Legacy IM accounts - end of the road?
I’ve had an ICQ instant messenger account since the early days of instant messaging. I remember the day I signed up (and coaxed a friend into doing the same) and thought it was such a cool ability to be able to message someone instantly from computer to computer. Email suddenly seemed so slow in comparison. Of course, these were the days of dial-up internet so unless your friends were actively online (and had their ICQ program turned on) it was often of limited usefulness, but as the years wore on and always-on internet became a reality I used it more and more. At one point ICQ seemed to be the defacto standard for anyone wanting to instant message. However, as the

“Twin” backup for Mac - $70 in the toilet.
I’m an avid user of Time Machine to keep all of my media (most importantly, digital pictures dating back 15 years, and scanned images dating back nearly 20 years) backed up and safe, but a few months ago I started to consider the possible issues of having a backup sitting right next to the source. In a situation of hardware failure on our iMac, the Time Machine backup is indispensable - simply fix the hard drive, and restore. However, in a situation of double-hardware failure (unlikely, but possible), corruption (again, unlikely, but possible), or (hopefully never) catastrophic loss of our household contents, a local-based backup is going to prove rather useless. I n

Elgato H.264 - Well, that sure helps!
One of the niceties of the latest version of iMovie was that it (Finally) recognizes my JVC hard drive camcorder natively, meaning that I no longer need to go through the tedious (and painfully slow) process of converting it’s oddly formatted files into .dv files in order to work with them directly in iMovie, or any video editing program, for that matter. When I bought this camcorder back in 2007 I was quite frustrated with the stupid file format that JVC decided to utilize, and frankly, I was surprised that Apple chose to update iMovie to fully support the fact that this camcorder is USB connected (typically OS X only played ni

Best aborted takeoff video you’ll see all day.
Came across this video on YouTube a few days ago. Observations: - The dust that blows back over the aircraft after it runs off into the dirt indicates they were trying to take off with a tail wind. - The crew didn’t put the props into beta when they rejected the takeoff which would have slowed the aircraft more and would perhaps have avoided the over run to begin with. Perhaps there was a reason (I’d be interested to know) as I’ll admit I’m not a specialist on large turboprop multi’s. - For reportedly being a small airport in South Africa in a shanty-town area, the emergency response vehicle is on top of things extremely