Category: Tech

  • Apple better look out: Microsoft Windows 8 and Office 2013 are fantastic

    [Looking for info on Office 2013 performance in a virtual machine? Check out this post.] It’s been about a week since I upgraded my Lenovo ThinkPad T410 and MacBook Air (mid-2011) to Windows 8 and Office 2013. (On the MBA, I run Office 2013 in Parallels virtual machines under both Windows 7 and Windows 8,…

  • Robots, Clonezilla and upgrading to Windows 8 (strike that, it’s now Windows 10)

    Once, many years ago, I gave a marketing manager who worked for me in Taipei grief for packaging the localized version of Lotus Notes in a box with a “friendly robot” theme and name. Apparently, Transformer-like images go over well with Taiwanese buyers. I was wrong; he was right and I learned an important lesson…

  • Do you watch video on the Internet?

    Dumb question, right? Of course you — and increasingly the rest of the world — watch all kinds of video on the Internet. And we all know it’s occasionally a frustrating experience. Images break-up, pixelate, stop or — my favorite — go audio only. Still, despite the low quality experience we are often stuck with, every estimate of…

  • Suing Lenovo, chapter 1

    Those of you who know me know I’ve been a fan of ThinkPads since the beginning. I was an IBM systems engineer in the early days of ThinkPads and developed an undying loyalty to their tank-like construction and, above all, the keyboards. Like many devotees, I put up with their higher prices and uninspiring specifications. It’s…

  • What does Apple have against the English language? (or how to restore a minimized window in Mac OS X with the keyboard)

    Recently, hell froze over and I bought a MacBook Air. As you might expect, between then and now, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about Mac OS X (not hard) and retraining my finger-muscle-memory for Mac keyboard shortcuts (very hard). Who decided that Ctrl-F3 is the keystroke to get to the Dock? Or, who decided…

  • Bye, bye JungleDisk; hello CloudBerry

    I’m the geek my family and friends go to with their tech questions and for advanced support. If you want to do something more than just stare at your Android smartphone — like connecting it to your Office 365 Exchange account — or you want to get a game to run in a Windows virtual…

  • Verizon: Who designed your websites and mobile apps?

    I’ve just been through a “process” of making my FiOS DVR accessible from Verizon’s website and their mobile apps for Android and iOS. You know what I mean about a “process” and a cable company: thousands of reboots of this thing or that — hours spent restoring my settings on this device or that after…

  • So long, Mr. Edison. It was great seeing you.

    Years ago when we were hunting for a condo to rent in Singapore, I noticed that the ceiling light fixtures hadn’t been installed in the kitchen of a newly constructed unit we looked at. When I asked the agent why, she said that the landlord was waiting to see if a Japanese or American expat…

  • How to: T-Mobile WiFi calling on Android phones with Verizon FiOS

    Well, another frustrating problem bites the dust. And my solution is documented here for others who have suffered trying to explain to T-Mobile customer support drones that, no, it’s not my phone — I have four of them that do exactly the same thing. And no, our Internet connection is up. And, no, I won’t…