The Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000 is a reasonably priced (under US$40) USB stereo headset and microphone. Microsoft doesn't provide any Mac drivers so I just plugged it in to a Macbook to see if it worked. You can see from the screen caps here that both Garageband (iLife '08) and Audacity 1.2.5 recognized and worked with the device. You can...

Forgotten in the mythology of Oakland--the high violent crime rate, and the barrios that gave birth to the Black Panthers--is the fact that this is a thriving city. San Francisco, across the Bay, casts a long shadow. It's hard to compete with a sibling so graceful and talented. It's also hard to overcome Gertrude Stein's pithy epigram about the lack...

it all started with Vernor Vinge's keynote address at Austin GDC 2006. this fascinating lecture discussed current technology trends and probable future developments ... and got me thinking about the future of mobile audio.

I had set this year as the year I would become Microsoft free. I have nothing against Microsoft --- there were just some products I wanted to stop using: IE, Office, and Windows.

Reader M.M. asks where one can find a developer to build an Entourage script. But, my advice is to wait until Office 2008 for Mac is released on Jan. 15, 2008.

You'd think that NSLog would write to stderr, right? Right? Um, no. At least not on the iPhone. This morning I spent way too much time trying to figure out why my freopen([logPath fileSystemRepresentation], "a", stderr); line wasn't working and redirecting NSLog output to my log file.

There is a fantastic, informative article in the current issue of Wired (16.01) written by David Byrne, the former leader of the band The Talking Heads. David does a great job of providing perspective (by an established artist) on the changes that are taking place in the music business in recent years that allow artists to be more empowered, and...

If you suddenly find that your ftp listings no longer work right, and the BLasted-UnnamEd-HOSTing service won't take responsibility for fixing httpd.conf, you can fix things by adding the variable definitions to .htaccess files yourself.

Microsoft's Office Live Workspace stores, shares, and displays Microsoft Office documents on the web. And, it works with Firefox on a Mac.

When your Mac is central to your home, it only seems natural to decorate it for the holidays. Historically, the Mac has enjoyed lots of creative holiday-themed enhancements, and Mac OS X continues the tradition.