iMac

As you can see, there's no new post for today. I think you'll forgive me if you know the reason. Basically, back in March, there were a number of storms, and we lost power for several days, followed by its going on and off a couple of times before finally being restored for good. Even though I have a surge protector, my trusty iMac was never the same after that. It booted incredibly slowly and ran so slowly as to be virtually unusable. It crashed a lot. Over the next few months, I tried all sorts of things. You might ask why I didn't simply try reformatting the hard drive and doing a clean…
What are the best applications, free or cheap, to install on your iMac for basic tasks and productivity? This post is to guide you in the careful and considered upgrade to your newly acquired iMac or other Mac OSX machine, especially for non-Mac experts. For each of the categories of work you may want to do with your computer, I suggest a number of applications beginning, where possible, with the applications already on your computer, then moving on to free alternatives, then inexpensive paid alternatives. In many cases there is a high end expensive alternative that is probably very wonderful…
UPDATE: Linux Install. Installing Copy on Linux was pretty easy. You go to the web page, download a tarball, upack it, then inside the tarball figure out the folder that matches your OS (i.e., 32 vs 64 bit) and go into that folder. Then run the Agent. That may, if you are good, put a thingie on your notification area. Click on that and then sign in and install and stuff, that's it. There are two pages you might find useful, one for Ubuntu the other for Copy more generally if needed. Notably, the install on Linux was easier for Copy than for Dropbox. Dropbox install LOOKS easy but never…
The last couple of days have been very busy, as you might have guessed from my brief (for me) post on Tuesday and my—shall we say?—appropriation of a post to use for yesterday. Today's going to be the same, but for more pleasant reasons than having had to go out to dinner with a visiting professor and being out until 10:30 PM and slaving away at grant applications. Last night an unexpected surprise arrived. Well, it wasn't a surprise that it arrived; it was a surprise that it arrived yesterday, as I hadn't expected it until today, and a couple of weeks ago I hadn't expected it before the end…