McMahonWeb

Laptops are are a wonderful thing.  They give us freedom from being tied to a desk, and nowadays they give us nearly the power of a desktop machine.  While these technical wonders are great tools to have, they do come with a downside, and I don’t mean short battery life.

The downside is, it’s a portable machine, but has a hard drive made of moving parts.  Hard drives don’t really like to be moved around while they are on.  With 1 or 2 platters spinning at 5400 revolutions per minute(RPM), and the read/write heads floating barely off the platter surface, it is an opportunity for damage and data loss. Read more »

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Like most iPhone owners this weekend, I was having a blast with the new 2.0 software.  Also as a .Mac user, I have watched the painful Mobile Me transition unfold (well, it still is).  While waiting for the Mobile Me rollercoaster to stop, I spent a lot of time experimenting with or reading about many of the 500 applications now available for iPhone and iPod Touch users.  Interestingly, I noticed one important application not on the list. Read more »

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Being an IT geek, I work with a lot of geeks.  Many of these geeks are Google fanboys.  In the early days, when the Gmail beta was really beta and had not-so-many users, I was a fanboy too.  As time went on I began to enjoy the google search engine more and more.  It is a great search engine.

Google spent more time developing Gmail, and eventually other services, but I never really fell in love with them.  To me, Google errs on the side of efficiency at the cost of great user experience.  I can’t blame them too much, as others tend to err on the other side of that.

Things were fine an dandy for me until word of the “Do No Evil” mantra came into existence. Read more »

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The Internet, our land of virtual promise.   I was thrilled the first time I plugged in a modem to a phone line, and heard the sound of the internet connecting.  Logging into Compuserve or Prodigy to explore this amazing new world.  Those were the good old days.  Good because, the ever expansive internet was actually fairly small.  It didn’t consume people’s lives.  It wasn’t enough of a virtual reality for people to escape the real world.

Nowadays, the opposite is becoming true.  It seems that an ever-increasing percentage of people are online, and all the time.  The internet has blown up into a never ending river of information (truth and lies), social networking (often a way to avoid actually having direct interaction with others, while still calling them friends), and online gaming worlds that allow you to be someone else.  The latter two are quickly growing.  I know that is a generalization, and many people enjoy these things while still having a balanced life.  However, that balance is becoming rare.  I know, I have been there. Read more »

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Have you ever received spam messages sent as SMS text to your cell phone?  Has it happened repeatedly?  Yea, it sucks. 

Until today, I didn’t think there was anything you could do about it, unless you turn off that service to your phone.  Apparently, there is something you can do.  While this solution is not perfect, it probably gets close. Read more »

The day apple released the iPhone, and in the process, provided only minimal support for its own .Mac service - I was perplexed.  What the heck were they thinking?  Every other Apple solution allowed for total syncing of Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, and more.  Why didn’t the iPhone?  In the age of ActiveSync, Blackberry Enterprise, and other solutions offering full sync of at least email, contacts, and calendars it makes no sense.  The iPhone seemed a perfect match for .Mac services, and therefore a point of discontent as a .Mac user.  Read more »

I don’t know about you, but I am a big video podcast consumer.  I subscribe to a long list of video podcasts, from various publishers, and stream them to my 50″ TV (Apple TV style).  It works great, and I am slowly moving away from viewing “traditional” TV.

I have been doing this for a while, and have noticed some things.

First, I am surprised how few podcasts do HD, or at least higher-than-iPod quality streams.  Second, I am surprised at how few of them are well produced.  Third, very few of them offer an array of options, designed to meet the modern consumer where they are, irrelevant of platform.

What I have also noticed, is how well Revision3 seems to be tackling all of these.   Read more »

Do you host your own domain(s)?  Do you host your own email, too?  If so, this might be of interest to you.

I have been long searching for a clean, efficient, functional, and pleasant open-source solution to a webmail front-end for my email.  My particular hosting provider has SquirrelMail and Horde options built in.  However, I have never been thrilled with either.  They work (and Horde has many features), but in my opinion, they are old and not user friendly.

Recently, my provider gave its users access to SimpleScripts, which automates the install of various web solutions, such as RoundCube. Read more »

Microsoft has experienced less than ideal response with their newest desktop operating system, Vista.  What is interesting in this, is that Vista is not a bad operating system, and there are many positive aspects to its design (security, backups, explorer improvements, etc).  It seems that the problems for Vista are twofold.   Read more »