If you live in a slightly older home, such as mine, you occasionally might want to know which circuit breaker or fuse controls a particular outlet. Besides making it more convenient to disable the power for repairs, some of us have to deal with easily overloaded circuits that weren’t meant for all of the modern [...]

Show me a musician and I’ll show you someone who has at least a three foot stack of sheet music squirreled away somewhere. My situation is worse—both my wife and I are musicians, to one degree or another. Throw in the fact that she is a music teacher and you can imagine just how many [...]

It so happens that my employer has made a most welcome decision to replace the aging creaky old Novell GroupWise mail software with Microsoft Outlook, joining the rest of the modern corporate world. Now, there is little love in my heart for GroupWise, but it does have one feature that the new Outlook configuration will [...]

One of my pet peeves in software is the black-box application that calmly sucks in all of your files and does everything for you, until the day you want to swich apps. This is the iTunes model, followed by many other products. I am of the opinion that rather than allowing an application to shuffle [...]

It’s too comical to be true. A few months back, when I wrote an article warning about inadequate attempts at sanitizing PDF documents, I thought that any organization serious about censoring documents would not make such a basic error. Especially not a government agency, after the military had been caught by this pitfall. Apparently this [...]

A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker sent me a PDF document to look at. He said that he was having trouble copying and pasting from the document and was scratching his head about why this particular PDF would have such issues. As it would turn out, there were several thousand other documents on a [...]

In my evenings, I sometimes find myself performing the role of “Resident Geek” at my nephew’s school, tending to network issues, computer problems, and my favorite, “The Internet is down!” Over the past couple of years I have considered several different approaches for keeping a grip on which computers had which service patch, which router [...]

Thanks to its face-recognition tool, iPhoto ’09 can now put names to the faces in your photographs, letting you quickly sift through your library based on content rather than how photos are arranged. But putting this feature to work requires some effort on your part. A few months back I received my copy of iLife [...]

23 tips for getting organized, streamlining your online time, managing your media and more In this Computerworld article, the writer gives several great tips on getting your geeky side in order. I’m happy to note that procurement of a Fujitsu ScanSnap and scanning your life to PDF made number 4 on his list. Other useful [...]

“How a lifestyle experiment and a disaster made me realize the value of turning atoms into bits” — Mike Elgin A couple of months back, Mike Elgin of Computerworld posted an article on his foray into the paperless world: Paperless office? Ha! How about a paperless life? In this followup article, he considers how lifestyle changes and [...]