Gaige's Pages

Edward Tufte, one of the preeminent authors and speakers on effective visual communication and design has some things to say about Apple's iPhone. Much of his commentary on the iPhone is complementary, but he has some suggestions, which seem pretty reasonable. If you have a chance, take a look. Thanks to Daring Fireball for the pointer and the reminder to look at Tufte's site more often.

If you're seriously considering watching this 2:38 monstrosity, then, please rethink. Carol and I would have walked out an hour in, except that we were trapped in the middle of the theater (with at least one immediately-adjacent theater goer asleep) and were trading looks of disbelief because we couldn't figure out why this was so critically acclaimed.

At the beginning of the year, it's nice to think that we're all starting off with a clean slate. I hear regularly that people are interested in going "paperless," so this entry is for those folks who are interested in this goal, or who just have too many PDF documents to keep straight.

Many of you Macintosh users out there are concerned for the safety and security of your data. This article will describe how to use the built-in disk image capability of the Macintosh to create a secure file storage location for your important documents.

An article from tells that analysts from The Yankee Group (unlike those from Gartner and some other IT analysis groups) think that both the security and policy issues about the iPhone have been overblown. Basically, it boils down to not being any worse than any other smart phone, and the analyst finishes with "Security worries about the iPhone are overblown. To boost employee productivity, enterprises would be better served thinking about how to accommodate the iPhone."

Way off topic, but I'm a bit surprised to find out that Queen guitarist Brian May is about to get his PhD in Astrophysics! Well, bully for him! Check out the BBC News coverage of Queen star set to hand in thesis.

Many moons ago, Parallels was the only game in town for Macintosh virtual machines. The software is good, but there is a new player in town. VMWare, the big name in PC virtualization has thrown its hat into the ring and is expected to release version 1.0 of VMWare Fusion for the Macintosh next week. At this time, people may be interested in trying it out, or converting altogether. But, if you've already got Parallels disk images, how do you get access to them from VMWare?

There are a lot of ways to manage passwords for web-based services. If you're like me, you have logins on an absolutely insane number of places. I've used a lot of different tactics for maintaining passwords and logins in the past, and every site I go to has a slightly more perverse set of constraints (some don't allow numbers in passwords, others require them, some have strange user name requirements, or require a unique email address). My current solution, and I'm rather happy with it, is a program called 1passwd. It integrates with most of the software I use online (Safari, Firefox, NetNewsWire) and a ton of other stuff, and does the job. Read on for more.

Often I'm asked what software I use on the Mac. Now, places like iUseThis are great places to go to get a general idea of what's going on and read basic comments. I even put information about what I'm generally using on there. However, I wanted to create a more in-depth review location—not quite what you get from major magazines, but something that allows me to gab a while about software that I find does the job... and there's a lot of that on the Mac. Be on the look out for more items in the "Useful Mac Software" category.

The wacky Fins at F-secure have decided to put an iPhone through its paces in a fridge and the result is a chilling video. Thanks to The Ultimate Apple Weblog for the pointer, and YouTube for the video.