The Raging Tech

Consumerist: 7 Confessions of an Apple Store Specialist

Consumer watch-dog website Consumerist has an informative article about things every consumer that shops in an Apple Store should know.

My favorite part:

1. If you fill out the survey and rank us 6 or lower, a manager will call you the same day or the next, corporate policy.
They usually will ask why you had a bad experience, and offer to make it better, usually by discounting something or another for you.

Check out the other 6 confessions over at Consumerist, and be sure to bookmark their site. It’s one of my favorites that I read from time to time.

I can also tell you, as a former hardware technician that dealt with Apple a lot, your Apple Care does NOT cover accidental damage. If you trip and fall and break the screen, you’re out of luck. If you accidentally spill coffee on your MacBook, you’ve just lost a lot of money. If you accidentally knock over your Mac Pro desktop and something comes loose and hits a logic board component and now it won’t boot - too bad. Apple Care only covers hardware failure by faulty part.

My recommendation: if you do buy a Mac laptop, put it under your home owner’s insurance, and make sure you keep back-ups with Time Machine or some other back-up app.

What’s So Great About Open Source, Anyway?

Today an article on Slashdot talks about how Sun is (finally) fully open-sourcing Java within this calendar year. For those not familiar, Java is a programming language used by a lot of different programmers and companies. You probably use Java at work or at home in some shape or form and don’t even know it.

Why is it significant that they’re open-sourcing Java? Because for years red tape and bureaucracy kept Java from being free to the world. You could write code in it for free, but you couldn’t just outright include it or make it available with an operating system, for example, because of the licensing. You also couldn’t see the source code behind the language or any of Sun’s proprietary JVM (the run-time environment Java executes it’s code in) to better understand how it works.

So you see, open-sourcing Java removes those barricades and lets coders see how it works by looking at it’s source code, and thus will be able to write better, more efficient Java programs. And better programs means less aggravation for you and me.

Oh, another cool thing about Java? It’s cross-platform, so it can usually run whatever you’ve made in Java on a Mac, a PC, Linux, a hand-held PDA device, cell phones, and even some really cool appliances. It’s only a matter of time until SkyNet launches and we all get rounded up by the Terminators.

Get the Menu Back in Internet Explorer 7

I know this is a completely dumb Windows tip, and most of you have probably already figured this out. I was helping a lady today who was not familiar with Windows because she normally uses a Mac. She had accidentally hidden the menu bar (File, Edit, Tools, etc.) in Internet Explorer 7.

It’s really quite simple: Just right-click on the open space beside your open web page title, and select “Menu Bar” from the pop-up menu.

You should now have your menu back that you’re used to from IE 6 and previous versions. Also note that the only menu I ever use is “Tools,” which is now located on the right even if the Menu Bar is disabled.

One Rank to Rule Them All

Previously mentioned Izea Ranks, is set to trump all other ranking systems. Alexa, Google Page Rank, Technorati, Blogjuice, and the other myriad of ranking systems are starting to get nervous, maybe even a little sweaty, over newcomer Izea Ranks.

These other ranking systems all have their prolific search engine-based ranking algorithms and fancy mathematical formulas that basically add up to bloggers and other web site owners having to kiss-up to the ranking provider, and live and die by their numbers.

Those systems might still be well and good, after all, they’ve been mostly good to me (I’m glaring at you, Google). But when you’re a blogger and your livelyhood is based on how popular your blog is, you want a metric that’s actually based on your blog traffic and not whether or not the ranking provider likes you or the way you run things.

Enter Izea Ranks - just install a simple piece of javascript code into your blog’s template (don’t worry, it’s not that complicated - they provide you with instructions) and then within a day or two, you’ll start getting statistics on your blog’s popularity within the blogosphere.

It’s exciting to get daily updates on where you stand, as opposed to waiting 3 or 4 months for a certain company to get off their “google” and update your page rank. That way, you can see what is and is not effective at attracting visitors to your site. This allows blog owners to be dynamic and quick-change artists who can effectively draw traffic and page views.

One of the best things about a daily update though, is that it gives a certain sense of satisfaction to my competitive side. Something about looking at my rank and knowing that there’s thousands upon thousands of blogs that aren’t doing as well as me makes me happy. I know that’s unsportsman-like, but you know you’d do the same thing.

