Warning! Do not be fooled by what you might read anywhere on the Internet. If you have been using Microsoft Money and you switch to a Mac, you are screwed. There is nothing comparable for the Mac. No … Quicken is not an option. No, there is no version of Microsoft Money in development for the Mac. No, there are no other software programs available which are even remotely similar. No, none of the other potential financial software programs will allow you to successfully import your MSMoney data. No, you are not going to find another financial software application that is freeware or shareware or open source that comes close to Microsoft Money. No, you should not believe any website that attempts to explain how to convert your Microsoft Money file(s) for use in any Macintosh program.

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It takes four actions to enable Bluetooth on the new iPhone.

1. Click “Settings”.
2. Click “General”.
3. Click “Bluetooth”.
4. Click on/off slider.

Leaving Bluetooth enabled all the time drains the battery much too quickly, so it makes sense to only enable it when you are using it, and to disable it when you are finished. (The same could be said of 3G network access.) Hopefully in the next release of the software they’ll make it easier to flip these two settings. I mean, I know it’s not world hunger or anything, but four clicks is at least two too many.

Recommended by a friend:

iToner: No hacks. No per-ringtone fees. Unlimited custom ringtones for your iPhone.

It’s been just over two weeks now that I’ve been using my new Apple MacBook Pro (running OS X 10.5.4), and I think I’m now ready to post a list of the ten things I like most about it.

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The restore I did yesterday on my iPhone failed to fix the problem I was having with the camera. Even after completely wiping the phone and resetting multiple times, the camera simply refused to save photos to its internal file system. I was ready to just complain at a Genius Bar in an Apple store this weekend (when I will no doubt be getting the new iPhone anyway), when I decided to do one last Google search for an answer. And, of course, Google provided. I followed the advice of olemono posted on April 22 and now the camera works again!

A few weeks ago my iPhone randomly decided to stop saving photos taken with its camera. It would act like it was taking a photo, but it wouldn’t actually save the photo to its internal photo file system. I didn’t realize this until I had taken a few dozen photos of my dad and me golfing in Connecticut, so I was pretty bummed. Since then I’ve been wanting to do a full restore to see if that would fix it, but I was afraid of doing that because I didn’t want to lose all my SMS conversations.

Enter Syphone. This little Mac utility will retrieve SMS threads from your iPhone and allow you to save them as PDF, txt, or XML files. It worked exactly as it claimed on the first try. (Reason #231297 why I am happy I switched from M$ to Mac.) I’m in the process of restoring my iPhone now.

About two weeks ago I decided that I was just completely done with my Dell Latitude D630. I’ve had it for just under a year now and it had continued to disappoint me at every turn. I had had an Inspiron 8600 — which was a pretty darn good laptop — for about a year and then upgraded to a D610. I loved the D610. It was the best laptop I’d ever owned. Unfortunately my lovely wife was underwhelmed with the 8600. Plus, it was now over two years old, the battery was dead so she had to use the power cord all the time, and the processor was no longer cutting it for what she needed it to do. So we shelved the 8600, I gave her my wonderful D610, and I “upgraded” to the D630.

I hate the D630. It drives me crazy on a regular basis. Sure, a large chunk of the blame should be on Microsoft; I’ll admit that. When I went from the D610 to the D630 I also went from whatever version of Office was current three years ago to the “new” version of Office. (I have no idea what the versions in Office are these days. Microsoft, I think, intentionally uses a conflicting and confusing taxonomy to keep us all guessing. Let’s just say that I went from a version of Office that worked “pretty well” 80% of the time to the really slow and obnoxious version that uses all new, not-backwards-compatible file formats and hogs every drop of memory it can.) At the same time I also moved from a Blackberry to an iPhone.

Now, listen: I have been a Windows guy for almost 20 years now. I always looked down my nose at the silly artists and screenwriters eating granola bars, wearing Birkenstocks, driving eco-friendly cars, and using Macs. They had no idea how to use a real computer and certainly couldn’t program their way out of a paper bag. I’m a developer. I program computers. I needed to use a computer that let me build things. And, plus, I never met a Mac user that didn’t spend all day sending me files that would only work on a Mac.

But something funny happened when Y2K struck. I stopped writing computer programs. I am still a developer, but now everything I do is on the world wide information superhighway. It’s been almost a decade now since I needed to code a DLL or an actual client-side application. I still build fabulous and amazing applications, but they are all web-based. And that means that I have been working almost exclusively with plain old text files. And you don’t need Microsoft to work with text files. (Hell, you don’t even need a GUI to work with text files!) Combine that realization with the awe-inspiring, paradigm-shifting, mind-bending total f&$*@ing coolness of the iPhone (and the iPod!), and you can start to see why I finally decided to switch to a Mac.

