Steve Jobs is sick, and may never come back. Apple's a consumer company with high-end products in a bad economy. But the reality of why the company's being punished in the stock market may be nothing more than the Yin-Yang of Apple's Reality Distortion Field at work.

The current AirPort base station combined with iTunes, Apple TV, the iPhone, a handful of printers, and powered speakers have enabled me to configure an "upstairs/downstairs" network complete with printing and remote-controlled music streaming. Here's an overview.

Windows 7 Beta runs surprisingly well on Mac with only 512MB virtual RAM allocated to Windows 7 by VMware Fusion. VirtualBox also works but has more quirks. If you need Windows on a Mac for a specific app, read on...

Reader Petra Hildebrandt recently suggested that I share with you a few of my favourite freeware applications. Since yesterday's post was about networking and troubleshooting, it seems only appropriate to continue in the same vein and look at a few tools that can neatly assist the budding trouble-shooter. Much like yesterday, none of it may be earth-shattering, but I find...

Once the news was out that Apple would pull out of Macworld Expo after this year's show, and that it was Phil Schiller, and not Steve Jobs, who would present the keynote speech, many assumed that there were no major announcements to be expected from Apple at this event. And still, I was surprised to overhear discussions about how "underwhelming," "boring," or simply "weird" the presentation was. After all, what Apple did announce were solid upgrades to existing products and even a bit more. Let me highlight three cool things presented last Tuesday.

Thanks to its UNIX underpinnings, Mac OS X is a remarkably robust network client. I knew not what this really meant until I had to build a QuickTime streaming server broadcasting all around France over a NAT-protected WiFi link crossing the Seine river and get it to play music in front of the national press. However, despite its outstanding resiliency,...

In recent months, my MacBook has occasionally slowed down to a sleepy snail's crawl: applications would respond with a major lag, switching between applications would take a few seconds, and the time for launching another application -- including Activity Monitor for hunting down the culprit -- could be measured in minutes. I still have not found a general root cause for this behavior yet, but force-shutting down and rebooting would always get the machine back to its proper performance without any further problems. The last time I had to apply this remedy, though, I could no longer log into my main user account after the machine had rebooted. And this was just minutes after I had left Phil Schiller's keynote, looking at a full week of Macworld Expo '09 still ahead of me. Bad timing, really bad timing...

Wow, CNET's Rafe Needleman sure raised a ruckus with his Mac switcher's lament article. If you are thinking about moving from a Windows PC to a Mac and want to avoid the feeling of lament, read on, I have some advice that might help you make the change.

The current economic climate and the old-world flair of traditional trade shows are often blamed for Macworld's slow, and somewhat humiliating, demise. After its move back to Boston — a thinly masked prelude to the cancellation of its east coast edition —, its original version is now widely suspected to be on its last legs. Certainly, IDG has announced there...

I sometimes want to move large files (digital video home movies and virtual hard disks) between my Mac and my PC. Unfortunately, OS X can read NTFS but not write to it. Fortunately, the free and Open Source NTFS-3G combined with MacFUSE solves this issue very nicely.