High Altitude Brain Damage

So, the three of us going to Denali are participating in a study regarding the effects of high altitude on the brain. They don't really consider Denali to be "high altitude", and I try not to take offense at that, while they sit in their posh

iButton

I just ordered an iButton temperature logger (looks like a large watch battery) and a USB reader. Set at a 15 minute interval, the iButton should be able to record the temperature for over forty days without exhausting its internal memory. The battery is rated to last for a decade.

GPS Stagnation

As far as I can tell, hand-held trail-style GPS units peaked with the Garmin GPSMap 60csx. Pictured is my old GPSMap 60cs (no 'x') on the top of Mauna Loa. It is rugged, beautiful and functional. Since its release Garmin has produced iPhone-style GPS units with touch screens

Traveling Light

The Brunton Solaris 26 foldable solar panel arrived while I was in Los Angeles this past week. I took it up on the roof today to try it out with the iPod power cable and my iPhone. Like magic, my phone started charging - which is amazing, given how hazy

A Book

My mind is made up (and subject to change): I'll bring along an iPod Nano to Alaska. However, I still have to decide about a book. It's safe to say I'll regret not bringing one. I have a shiny new copy of Atlas Shrugged

Words

I wrote an Objective-C program to parse all of my iChat log files (necessary because the format is a binary property list that I really didn't want to have to parse by hand) which go back to early 2005 (the pre-2005 logs are backed up elsewhere and in

Mail

Due to years of POP3 use and a rough transition to IMAP, I ended up with thousands of duplicate emails scattered across hundreds of mailboxes. Much like my desire to replace my boss at the AJC with a small shell script, I reduced this task to something similar: mail.pl.

iChat

A couple versions back, Apple updated iChat so that instead of just storing each chat log in a "flat" directory, it organized them by date. Of course, it didn't go through the potentially thousands of chat logs you already had and update their organization accordingly. So

Mac vs PC

I've fallen prey to this conversation (which usually quickly becomes an argument) more than once. Is there a "Mac Tax"? Do Macs cost more than PCs? Etc. Someone apparently put together a fairly comprehensive review of the matter in response to Microsoft's recent attempt

Happy [Early] Birthday, GMail!

Five years ago (tomorrow), Google surprised us with the biggest April Fool's joke ever: a free email account with 1GB of space. It was unheard of at the time. Everyone knew it was a joke. For the next several months, those all-valuable GMail invitations were being sold, pawned