So, to give you the short version of the story, I spent about 2 or 3 hours today (mixed with a few other things) cleaning up a keyboard for one of my computers. It was a recently purchased Apple A1048 Keyboard which was purchased in a dirty state. I thought, since I had the time […]
In the previous article, I went over the gist of how I fixed a small problem with my “new” PowerMac G5 – the lack of a boot chime. After a few days of really working with the machine and trying to figure out the reason, I would find out it was really something as simple […]
At this point in our story I had a Power Mac G5, the last of the Power PC based Macintosh computers, in my possession. It worked but with a quirk in that it didn’t make the traditional “boot chime” that (until recently) all Macintosh computers had. This bugged me enough that I set out to […]
As mentioned previously, as much as I am a Windows guy I’ve always had a fondness for the Macintosh computer family. A combination of having them in school as well as seeing the awesomeness to be found in the Power Mac G5 and the Mac Pro really made me want to get some of these […]
As far as modern computer usage goes, I’ve always been a Windows guy. Granted, I’ve spent quite a bit of time messing with Linux, and have had dedicated Linux machines from time to time (as secondary machines, anyway) but not since high school have I actually really spent any time with Apple Macintosh machines. Through […]
Oh, hi. You might remember me. My name is Chris, and I’m the guy who used to write an article a day here at Xadara, but over the past 6 months has cut back on this, much to his own displeasure. As much as I’m trying to get back to heavy writing, I wind up […]
Over the past year I took some time to cover every episode of the 1983 Canadian TV series “Bits and Bytes.” This was a television program designed to give its viewers some insight into the then-new home computer scene, covering basic principles of computing, showing some things you can do with various computers of the […]
A few days ago, users of MacOS High Sierra version 10.13.4 (the current release version as of this writing) have started being met with a message upon running a 32 bit application, explaining that the application “is not optimized for your Mac” and states that the developer should update the application to improve compatibility. This […]
Ah, now we’re getting into one of the more interesting nuances of the 80’s computer scene – graphics! While today our systems simply use software to create everything we see on screen, with hardware doing the raw math to make it all happen, back in those days, you didn’t have processing power, memory, or, well, […]
One thing that all computers do in some form is store data, be it programs we install on them, or data we generate ourselves using these programs. This is, of course, by design – computers are tools to help us do work (or at least, that’s why they are made, whether or not we use […]
Returning to Bits and Bytes, we step into the land of ready made programs: that is, software that you just put in and run. You don’t have to write it yourself in basic. Of course, this is how computers are for us today, naturally – we have everything we could ever need, and probably more, […]
It’s time to head back to 1983, to a time when the PC as we know it was in its infancy, and the home computer market was still dominated by the likes of Commodore, Atari, Apple (pre Macintosh, mind you), and Tandy (at least, here in the North American market – it was a slightly […]
I don’t go on the Apple website much. By much, I mean ever. I missed something that happened yesterday, which has me pissed. The iPod Classic, the last evolution of the original iPod released in 2001; the very device which put Apple back on the map, some would say, has been, from the looks of […]
It’s that time of year again – the time when Apple announce its new hardware and software to the world. This yearly tradition has been met by geeks and consumers alike as an event that sets the standards for the following years consumer technology. Apple Keynote 2014. As would be relevant to a blog from […]
In late 2007, I purchased a Zune 80. I had weighed the options available, the design of units at the time, and the software used to sync them. My experience with iTunes and a borrowed iPod nano had been, suffice to say, less than stellar. Of course, the Zune software was just as clunky, but […]