Stephen Yeargin

This is likely the longest amount of consecutive time I have spent in front of a computer not owned by my employer in two months. I am not actually accomplishing much, just leisurely perusing the Internet. The last two months have been rather expensive with the move and whatnot, but has been far less financially [...]

I have learned an important (and somewhat expensive) lesson about buying appliances. Nothing to do with the brands or features, but rather the simple engineering problem of an item of a fixed size needing to fit into a fixed size space. If the space is smaller than the item, even by a little, one of [...]

For the last week or two I have been watching podcasts from Stanford University on iPhone Application Programming (CS 193P). The videos are recordings of an actual class at the university, where the instructors are Apple employees who have developed for the platform. I have now watched six hours worth, so I think I am [...]

Apple has quietly added a “feature” to their latest round of MacBooks to prevent customers from playing digital rights managed (DRM) movies purchased through their iTunes Store on non-compliant external displays. The goal is to plug the so-called “analog loophole” that would allow someone to record the video output for illegal distribution. [via Wired.com and [...]

That block on the right side of my Web site keeps a running tab of what is currently pumping through my headphones. Granted, I may not actually be there to listen as I often forget to pause iTunes before I leave the apartment in the morning. There is a small plugin I wrote to get [...]

Here are my late-breaking predictions for the Apple “Let’s Rock” event tomorrow (September 9). I did not come up with any of the original ideas for these. They are merely a rehashing of what is already circulating around the Internet leading up to the event. Skinny iPod nano – The short, chunky version lacked the [...]

My wife is of the opinion that if my Mac mini is slow, it probably has to do with what all I have loaded on it. Fair enough, as I am using a (mostly) unmodified version of the default personal Web server for testing purposes. I have resisted installing MAMP because there is a perfectly [...]

I should be writing this on my Mac mini. But I am not. It should have all of my data restored from Time Machine, snapped back in time to just before the hard disk drive failed. But it does not. My fairly expensive, midrange computer hyped as fantastic because “it just works” should be back [...]

Two lines have defined the weekend. The first was on Friday in Green Hills at the Apple Store, where we waited thirty minutes or so to line up a “Genius” at the Genius Bar to have a look at my Mac mini. The diagnosis was not good, but expected. The hard drive had keeled over [...]

If your local Web server was running Apache/MySQL/PHP before installing Leopard and is suddenly dead to the world, here are the quick steps to get it working again. Mileage may vary. 1. Edit /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf using your favorite text editor. Line 114: Uncomment (remove the “#” from in front): LoadModule php5_module   libexec/apache2/libphp5.so Line 203: Edit the “None” declaration [...]