Category: tech

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Scales That Tweet Your Weight!

Losing weight always seems to be a motivational thing. What if you had some scales that broadcast your weight on twitter every time you weighed yourself?

Enter withings.com. These scales connect to your WiFi network and tweet your weight! As Leo Laporte says, diet by humiliation. Of course, Leo has one of the scales and has given it its own twitter account: leos_scale

I’m ordering one and I’ll report on my success (or failure) in a few weeks’ time.

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Readability

Would you like to be able to read websites without all the distractions of ads, flash pop-ups and banners? Readability strips away all the clutter from the page and leaves you with just the content that you want to read.

Go to the Arc90 website, select your settings, then drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. Then click on the bookmarklet to declutter a web page!

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Snow Leopard on Dell Mini 9

Here’s my Dell Mini 9 running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1.

mini9.jpg

I followed the instructions on MyDellMini.com to do the upgrade from Leopard 10.5.7. The internal drive has been upgraded to a RunCore 64GB SSD so the easiest way to upgrade is to remove it, connect it to another Mac via USB, then do all the installations before refitting it in the Mini.

mini9_Finder.jpg

Don’t forget to DISABLE the Legacy USB support in the BIOS to prevent the computer locking up in sleep mode.

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Snow Leopard

If you’re running an Intel-based Mac you should really run out and buy the latest version of Apple’s operating system, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard

To learn more, see Apple’s Snow Leopard pages and MacWorld’s extensive coverage. To check that your critical applications will run under the new OS go to the Snow Leopard Compatibility page on snowleopard.wikidot.com.

Although Snow Leopard provides very few new features, it consolidates all the work Apple has done since moving to Mac OS X in 2002. By removing Power PC code and optimising Intel code, the installation is smaller than 10.5 and runs faster. And at only £25 for a single user and £40 for the Family Pack to upgrade from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, it shouldn’t be a difficult decision.

If you’re still running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger your best bet is to buy the Mac Box Set. For £132 you get Snow Leopard, iLife ’09 (iMovie ’09, iPhoto ’09, GarageBand ’09, iWeb ’09, and iDVD) and iWork ’09, Apple’s productivity suite which includes Pages ’09, Numbers ’09, and Keynote ’09.

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Posterous Review on TUAW

Here’s a great review of PicPosterous on The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Posterous is the really easy blogging service and PicPosterous is the companion iPhone app for photos and videos.

I’m using Posterous now because a) I can email anything to post@posterous.com and it will appear on my posterous blog and b) because it will automatically get posted to Hangout, flickr, twitter, and many other social networking sites.

It really doesn’t come any easier than this!

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LaCie Power Supplies

In 2006 and 2007 I bought five LaCie external disc drives, mostly the d2 or d2 Quandra models with a capacity of 500GB. I also bought two LaCie Mini 500GB drives, the kind that match a mac mini and sit neatly underneath it.

In 2008 the power supplies started failing. The light would flash but the drive wouldn’t mount. With more than one drive I was quickly able to swap power bricks and confirm the problem. LaCie, to their credit, replaced each power supply without complaint, although on one occasion it took a while as they were out of stock. This happened four times with the d2 drives.

Last week it happened again. This time I ordered a drobo, ripped out the drives from the LaCie d2s and installed them in the drobo. As soon as I got that up and running one of the LaCie mac mini power supplies drives failed! Luckily I’ve now got a large stock of power supplies so I’ve just swapped it over.

Six power supply failures out of seven drives. Not good.