The Empty Soda Can

I’ve been using AppleScript for years now, but I’ve never had the opportunity to become really good at it. I can do a few simple things, but once I get beyond that, I pretty much have to turn to the web. So it was, this morning: my office has two large windows in it, so the ambient light varies quite a bit from day to day and hour to hour. I finally decided that I’m sick and tired of adjusting the brightness on three different displays—not to mention hoping that they’re all exactly the same—on a regular basis. So as usual, I turned to the web. After a few less useful hits, I finally came to an old blog post called “ Change Monitor Brightness Using AppleScript .” It was exactly what I needed, with three exceptions: Since it’s four years old, it hasn’t been updated for Mountain Lion. It isn’t designed to change multiple displays concurrently. It doesn’t include the ability to specify the brightness level, on the fly. Having solved all three of these problems, I post my resu...

First of all, if you haven’t read the Introduction to this post, please do so. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it will help you better understand our search for the perfect printer. :-) After years and years of purchasing printer after printer—some good, some bad, some so horrible you’d prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick—we were finally happy with our Brother HL-4070CDW for printing, Epson CX5200 for flatbed scanning, and HP OfficeJet 4315 for sheet-feed scanning. We also had our worse-than-a-sharp-stick Samsung SPP-2020 for photos, but since that only worked once before being in the shop for three years and then coming back still broken , we hardly even counted that. But the one thing we still required was a functional CD printer. I hopped online and, lo and behold, Staples just happened to be running an awesome sale on the Epson Artisan 835. But did I want to risk another Epson all-in-one? Sure, my CX5200 was great, but it wasn’t a CD printer. The only CD-printing al...

When Anna and I first got married, we bought an HP printer. I don’t remember what model it was; I just remember that at the time, I wanted a nice printer that could handle 11″×17″. It cost us over $500, but we were happy—right up until we tried to print something. It was horrible . In the three months we owned it, we had no less than thirty different errors. It probably worked, about 2% of the time—no exaggeration. I remember one day, I needed to print a two-page, black-and-white text document, before I left for work. I was late, because I only gave myself 20 minutes and the printer took 32 minutes to complete it. We finally got HP to take it back, but they docked us $50 for the ink we used.  I decided it was time to find another manufacturer. Shortly after the HP debacle, we got an Epson Stylus Photo EX. It was awesome , but when we got a new computer, a few years later, its standard 8-pin serial connection was no longer standard. We upgraded to another Epson, a Stylus CX5200 al...

C|Net’s Dan Ackerman recently reviewed Apple’s new iPad , comparing it to any one of the plethora of Microsoft Windows–based netbooks out there. Of course, as happens with any Apple product, the responses are both polarized and numerous. Here’s my take on the subject: Personally, I’d never buy a netbook. They’re too small, too slow, too—well, too just about everything I wouldn’t want in a computer. I just can’t see myself having any use for one. IMHO, the problem with a netbook is that it tries to replace a laptop, while the beauty of the iPad is that it doesn’t. I think the funniest complaint I’ve heard is the one along the lines of “It’s just a big iPod touch.” Well, yes, that’s exactly what it is. That’s exactly what Apple was going for, and after playing with an iPad at my local Best Buy, I can say they achieved that intent quite effectively. The reason some people are so excited about the iPad is because it meets a need they have. What is that need? It varies from person to pers...

A few years ago, Greenpeace blasted a bunch of computer companies for making their products out of non–environmentally-friendly materials—which, if you think about it, isn’t that surprising, neither on the part of the manufacturers nor on the part of Greenpeace. They each have a job to do and they’re doing it. One of the many companies that Greenpeace blasted—and one that bore much of the brunt of their wrath, due to some of the specific components and chemicals used—was Apple . As a result, Apple made some major changes in the way they did things. Their computers are now much more environmentally friendly, including being made from (I believe) 100% recyclable materials. Whatever the case, Greenpeace was not only appeased, they began singing Apple’s praises for its willingness and ability to make such drastic changes so quickly. And that, we all thought, was that. Enter the iPad . In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, Apple will be releasing—tomorrow, in fact...

For the last two days, I’ve been bombarded with RSS feeds about a recent study from the NPD Group. According to the NPD Group’s report (and about a thousand blogs regurgitating the information), “Nearly 85 Percent of All Apple Households Also Own a Windows PC.” While this could certainly be possible, nobody seems to have seen the original report; they’ve just seen NPD’s resulting press release . it really makes me wonder how well the release reflects reality. Let’s take my household, for example: I don’t think myself a Mac bigot, but at present, all of our functional computers happen to be Macs. Specifically, we currently own 11 computers: 10 Apple Macintoshes (ages 2-18), plus one partially assembled “white box” (read: generic) PC. The “white box” is one of my eternal projects and just sits in the closet; it doesn’t even have a motherboard or a hard drive at the moment, let alone an operating system. So that leaves us with the ten Macs. Here’s the OS breakdown, in numbers of instal...

For those that don’t know, my main computer is a Power Macintosh G5. It’s a great machine, the only downside being that it uses more electricity than your average computer, to power its gimongous processors (and in turn, gives off a bit more heat—although admittedly, that could be a lot worse). Anyway, this wonderful machine—on which I am typing, right now—has been my main workhorse for the last six years, and it’s still doing great! It’s been less than a week since it finally couldn’t run the current version of Mac OS ( Mac OS X v.10.6 Snow Leopard came out last Friday, in case you’ve been in a cave since, let’s say, July), and it still does pretty much everything I need it to, at a very acceptable speed—certainly much better than you’d expect, from a six-year-old computer. So here’s the problem: As tends to be the case (knock wood), I’m currently working on a database for a client. As part of this database, I decided to use a particular interface technique that I’ve seen ot...