Plaxo recently announced that is has sold out to Comcast - the axis of all things evil in the cable industry (though much more reliable than Adelphia).
I signed up for Plaxo years back thinking it would be a good central location to store all my contacts in ‘the cloud’. But there’s really no point to it any more. For one, I’m a .Mac subscriber which makes my contacts available across all my Macs, online and iPod.
Plaxo was headed in the social networking direction, but with LinkedIn and Facebook as competition, there really isn’t much point to using a third service. Now with the Comcast acquistion, Plaxo’s control of your data just can’t be trusted, IMO. Comcast is notorious for poor customer service and screwing you on the service you get. I’m dropped Comcast years back and after a short stint with DirecTV, I’m fully in the arms of glorvious fibre thanks to Verizon FiOS for TV and Internet and Vonage for VoIP.
So today I’ve deleted my Plaxo account. You can do the same via the following link:
https://www.plaxo.com/signin?r=/delete_account
Plaxo FAQ page.
From the makers of BarCamp Boston comes Mac Camp Boston. Taking place on May 10th at the YMCA Theater located at 820 Mass Ave., Cambridge, MA.
I’m hoping to free up my Saturday to attend. If you’re interested, check out http://maccampbos.pbwiki.com/
People grumble about the battery life of their laptops and various makes and models offer considerable difference in the mileage you’ll get. Living in a Mac only world, I’ve always thought that Apple has done a pretty good job of getting the most out of the battery on their laptop range.
I have two MacBook Pros. One for work, and one at home. They are pretty much identical in spec. On long flights, such as my regular trips to Seattle or Houston, I’d get 4+ hours out of the MacBook Pro by turning off Wi Fi and dimming the screen right down during the flight. Makes for a very productive journey.
Continue reading ‘MacBook Pro Battery Problems’
For the past few years I’ve been listening to music and podcasts on my various iPods in the car over FM transmitters. They work… okay, but not great. It’s all about getting a clear enough frequency and being able to sustain the signal long enough.
I’d whittled it down to two reasonably clear channels in the Boston/Cambridge out to metro west areas - 88.5FM and 92.3FM. But, depending on the weather and the quality of the recording, my listening enjoyment fluctuated daily. By last week I’d had enough. 2hrs a day on the road and I want to be able to enjoy what I’m listening too.
I have a 2005 Jetta, the new style. Great car and VW offers an iPod Adapter which can be installed by a dealer. But every review I read pretty much stated it was pure crap.
Finally I found the PA11-VW6 from USA Spec. It works great with all ranges of current and most past iPods and runs off the CD changer port on the back of the car stereo. Installation took around 30mins by an experienced car audio guy for a fraction of the cost a dealer would charge. Best price I got on the device was from Enfig Car Stereo.
Hallelujah !! Apple today finally released 7.1.3 firmware upgrade for the Airport Extreme Base Station updating the base station with support for wireless Time Machine backup.
Since Leopards initial release last October there has been uncertainty as to why Apple pulled AEBS wireless Time Machine support from the release at the last minute. To add fuel to the speculation, Time Capsule’s announcement at MacWorld led many to consider the fact that Apple was going to pull a fast one over the faithful and force us to purchase a new device.
Now we know this is no longer the case. As of right now I’m wirelessly backing up my hard drive over to the 500GB USB drive attached to my AEBS. Hallelujah !!
Last week I was able to finally upgrade my work MacBook Pro to 10.5 Leopard, bringing an end to months of hitting the spacebar on filenames and wondering why nothing happened. Now with both notebooks on 10.5 I’m able to try out Back To My Mac.
Out of the gate it didn’t work, that I was expecting. So, after a little googling around the web I found various references to what ports I needed to open up on the home router. At home I’m on Verizon FiOS (loving it!) with a VZ provided wireless router / modem. From that, I have a bridged Airport Extreme Base Station for 802.11n wireless networking. Since the AEBS is bridged it requires no changes.
On the VZ router I needed to open ports UDP 500 and 4500, as well as ESP and AH. That was it.
From work today I’m able to effortlessly connect back to my home MacBook Pro, connect to file shares and share the screen. In adaptive mode the screen sharing is perfectly acceptable and I’m able to comfortably work as if I was infront the the notebook.
Other than needing to open the ports, the whole process was just a simple as I’ve come to expect from Apple. Unfortunately I can’t BTMM into my office MacBook Pro as I would expect from a PCI compliant company, but no biggy there.
Net, net. Back To My Mac rocks!