So I did it. I made the switch. I bought a MacBook Pro. I’ll keep you posted.

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If you’re getting that annoying message telling you that your copy of AVG Anti-Virus is about to expire, you can get the new version here.

Just about everyone that uses iTunes has a hella hard time keeping their music files organized. This is a shame because (a) it’s actually pretty simple and (b) it is a colossal pain in the ass to move your library if it’s not organized correctly. (Note that I’m talking about the organization of your actual music files and not the appropriate tagging and categorization of your music library.) The bummer of the thing is that the folks at Apple unwittingly made this more complicated and difficult by trying to make it simple and easy. It happens. Trust me. I have been building software for just over a decade now and it happens all.the.time. Don’t get mad at Apple for this one. Let’s just fix it.

First I’ll tell you what you need to do, and then I’ll explain why.

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Seek allows for ‘faceted browsing’ of email and looks, pretty much, like the coolest thing to hit email since the @ symbol. It’s Thunderbird only, though. At this point I don’t know if it would be possible for me to abandon Outlook. The email functionality I could take or leave, but the address book and calendar are so entwined in my life there’s no way to chunk them. I need to be able to synch with my iPhone … mumble grumble … <rolls up sleeves> … must to do something …

Bryan has posted an elaborate examination of the “Play Count” metric used by iTunes. I, too, use the “Play Count” metric as a component of many of my Smart Playlists, so I was interested in his research. I agree with one of the comments on his post, though, and think that iTunes really simply considers a song as “played” and increments the “Play Count” about ten seconds prior to the end of the song. (It would be interesting to know if the “Cross Fade” option affects this. Maybe Bryan can investigate …)

In most of my smart playlists, the “Last Skipped” metric is more important than the “Play Count”. I have a “base” smart playlist which I include in almost all my other smart playlists. It contains all the tracks which I do not want to include. If a track is a music video, or holiday music, or from an audiobook or podcast, for example, I don’t want it to play while I’m jogging along Olympic Boulevard or doing the laundry. Consider this my Exclusion list.

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About six months ago I bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 160 GB USB External Hard Drive from the evil empire™. As far as hard drives go, well, it’s big and it stores data. So in that regard it performs perfectly. It also has a soothing amber glow that pulses while it’s spinning, which is very nice. The problem with this thing is the software. It’s two sacks of rotten apples bad. And, based on the 1994-esque, we-hate-our-visitors Seagate website, it’s not going to get any better.

I’ve been returning to the site every few weeks, hoping that they’ll release some sort of upgrade or patch, but no. The software that’s bundled with the drive is the FreeAgent Launcher. Like almost all new software, it lives in the systray. To kill it, you have to right-click on it, choose exit, and then confirm when it asks, “Are you sure you want to exit?” (This annoys the hell out of me. If you insist on treating me like I might be slightly retarded — Why would I click “exit” if I wasn’t sure? — then at least give me an option to not have to confirm next time.) In a fit of desperation I installed the software for one of Seagate’s other drives. The other software is Drive Manager or something like that. It also lives in the system tray. Get this, though: To kill that one, you have to left-click and do the “Are you sure?” dance. Why would Seagate make one work via right-click and the other work via left-click?!
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Found: One brilliant article about being a programmer
Source: MeFi

When I got my new laptop a few weeks ago I thought it was pretty cool that it came with Office 2007. The nifty new toolbars and embedded wavey swooshes are slick. I don’t really mind that by default Word and Excel assume you want to save files with a .docx or .xlsx extension. (That’s fine with me; makes it easier to remember to not save something as an ‘07 file if I need to share it with others that are still using Office XP or 2003.)

What I cannot handle is the fact that Outlook 2007 is using over 130 MB of RAM. 130 MB?! I wouldn’t mind that much, since apparently it’s supposed to play nicely with Windows and just use whatever RAM is available. But even using as much memory as it is it’s still slow slow slow. And this is even after I disabled iTunes 7.3’s ridiculous Outlook add-in. 130 MB?! Are they crazy?

Yesterday I became the proud new owner of a Dell D630 Latitude. Today I began the tiresome task of transferring my life from my old D610 to it. The old laptop was Anchor. (Previous computers were Budweiser, Guinness, and Corona.) The new laptop is Maui. Here is a list of the software that Dell decided to install on my new machine that I either immediately disabled or deleted:

• Google Desktop
• Google Toolbar
• AOL Setup
• Intellisonic Speech Enhancement
• the “language” taskbar toolbar
• Dell’s Wireless WLAN Card monitor