TooMuchGreen

I’m a huge fan of the Mac Mini and think it has been one of Apples most under developed and under rated units, in fact I’m on my 3rd one at the moment now the MacBook Air has been eBayed. Needs as must however and although it’s the somewhat older 1.42ghz G4 model it’s no real detriment to me as (compared to the video hungry masses) all my own daily apps are probably as low end as you can get these days (“Terminal” isn’t that resource intensive). Obviously I would relish the prospect of owning an 8 core Mac Pro but I honestly have no need for one.  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:56 mins)

Apple were slated by a few people post the September 9th event for not releasing anything innovative enough. All considered I feel this was a touch harsh but I do realise demand of the gadget hungry innovators from the world of media tech doesn’t get any easier to satisfy so I suppose it was only to be expected.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:34 mins)

If you don’t have the luxury of a second computer or on-line Virtual Server it’s a good idea to have a local instance of WordPress for mirrored back and related development, under OSX Leopard this is quite easy to configure.

Firstly you need to install the server side of things (Apache, MySQL, php & phpMyAdmin), this is quite straightforward and I’ve a separate quick and easy ‘How To’ for that HERE.

Once you have the back-end sorted go into phpMyAdmin and create a new database called wordpress with global full privilege access for the root user  Read more... (estimated reading time 1:47 mins)

Obviously I was keen to upgrade to Snow Leopard this week (who wouldn’t be for €28.99) and was there in the queue at Gravis on Saturday morning. After a rather satisfying chocolate croissant in their cafe we went back in the apartment and an hour later it was up and running on the MacBook Air (Rev A 1.6ghz), OK, let’s see what we have…..  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:11 mins)

Email – the enabler of the electronic age? Our very own technological spokesperson, Apple fan-boy extraordinaire, Ubuntu advocate and undisputed King of Twitter, the man Stephen Fry, nailed it with his recent blog-post “Office Slavery” in which he laments the loss of the office secretary and highlights the resultant time sapping vacuum we drop into each day trawling through our digitised messages, as ever he’s right on the button and I’m not going to further drag out the scourge of lost hours spent replying, forwarding and CC-ing, we’re all more than aware how much our lives are ruled by the keyboard and the inbox. No, in this post I just wanted to drop behind the scenes of actual content for a moment to highlight a few of the technical hurdles mainstream users may not be aware of, you may think with email being the prevalent and integrated norm it is there might be some degree of stability around the majority of services offered to us, however you’d be surprised.  Read more... (estimated reading time 4:10 mins)

There’s obviously quite a bit of recycled information on the internet and this review is in part just that, as well as also being part speculation and part *sum* of it’s parts, hopefully (or at least partly anyway)….err….yes….

The Apple Tablet then, hopeful geek myth or concept changing portable shortly to emerge from the reality defining vortex of Steve Jobs designer distortion field? Personally I’d like to think the latter and there’s plenty of evidence stacking up around development of such a product to reinforce an imminent release, including a reported suicide due to a lost prototype (or was it indeed industrial espionage gone wrong?), whatever the story things are getting quite serious about what seems to be just an overgrown iPod Touch….or is it?  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:27 mins)

Indeed, it’s all very well and good having all this data flying about, data on your USB key, data in the Drop Box cloud, data on your hard disk, data here, data there….but how secure is it? What if you lose your USB key? It wasn’t password protected was it, no, I didn’t think so, don’t berate yourselves though, I’m invariably slack too sometimes (although only ‘sometimes’ I may add).

If you’re a Mac OSX user there’s a super quick, super efficient and super clean way to keep things in check and secure, it just involves dropping a level, let me explain.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:12 mins)

As both an OSX user and a Linux developer find a localised LAMP installation somewhat useful. There are a couple of methods to achieve this, the quick way, and the *real* way.

The first method is to simply download and install the MAMP bundle. This comes as a self contained single package which runs completely from it’s own folder with *one click* stop and start (see the header image) , it’s free, it uses it’s own version of Apache and removal is as easy as just deleting the folder. MAMP is quick and stable and it couldn’t be simpler to install, it’s ideal as a quick test platform for your dynamic websites and php scripting however if your drop is more toward the actual ‘LAMP-ness’ of LAMP development you may prefer to install the real deal using a more professional approach, if so here’s the How To.  Read more... (estimated reading time 2:04 mins)

Monolingual is (I think) one of the most useful OSX utilities about, it simply frees up extra disk space at no cost (who isn’t glad of a bit few extra bytes). Don’t worry, it’s not a data compression program, it merely removes all the extra language files you don’t use/need, and you’d be surprised how they add up. Install it, fire it up and tick the boxes. I usually dump everything but English (obviously) and as I’m an Intel based Mac guy now all the old PPC (G4 & G5) architectures too.  Read more... (estimated reading time 49 secs)