News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
Back in the in 1980s one of the most popular illnesses doing the hypochondria wards was RSI or repetitive strain injury. Everyone who used a keyboard suddenly seemed to be a victim of this previously unheard-of affliction. Those who played a lot of tennis knew about it, but the rest of us didn’t have much idea and most of us thought those who complained of it were probably prone to a bit of whinging and most likely also members of the regular sick-day club. Most of us probably regard people who regularly say “oooh, my back hurts” as having a minor irritation they simply must share. The first time you do something that makes your back hurt you change your point of view. When your correspondent was stricken with RSI back in the mid-eighties, I was instantly reminded of the rapid way your opinion can be changed by a dose of reality. OK, so I was working as a software developer and churning out many lines of code for a big project so what had gone wrong?
Ian Yates | Apr 14, 2008
One of the attractions of using a Macintosh instead of that other operating system is not having to futz around with command lines and arcane code you barely understand but have been assured by some guru or other will be “alright as long as you type exactly this string of gibberish”. Imagine my surprise when Apple’s Time Machine code turned up on my desktop and refused to do a backup to anything except an attached drive. At first glance I thought I’d stepped into a real time machine and been transported back to the days when Apple did networks its own way.
Ian Yates | Mar 17, 2008
Astute readers will have noticed that we didn’t manage to complete our scheduled review of high definition DVD burners. Yet. Now that Toshiba has announced an unconditional surrender in the HD wars, we can claim we held off because we didn’t want to give readers a bum steer to a soon to be dead format. However, we’ll come clean -- we didn’t know what Toshiba was about to do until we read about it, just like you. And so we reach the conclusion of perhaps the briefest media format war.
Ian Yates | Feb 19, 2008
What we really need in a photo printer is not what any vendor is offering right now. Almost every vendor offers a postcard-only photo printer, for three times the money they’re asking for an all-in-one A4-sized scanner/copier/printer/coffee-maker. Those postcard-sized photo printers are just plain wrong for several reasons.
Ian Yates | Jan 28, 2008
America’s presidential election is over, and we can all be grateful for that. But in politics, the race never really ends. I think that’s the metaphor at work in Freedom Run by Spiralstorm Games. The game’s imagery is ripe with symbolism: Republicans and Democrats are bound to each other, struggling to achieve a common good just out of reach. One cannot succeed without the other. And the run, just like the ever-expanding quest for freedom, is endless. There is no finish line. And if you fall down, you get up and try again.
