Making Your iPhone, iPad or Mac Sound Better

iTunes icon with blue sunbeamsAside from being made by Apple, what do an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and an iMac have in common? They all have tiny speakers. Even my Mac Mini has a tiny speaker, but it’s audio out is connect to a monitor – WITH TINY SPEAKERS. All day long, it seems that I’m surrounded by tiny speakers. They have a sound that rattles as if it was emanating from a tin can. Fortunately, there’s a setting to help mitigate that problem.

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A Warning To Apple TV Owners

iOS Remote App IconIt looks like Apple is gearing up to take the Apple TV seriously. The price of the device dropped from $99 to $69, HBO Now will be available on Apple TV next month and there are all sorts of neat rumors about Apple TV improvements for later this year. Yet, I realized something about Apple TV features. It doesn’t matter how many channels Apple adds to the Apple TV. Without a working remote, I couldn’t access any of them. The recent Apple TV update was met with frustration.

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Happy Pi Day – A Developer’s Perspective

Pi Day - 3.14Today is March 14, 2015. It’s a day that has mathematicians abuzz. In the United States style of writing dates, today is also know as 3/14/15. If you forget about that whole Y2K thing, the date is very similar to the first few digits of Pi. That’s 3.1415. For the extra fanatical, 9:26 AM (or even PM) adds a few digits to the end. However, there are lots of nonterminating decimals in the universe. What’s so special about Pi?

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Are We Really Living In Exponental Technological Growth?

Thumbnail - Emoji Surprised ChartIt seems like a silly question to ask. As I type this from an extremely thin and powerful portable computer, do I really have to wonder if I’m living in the future? I can speak to a machine and it will respond to my commands. Run computations… done. Play 80’s music… done. Find the nearest pizzeria… done. Nothing like this has been possible before… or has it? Supposedly, if technology is growing fast now, it should grow even faster in the future. But as I look back at the last two decades of tech, what has really changed?

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Upgrading My Early 2009 Mac Mini (Again)

Activity Monitor and System Preferences IconsWhile I’m happy with the new iPad Air 2, and it has seriously cut down my desktop usage, I still need a traditional computer to get work done. The problem was that my Mac was running slow. It’s over five years old. I thought about getting a new Mac, but the new models didn’t impressed me. They’re either too expensive for my budget or not a significant improvement over the earlier Macs. To save money, but boost performance, I decided to upgrade my Mac Mini.

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