Archive for October, 2006

Safari Alternatives: Flock

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

Well my brief browser affair with Camino has ended. It was great while it lasted, but the lack of a built in spell checker was really starting to annoy me. So a few weeks ago I downloaded Flock and for the moment, couldn’t be happier! Flock is billed as a social web browser and as such has built in photo (flickr) service, favorites (del.icio.us) sharing, and blog (wordpress, etc) posting capabilities. But what I really like about Flock is it’s built in RSS news reader/aggregator which presents all your feeds in a very visual newspaper layout.

If I had a rating system, Flock would receive 5/5 ;) Flock is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Flock

Posted in Apple, Linux, Mac, Microsoft, Software, Windows | 7 Comments »

MINI International Magazine

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

I received an email last week from the publisher of MINI International Magazine in Germany. They received my subscription payment! I’m all set for a two year subscription.

While not an earth shattering event, especially for those living in Europe, this wasn’t an easy magazine to subscribe to. Let me rephrase that. Subscribing was easy, sending in my payment proved otherwise. The publishers of do not accept payment via credit card. They only take transfers or bank drafts. So my eight issue subscription totaled about $60; €16 per year and $20 for the euro bank draft from my local Amex travel office.

It’s all worth it though. The magazine is a great read with terrific content and layout. Each issue also includes a CD with music and other media on it. Oh, I should mention, you can request a free copy.

MINI International

Posted in MINI | 2 Comments »

Mac OS X 10.4.8 Woes

Monday, October 2nd, 2006

I installed the 10.4.8 delta update over the weekend and now my MBP no longer asks for a password when waking from sleep or screen saver.

Doing a quick search online suggested removing some preferences. So I removed these files:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.plist
~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.screensaver.*

That didn’t work. I also tried Disk Utility to repair any permission issues. The scan found a few files that needed correcting but my MBP still doesn’t ask for a password. The last thing I did was reinstall the 10.4.8, this time using the Combo updater. Still not working.

It’s interesting that my G5 with the 10.4.8 delta update remembers my security preferences. Oh well.

UPDATE [Oct 29] – I give up! Too many problems with 10.4.8 (not sleeping, random crashes). The MBP is back to 10.4.7.

UPDATE [Oct 8] – I gave YASU a try and the ability to lock my MBP has partially returned. I’m now asked for a password only when waking from screensaver. Still no luck when waking from sleep. I used these options in YASU:

YASU

Posted in Apple, Mac, Software | 7 Comments »