Muskblog: Making the Internet better since 1995

I just got an email that looked like it came from Apple. It looked like I or someone pretending to be me had changed some settings on my AppleID, something that is entirely possible given I’ve had to reset my password many times and I just downloaded several major updates from Apple yesterday. But was it a real email from Apple, no it was a phishing exercise from Russia…

After the fun that was upgrading to Mac OS X Lion and tired of battling ongoing issues with WiFi/Time Capsule/Time Machine and because Opera upgraded today and mentioned the benefits of being on Mountain Lion I decided to take the plunge, backup and upgrade over Ethernet.  It still took a long time. I expected this, but I didn’t expect to once again have hundreds of dollars of software no longer work. Opera is currently not running well and I don’t think my WiFi is working any better. Ethernet downstairs is so much faster. I think I’m going to save this post […]

Lost among all the glossy photos of the new iPhone, Apple quietly announce the closure and failure of Ping, their social network targeting music fans. Ping was built into iTunes and thus only accessible when you were using iTunes on your computer or other Apple device. Apple famously integrated Twitter more tightly into iOS as they see Facebook as a bigger rival, but their continued insistence on a made at Apple social network, definitely seems like paddling upstream near the falls. Well maybe not near the falls, Apple may have achieved too big to fail status. It would be nice if […]

I’ve been waiting for iTunes Match since before the project had a name.  Then I had to wait even longer because I’m Canadian.  iTunes Match combined with iCloud was supposed to allow you to store your entire music collection online so you could access it anywhere. The early iPods had actual hard drives in them and could hold numerous songs.  They didn’t have touch screens and iOS wasn’t what it is now.  Now not only do iPods have color LCD screens and in many cases touch screens, they have WiFi, and they have lots and lots of apps competing for […]

It took several attempts and for a while I didn’t think it was ever going to work, but I now have iOS 5 on my iPhone 3GS and am using iTunes 10.5 and iCloud.  I’m a bit disappointed.  You need Mac OS X Lion to use iCloud currently.  I’m not a big fan of Mac OS X Lion, but I also own a PowerMac G4 which I’ve spent considerable time and money upgrading.  I used to use my G4 to do backups, but after Time Machine came out, that was no longer a possibility as it only works with external […]

After yesterday’s furious update of Mac OS X Lion and a whole bunch of apps, I finally got around to trying my new version of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel this morning.  Microsoft Word templates gave me some grief, Mac OS X Lion doesn’t even want me to see my Library folder now, I had to trick Finder into going to it. Then one of my document templates, basically the biggest most elaborate one seems to crash Microsoft Word. Onward to Excel… The spreadsheets I was working on most recently worked.  In fact Excel seemed to be working solidly.  Even […]

I know Lion was coming.  I follow people on Twitter.  They tweeted about starting to download.  I decided I would upgrade and then see whether my mom and sister should upgrade.  I’ve been using OS X since the public beta.  I have a lot of experience using computers, upgrading computers, developing software, etc. etc.  The upgrade itself went relatively smoothly, but when apps I use everyday and were in my dock had big no good symbols drawn through the icon, well I told my sister and mother not to upgrade. Turns out older apps denoted PowerPC which makes little sense […]

Twice now I’ve been asked in a job interview about the merits of open source VS commercial software, or how open source software can be used by corporations, or how startups can make money leveraging open source software? What are your assets if all your company does is contribute to and work with open source software? How do you assign a value to such a company?