Awhile back I purchased a Blue Snowball mic and I have to say, it’s pretty awesome. I just did some recording of a screencast for a client, and the sound was MUCH better than the laptop sound.

It’s convenient in that it’s USB powered (though I’ve grown into needing a powered USB hub at home to extend the two slots on my laptop), and it has a good sound to it. Plus I use it for Skype and people can hear me now. Added bonus (sort of) is that my laptop has started to make a buzzing noise (fan issues) and so the external mic eliminates that noise, which the built in mic can’t help but pick up.

Downsides are that it isn’t that portable or geared towards conference calls, but is still a good addition for while at the home or office.

Who knows, I might even try my hand at podcasting in the near future!

Seems obvious, but I’m looking through CVs at the moment for a client and a ton of people just name their PDF or DOC file of their CV something like CV.pdf. How silly and wasteful of my time as the one doing the hiring, as I have to rename it with your name when I file it. Give it a meaningful name and make the lives of the people doing the hiring much easier!

Make it easier and give obvious names to your CV files when you submit them.

I popped into the Apple Store the other day to have a look at portable hard drives and their backpacks and related gear. While I really like the Osprey pack I bought to replace my trusty Timbuk2 bag, it isn’t built for laptop road warrior use and it’s more than a bit awkward as the framework for my portable office-on-a-back.

Anywho, I was shocked at the amount of people just using the machines to check email and surf the internet. Just about every demo machine was being used as if we were in some sort of high-end internet cafe. Pretty funny. I think I even saw someone writing a blog post.

Guess if you’re in a pinch and need on the ‘net, you can head to the Apple Store on Regent Street.

Apple has just released their latest security update to close a security vulnerability discovered via the Pwn2Own hacker competition – via the Apple Type Service.

Run Software Update, restart, and you should be covered.

More at H-Online and at ComputerWorld.

Apple’s released their new chipsets for the Mac Book Pro — long overdue. Only they neglected the 13 inch MBP model, instead saving Intel’s Core i5 and i7 chips for the 15inch and 17inch models.

I like the screen real estate of my 15inch (older, non-unibody) MacBook Pro, but my back’s been complaining about the amount of weight I end up carrying around. The 13inch is that much more portable and lighter (without, say, trying to move to an iPad while out of the office) and so was my target for my next mac.

Maybe I can just add a bigger hard drive and get a new battery for my current MBP and hold out to see if there will be an upgrade in the next 6 months?

Off the back of a post on Tungle over at Lawyerist by Allison Shields I’ve been giving the service a try. One week in, and I’m liking it quite a bit. It’s a service to help you schedule meetings across several people and advertise your availability to others.

To me it’s a bit like a supercharged Doodle, which I’ve been using for awhile to help schedule meetings. The added advantage with Tungle is that if your schedule changes so too does your availability for meetings you’re trying to book, which is super handy when trying to book something with those late-to-reply people who end up having you hold multiple slots open for a meeting or make you rebook because you’ve already scheduled something else. Plus Tungle looks better.

The connector program for the Mac is in beta, and has stuck on me a few times but more or less runs smoothly. Currently it refers you to the Tungle website when scheduling, I’d like to see a way to schedule meetings directly on my machine. Syncing works pretty well with iCal back and forth.

Right now, there doesn’t appear to be a pricing model attached, so not sure what direction it will head, but this is a great idea, and well implemented.

You can find me at: http://tungle.me/jordanhatcher

This posted started because I was going through my MobileMe settings for an unrelated reason today and discovered Back to My Mac.

It allows for remote access to your machine and apparently it can even be used to catch a thief. My rough impression is that it seems like it is a lighter version of Apple Remote Destop or VNC.

I don’t usually have a need to remote access my machine that much — it’s a laptop and so if it isn’t with me it is usually just shut off. And if it is off with the lid closed, it ain’t likely going to wake up again (though I’m assuming if it was asleep with a network cable attached, it could?).

That being said, I am starting to not take my laptop with me when I’m out of the office for meetings. It’s heavy and I’m frankly trying to save my lower back. Instead just use my iPhpone. Between Safari, Mail, MobileMe, iCal, Address book, and all the other goodies like OmniFocus on my phone I find I don’t need my laptop unless it’s for something specific (such as a presentation).

Now that I’m leaving it behind more, I now can see some limited need to leave my laptop on and be able to access it from my phone, even if just to access files or to have it as a spam filter.

Anyone have any suggestions or further thoughts?

Cnet has a post comparing the old iBook’s to today’s netbook trend. My trusty 12 inch Powerbook was the same — and I’d recommend it over the iBook for probably around the same price. They are faster and feel much more durable as well as being about the same weight.

Mine lasted, after 4+ years, still 3-4 hours on the battery and weighed less than 5 pounds on its own (though they don’t call the charger a brick for nothing). It was fast enough for netbook activities (surfing email and word processing), though when I switched to an MBP I realised it was slower than what I could have.

It unfortunately kicked up a memory problem with the graphics card earlier this year, which since it is integrated into the logic board means an expensive logic board replacement. But instead of a netbook, maybe I’ll just go for a repair? The downside though is being on a PPC machine when Apple has moved solely over to Intel with the Snow Leopard release.

I don’t get a lot of spam, as I actively try to keep most of my email addresses off the internet (and thus keeping them away from screenscrapers). Some of my accounts (I have 8+) are relatively immune, as they’ve never been signed up to email lists or given out to more than a few people.

But I’m not immune. I get about 50-100/week. Apple Mail’s filters have been doing a good job, but lately in the past few months about 5 get through a day, not counting the rules I had to create to eliminate spam from people like (spammers) LawCrossing or Affluence.org who refuse to actually remove people when requested.

So one quick search and a trip to Hawk Wings and enter SpamSieve for a test run. Only one day into it, but it is getting trained up and doing a pretty awesome job so far. It uses a different type of filtering (Bayesian) than Apple Mail so that’s part of the trick.

It also has a handy guide to integrating it with your iPhone (though it involves leaving a computer running back at home…).

I’ll give it a go over the next 30 day trial period to see how it goes.

This is crazy. I almost can’t believe and am assuming I am missing something. I upgraded to Snow Leopard last week, but today was the first day I had to search for a term in Preview, Apple’s PDF viewer. It is horrible! They have some new features in Preview I like with the search (page relevance for one), but I want the list of hits along the side — with surrounding text just like with Google — not what they have now which is just the pages. It makes searching through large legal documents very difficult without word matches on the side.

So much so I’ll have to find a Preview replacement unless there is a hidden way to enable this feature.

The annoying bit is on the side: