Search: os-x

In-Home Photography Studio and Hiring a Maid Service

This article was written by Flexo in Frugality. 10 comments.

I’ve rearranged my dining room to function as a small photography studio. I haven’t had much time, but this metamorphosis should give me more opportunities to practice photography. Since this might involve people visiting my home, I finally stopped procrastinating and called a maid service. Upon some recommendations, I found a local office of Maids.com. They will be sending over a four-person team tomorrow, which also forces me to organize my living space a little bit more today.

The service is a little more expensive than I expected. After tomorrow, though, I’ll have a good indication of whether it will be worthwhile to have a regular cleaning schedule.

Part of the reason for my procrastination is the idea that I should be able to clean the apartment myself, but in reality, I just don’t do it well enough. I have no problem calling in the professionals — and paying for it — as long as they perform better than I would, save me time, and have an affordable service.

Here are some interesting articles I’ve enjoyed recently.

Four Expenses You Must Negotiate. This list by Miranda Marquit includes medical bills. This is one type of negotiation I have not tried — mostly because almost all of my medical bills are simply handled by my insurance company and I have had very few out-of-pocket expenses. The Health Care Blue Book allows people to search for the average price of any medical procedure in the local area, which might be able to help with negotiation the same way the Kelley Blue Book can often aid with car price negotiation.

Will Mac OS X Lion Kill Quicken 2007? Nickel points out that the newest version of the Apple computer operating system will prevent Mac users from running Quicken 2007, the last full version of Quicken for Mac. Quicken Essentials for Mac was released more recently, but the software is missing many features that many Quicken users have come to rely upon. Nickel is looking for replacement software to avoid working around the problem using Parallels, but I think he’ll be disappointed. Without Microsoft Money being developed, there is no serious alternative for those who use the deepest features of Quicken.

How Much Should You Spend on Self-Improvement? J.D. asks his readers this question. Self-improvement is an important piece of living a satisfied life. It is valuable to evaluate yourself and decide what needs to be changed to be the “ideal you.” I think most of self-improvement is based on gimmicky motivational programs. I will spend money for classes to improve my skills, like in photography, but I will not spend money for seminars to improve my sense of self or my productivity.

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Happy Snow Leopard Day

This article was written by Smithee in Software. 6 comments.

For the increasing number of Mac users in the audience, today’s the day to start deciding whether you want to upgrade your operating system: “Snow Leopard” is on the scene.

Number-wise, this is a move to OS 10.6. It will only work on Apple computers with an Intel processor and at least 1 GB of RAM. For anybody whose Mac came with 10.5 (Leopard), this should include you. And for you, it’s a $29 upgrade. (Users of 10.4 “Tiger” will need to spend more if they want to upgrade, but it’s still possible.)

The $29 fee is kind of a double-edged sword for me: it’s the cheapest operating system upgrade of, I think, my entire life. And yet, because it’s so inexpensive, that must mean it’s not necessarily worthwhile. Apple’s been pretty upfront about that, though… most of the changes are pretty boring.

Here’s what I recommend for right now:

Find yourself a good, detailed review of the Snow Leopard features
Wait at least a week and keep your ear to the ground for problems people are having: I’ll be watching my Apple friends on Twitter and this part of the macnn.com forum.
Not sure how often this will be updated, but I also found a list of programs that we know don’t work (or are restricted) with Snow Leopard
If you can manage it without losing any software, I strong recommend doing a clean install that wipes your hard drive first. In my experience–and I used to do this for a living–the only reason to upgrade an operating system (as opposed to a clean install), is to document what goes wrong.

Personally, I’ll be watching to see what new gee-whiz features Apple will soon introduce that won’t work on anything earlier than 10.6.

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Just Like Apple’s MobileMe, But Free

This article was written by Smithee in Software. 7 comments.

For the purposes of this article, the term “iPhone” includes “iPod Touch”, and I’m assuming that your operating systems are up to date.

Along with new firmware for existing iPhone owners, and the new iPhone 3G itself, Apple is releasing this week a new service called “MobileMe”, succinctly described as “Exchange for the rest of us.” In short, it automatically syncs your contacts, calendar, e-mail and photos between your home computer and/or work computer and/or iPhone. It stores these items in a 20 GB cloud of data and is smart enough to push updates to you from any of these categories, wherever you are, as long as you have an Internet connection or cell phone signal.

mobileme It sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, it costs $99 (US) a year for one person or $149 for a Family Pack. Calendars and contacts don’t take up much hard drive space, but between e-mail attachments and photos, it wouldn’t be that hard to bump up against the 20 GB ceiling, and it’s $49 for another 20 GB (or $99 for another 40 GB). As of this writing, a 500 GB hard drive goes for around $100. I will admit that managed data storage should be more expensive than buying yourself a hard drive, but twelve times as expensive?

I think we should hold off on signing up for MobileMe for a little while, because if the goal is automatic syncing of your contacts, calendar, e-mail and photos, I predict Google and Yahoo! are going to make this possible for free (and probably with “unlimited” data storage) in the near future. Taking each one in turn:

E-mail

If you use GMail (and I believe everybody should, even if your e-mail address is at a different domain), your e-mail is already syncing with GMail on your iPhone. Having it automatically pushed to your phone isn’t happening, yet, but it will be possible for all applications to take advantage of the “cloud computing” scenario that Apple designed for the iPhone. Do you suspect that Google won’t make a GMail app for the iPhone with push e-mail?

Contacts

With the update to OS X 10.5.3, you can already sync your contacts between your iCal (and by extension, the iPhone) and Google. See previous comment about future push scenarios, but for the time being, it would be a weird kind of emergency needed to make a lack of push technology a serious problem in this arena.

Calendar

I actually originate my calendar with Google Calendar, and subscribe to it in iCal, and by extension, my iPhone. See previous comment about future push scenarios, but Google already has a nicely iPhone-formatted version of the Calendar that loads in the Web browser.

Photos

This is probably the first thing that made me second-guess my temptation to subscribe to MobileMe, mainly because I love my Flickr account. It’s got a long history, and all my friends are there, etc. I can already e-mail photos from my iPhone to Flickr using a customized e-mail address, so that could hardly be simpler. Even so, it appears that Flickr has every intention of making their site as friendly as possible for the iPhone.

Now, I’m merely speculating that Google will come out with native iPhone apps that mimic most of the functionality of MobileMe, but look at Google’s track record. They try everything, and succeed at most of them. My plan as described may not be as elegant as a MobileMe account, but I think it’ll be just as easy, and it’ll cost 100% less.

This is only a prediction. Don’t blame me if I’m wrong. But unless you know something I don’t about Google’s plans, it’d still be smart to wait a month or so and see what they have to offer.

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