I challenge you other blog owners out there to sign-up for Izea Ranks and install the code, and see how you stack up against The Raging Tech.

iMovie Festival 2008

Last night I attended the first annual iMovie Festival at the university at which I am employed. It’s not the first ever held, just the first one here. I have to say, it was pretty enjoyable.

I was expecting a series of more and more horrible films, and maybe a few shining-star examples that would probably win it all. Instead, I found a quirky set of five films that all had to include the phrase “over at the UC” (short for University Center) and at least one Apple product.

The first film was about a couple of guys hanging out and deciding to go get some food, then go up to a cliff to hang out and talk about serious life-goal type stuff. And of course, some kids are rolling along, and one guy is driving  while texting and he ends up hitting them. It was all very dramatic.

The second film was about “Urban Parkour” - although I suspect either these guys were very bad at it, or just mocking it. It wasn’t quite clear enough to be “laughed with” instead of “laughed at.” There was also a lot of really annoying slow-motion and bad techno music behind it.

The third film was called “Mozzerella Mahem,” about an undercover sting operation to bust an illegal cocaine-disguised-as-cheese ring based out of a pizza parlor. The cop is of course, discovered, and when the dealers try to run away, he busts out into an overly-elaborate action movie fight scene. Which, I might add, was really bad, but really funny.

The fourth film was by the campus Apple student rep, who did a film about possible meanings for the letters “UC” - it was okay. Some of the parts of this film were funny, at least. It was mostly just him looking into his iSight camera on his Mac and talking. The black & white filter and stylings were nice. Not terribly impressed though. I give him points for creativity.

The fifth and final film was probably saved for last on purpose. It was pretty awesome for what it was. The production value was nice for their budget and equipment. It was kind of a “Deadman’s Curve” meets “The Ring” meets every other film where they use that ghostly black-hair-over-the-face girl that crawls around really fast in stop-motion. But still, the makers of this film did a really good job.

And rightly so, because they won this competition and an iPod Touch - while the runner-up got an iPod Nano and the rest of the competitors got Shuffles.

Grand Theft Button: Windows Tips

Those of you who have not yet upgraded to Vista, or are like me and dwindle between XP and Vista lands, you probably encounter this problem whenever you copy files: if you’re copying files into a folder where those files already exist, you get a dialog box.

This box usually says something along the lines of “Are you sure you want to copy this file? It’s going to overwrite an existing file. Are you sure?” followed by “Yes,” “Yes to All,” and “No.” But what if you want to say “No” to all of the files you are copying? There’s no “No to All” button. If you’re in Vista, this has been taken care of with a redesigned and more specific and helpful dialog box.

On XP, you can simply hold down the “Shift” key while clicking on “No,” and it magically knows you mean “No to All” and will take action accordingly. I ran into this tip on Lifehacker today, and it struck me as useful.

Also, my friend has an article over on his blog about using CTRL+ALT+END during a remote desktop session since CTRL+ALT+DEL will bring up the task manager on the local machine instead of the remote session. Alternatively, you can load up the “Run” dialog from the start menu and type in “taskmgr” and get the same thing. Check out that post for more windows tips.

Take Control of Firefox Extensions

If you’re not already on the Firefox bandwagon, get on it! One of the safest, coolest web browsers out there, Firefox is steadily gaining ground in the browser wars. Firefox is extremely extensible through add-ons, or “extensions.”

There are a plethora of Firefox extensions out there - ad-blocking software, user-scripting software, bookmark plug-ins, tab managing software, and software that modifies the way certain web pages behave to download files you normally couldn’t.

Once you find the extensions you like best, it’s best if you back them up so that you can install them again later without hunting all over the place. The easiest way to do this is when you go to download the extension, instead of left-clicking, right-click on the download link and choose “Save Link As” and saving the resulting file with a .XPI file extension. Back these up to a folder, maybe name it “Firefox Extensions” and then double-click each to execute the installation of the extension in FireFox.

But what happens if these extensions go haywire and wreck your FireFox? If you’d like to trace down the location of the files used by your Firefox extensions, a simple about:config tweak will let you see the full system path to the files. CNET also has an excellent article on using Process Explorer from Microsoft to take back control of runaway processes.