As many listeners of our Mac Geek Gab podcast know, I recently purchased a new 2.6GHz 15″ MacBook Pro from Apple. It arrived yesterday, but I really didn’t get a chance to even begin setting it up until today. Honestly, if I wasn’t traveling to Austin, Texas next week, I probably would have waited longer [...]

[UPDATE April 7, 2008 -- The audio and slide-video from this session is now freely available online, as well.] Last month at Macworld Expo, I presented a session entitled, “Running Your Mac Lean, Clean and Mean” where we talked about all sorts of ways to ensure your Mac is running at its best, and what [...]

AOL has announced that February 1, 2008, will mark the end of the Netscape browser. I know many of you probably weren’t around for this, but Netscape was the first product that really acknowledged the fact that home computer users wanted to — and could — easily use the Internet. It wasn’t the first browser [...]

Ever since I installed Mac OS X 10.5/Leopard, I’ve been unable to get iChat logs to appear in my Spotlight results. I used to rely on this quite heavily and it’s been frustrating without it. This morning, I spent a few minutes in Spotlight preferences and realized what happened: Previously, iChat logs were classified as [...]

For now, my Treo 650 works better for me.But we have been tracking the iPhone news over at iPodObserver, and we’ve compiled our iPhone Special Report where you can see all the iPhone-related headlines, all the time. Check it out!

Over at The Mac Observer (and, indeed, at iPodObserver, as well), we’ve begun experimenting with Google’s Custom Search Engine, largely because it’s near impossible for a site the size of ours to implement a search engine that’s any better than what Google can do…. I noticed today that Colin Crawford mentioned that Macworld has done the same thing, for exactly the same reasons.It also seems like they’re having exactly the same problem we are (at least on TMO): Google’s not making the results IFRAME long enough to display all the results and the navigation controls in every instance.

All of my Macs in my home/office here in Durham, New Hampshire are having trouble connecting to Google, in that they can’t connect at all using Firefox or Safari, though my wife’s PowerBook has had success connecting using IE.My linux and Windows machines have no trouble whatsoever, regardless of browser (including lynx).If I connect to a proxy server elsewhere, then Google loads fine on my Mac, indicating to me that, well, it’s not my Macs.This is the wierd one: If I run CrossOver on my MacBook Pro, and then run IE *or* Firefox, Google comes up fine…. the Windows version of Firefox running in CrossOver has no problem, while the Mac version (running on the SAME MACHINE SIMULTANEOUSLY) can’t connect.

Joe Consumer, who has nothing and is looking to get a DVR to go along with his spiffy new plasma screen, is going to sit in his living room and compare this to the one his cable company offers…. And *because* the Comcast box sucks so much, we’re actually considering the $1000 to TiVo just to get the same (basic) functionality but with a much better user interface.

After all, it was 15 years ago yesterday that Tim Berners-Lee posted this to usenet:The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system…. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.

Well, I guess being in Chicago for three days made me miss the fact that Skype sneak-peeked the beta of their next round for the Mac, and even made public (though not promoted) access to the video-capable version of the beta.This thing’s pretty stable, and is *well* worth your time to check out.