazes me that companies recompile their code to work on the Mac (either using cross platform GUI libraries or trying to make a Mac interface without basically ever using a Mac) and expect Mac users to not be offended when no real effort is put into making the app look like it belongs on [...]

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Yesterday I received a message from the Palm developer program; it looked liked there was nothing in the message, so I poked around and found that it was an HTML formatted email. I’m a bit of a luddite when it comes to HTML email in that I completely oppose it. I go to great lengths [...]

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