Yes, I’m on Twitter- alandove: Another reason we need universal healthcare. @DrFriedenCDC "education & income ... keys to better health. Another reason to stay in school!"
- alandove: No, the Lexus with its lights on probably doesn't belong to anyone at this public health meeting.
- alandove: RT @stevesilberman: Taxes, spending and deficits are all lower today than when Obama took office. http://t.co/NGnJlr5l
- alandove: Good: Apple store next door to conference. Bad: they couldn't fix it either. Good: bought Bluetooth keyboard, now phone = laptop.
- alandove: @lhrandall Cool! I've been sitting about five rows back, end of row, house left. Will probably take same seat tomorrow.
- alandove: My new laptop. #oldschool http://t.co/UK1oPLAQ
- alandove: Just arrived in ATL to cover 2 conferences, and my brand new MacBook Air suddenly and completely croaked. No words for how much this sucks.
- alandove: The journey of a thousand miles should begin with an empty bladder.
- alandove: RT @profvrr: This Week in Virology (TWiV) episode 183 is up: Bats out of hell http://t.co/8ukXCDCq
- alandove: Plenty happens if you listen to HF radio frequencies. "We keep hearing about these ... sunspots and nothing happens!" @sciencegoddess
Tag Archives: mac
Simple Hack: Magnetic Mac
There are powerful magnets hidden inside the screens of recent-model iMacs*; mine has them all around the edges. I don’t know why Apple put them there, but here’s my favorite use: holding documents while I transcribe them. The picture shows … Continue reading
Crossing Over
I’ve been struggling with a tricky problem in Web design lately: how to preview my sites in Internet Explorer. For my personal site, I largely ignore that buggy browser’s bizarre behaviors (see my archived tirade for details). But lately, I’ve been working on a Web redesign for a nonprofit group, and they need their site to be accessible. There’s no current version of Explorer for the Mac, and my old copy of IE5 doesn’t capture a lot of the more recent bugs the folks in Redmond have added. It seemed like the only reasonable option was to install Windows on my Intel Mac, paying hundreds of dollars to Microsoft to get a copy of their operating system, and then install Explorer. I have a moral objection to that, though, as it would mean enriching Microsoft, not in spite of, but because of their very worst habits.
Thankfully, the good folks at Codeweavers have come to my rescue. Instead of sending a big payment to Bill Gates, I can now send a measly $60 to this small company that helps support the Open Source movement. That’s the registration price for Crossover, a product very similar to the more popular Parallels. While both applications allow one to run Windows applications on the Mac, with Parallels you still have to shell out for a copy of Windows itself. Crossover eliminates that by using the open source Wine emulator instead. Now, back to hacking these stylesheets. Continue reading
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Tagged browsers, computers, mac, operating systems, tools, web development
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Learning New Languages
Recently, I started getting back into an old hobby: computer programming. My use of the term “computer programming” suggests just how old this hobby is for me; these days, it’s known as Information Technology, Application Development, Software Engineering, or some other corporate designation, reflecting the field’s near-total professionalization. Indeed, I’d tried to get back into it a few years ago, but quickly concluded that writing my own software, like repairing my own car, was one of those self-reliant activities of yesteryear that had been removed, gently but firmly, from the hands of mere amateurs. The programming hobbyist had apparently gone the way of the shade-tree mechanic. Continue reading
Lust for Powerbooks
This is the second of two articles about Linux that used to reside on the main part of the site – it’s a somewhat more whimsical look at why someone might install this operating system on an old Apple.
It’s 1999. In a Manhattan apartment, a writer sits in front of a laptop computer, focused intently on producing an article. The computer is a sleek, chic piece of industrial design, the quintessence of hip electronics in the pre-iPod era. Its sexy black case sports a bright white Apple logo. Continue reading
Worth Double the Price
This essay used to be on the Dovdox site, but it was a casualty of the recent technical glitches. Rather than try to reformat it as a Wiki section, I decided to publish it here. It’s the first of two articles about my recent dabblings in desktop Linux.
As you may have gathered from the rest of this site, I’m a big fan of open source software. Firefox is a wonderful browser, and the growing universe of free plug-ins for it constantly add new capabilities. I also use Open Office, an astonishingly good MS Office clone, for some of my work. But what about the final frontier of free software – the desktop operating system itself? What about Linux? Continue reading