Everything

Don’t Bother With Multiple Colored iPhone and Exchange Calendars

July 22, 2008 by Stephen 13 Comments

Update: Things have really changed regarding calendars in iPhone OS 3.0! They are much easier to understand, you can have multiple sources, including iTunes and over-the-air exchange, CalDAV, and ICS. Almost everything I complained about in this 2008 article has been fixed in OS 3.0! One of the things that surprised me about iPhone 2.0 […]

My New All-Apple Feed

July 22, 2008 by Stephen Leave a Comment

With all the Apple-related content popping up on this blog, I decided to add an Apple-only feed to the mix. Now, if you’d like to follow my adventures with the Mac, iPhone, and other Apple junk, and don’t care about all the enterprise storage and general home computing stuff, you can subscribe to just the […]

A Few iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Gotchas

July 21, 2008 by Stephen 62 Comments

I’ve been running OS 2.0 on my (first-generation) iPhone for a week and a half now, and as I mentioned before, Exchange ActiveSync push email, calendaring, and contacts was one of the main things Iwas looking for when I upgraded. That article on setting up ActiveSync has since become my top blog post by far, pulling in literally thousands of hits per day, so I must not be alone in wanting this functionality.

Which Storage Protocol For VMware?

July 18, 2008 by Stephen Leave a Comment

I had two great storage virtualization seminars this week, in New York and Philadelphia. As usual, audience participation was key, and interest in VMware and Hyper-V remains high. One of the main questions I always get is which protocol one should use for VMware storage. My recommendation remains that the answer is an organizational one […]

Tuning Time Machine

July 12, 2008 by Stephen 2 Comments

I’ve been very pleased by Apple’s integrated backup application in OS X, Time Machine. It cleverly removes many of the barriers to backup, and makes restore both simple and fun. But I’ve noticed that it’s not quite perfect out of the box. Two default settings in particular bother me: It is set to back up everything, including OS files and caches, and spotlight needlessly indexes your Time Machine drive. Luckily, both are easy fixes.

« Previous Page

The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!

The third-generation iPad Pro is a great machine but also a bellwether of change at Apple. It will be very hard for the rest of the mobile and client computing industry to keep up with this kind of progress!

Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

It’s an easy decision: Get a free ProtonMail account and use that as your verification address for important financial and social media accounts. Keep using whatever email account you like for regular communication, but don’t mix security and communication!

Review: Blue Snowball USB Microphone

March 31, 2010

I’ve really jumped into recording podcasts, and am also an avid audio and video conference user. Wanting better sound, I upgraded my Logitech microphone to the highly-regarded Blue Microphones Snowball desktop USB microphone. Here are my initial thoughts.

A Fairy Tale of Two Storage Protocols

September 23, 2014

It’s clear how this fairy tale ends. So many companies are using “S3 plus” as their standard interface, and even inside their solutions, that it’s safe to say it’s won the cloud storage API battle. But S3 isn’t a finalized spec – the industry will extend and improve it over the coming years. Soon we’ll have a cloud storage standard based on S3, just like we have a LAN file services standard based on CIFS.

Regarding My Symbolic Links and Good Reads

April 16, 2015

I’ve been told that my shares drive traffic to the blogs I read. I’m thrilled that I can share great writing with you in this way, and I hope you find it valuable! But just in case you don’t, I hope you’ll take advantage of the fact that I filter these posts for you into “Symbolic Links” and “Good Reads” so you’ll find it easier to ignore them.

Microsoft’s Big Chance to Change

August 23, 2013

It takes a truly-remarkable leader to be willing to kill his old golden geese to make room for a new one; so far, only Apple and Amazon seem willing to forgo continuity in the name of profitable destruction. But new corporate leadership at Microsoft might un-stick the company and awaken the once-innovative Redmond powerhouse. The retirement of Steve Ballmer is welcome news.

Instapaper for iPad and iPhone Enhances My Web World

June 1, 2010

One of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps is Instapaper. Like the iPad itself, Instapaper seems almost foolishly simple and derivative until you experience it. Then it becomes something else entirely: A product so useful you may ask yourself “how did I ever get along without this?”

Co-Processors, GPGPU, and Heterogeneous Computing

June 26, 2017

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about microprocessors, from the many-core CPUs that AMD and Intel introduced recently to the massively scalable GPGPU processing that’s taking machine learning by storm. After years of consolidation on commodity x86 CPUs, it seems that the computing paradigm is turning again to specialized offload processors. This trend towards heterogeneous computing will change the face of hardware, from mobile devices to the datacenter.

Are You a Hypervisor Hugger or a Storage Stalwart?

November 14, 2011

The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the array? Most administrators are already lining up on one side or the other, unintentionally casting their vote while the rest flounder. But the storage industry must wake up and embrace the divide.

The Best Mac OS X Terminal Font: Glass TTY VT220

October 6, 2015

More than five years ago, I blogged about a “stupidly cool” terminal font. Now that Mac OS X isn’t a big cat anymore, I figured it was time to repeat that: If you’re an old-school computer nerd like me, Glass TTY VT220 is the coolest terminal font for Mac OS X!