Michael Miller

I've been given a lot of labels over the 10+ years that I've been helping people with their technology. IT consultant, network administrator, Mac Wizard, nerd. But the most common, really, boils it down pretty well: "The computer guy is here, and he's doing something."

Maintaining Your Mac: a Boring Guide

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Recently, I had to buy a new car. Well, a car, as it’s only new if the first ten years of something’s life don’t count. In which case, huzzah! I’m still in my twenties.

Outside of that though, it wasn’t a new car, it wasn’t all that expensive, and boy, was it in great shape. In such great shape, in fact, that my trusty old VW Golf – which had been making horrible sounds that universally caused new passengers about five minutes of alarm and asking ‘No, really, are you sure it’s okay?’ – seemed to rise up, Jacob Marley like, from the metal grave to which it had been consigned to shame me for its ill treatment. It was nearly the same age, after all, and the only reason for the discrepancy (outside of the fact that I drive an absolutely insane amount, I suppose) is that I was much more of the school that as long as I could squeeze the last remaining, clanking, staggering miles out of the vehicle, well then, why take it in for repair?

We don’t really need to go into why that’s dumb. It is. Very. When you own a car, you factor in more than just the cost of purchasing it, but of gas, insurance, tires, and if you’re not a moron, maintenance. Thank you Captain Obvious, yes I know.

But it made me think about similar Total Cost of Ownership considerations for a computer. The obvious ones are there, of course – computer, internet connection, printer, and so on. Then the not-so-obvious but even more critical backups. What about maintenance? Smart people ask me about what they can do for their computers all the time.

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Set your Google privacy settings

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Note: This is a quick and dirty guide. We’ll be improving it a smidge over the up-coming days, to make it easier to understand!   First, log into your google account. You should be able to do that from just about any page with the word ‘google’ in it, including plain old google.com. If you … Read more

SOPA Strike

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Yesterday, I opted into taking our business site down for yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA strike, a decidedly political move. It’s not like outofajam.net being down is going to affect anyone or anything. I mean, the Google bot might be miffed as it crawls the web, but that’s about it. For me (who wields no political power whatsoever), … Read more

Converting PDF to Word Documents

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It might not be helpful to start out by making this point, but I can’t help myself: the trick to converting a PDF into a Word document is that it’s not a Word document. By which I mean that it’s not a text document, and it’s entirely possible that it never was one. It’s the … Read more

PowerPC applications for the defiant among us

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There is a certain sense of accepted outrage that everyone seems to have about computers, and it can roughly be summed up as this: I bought my computer last year and it’s already obsolete!

Well, that’s true. I doubt it even took a year for that to happen; it could have been days (handy-dandy tip: Apple has a 14 day return policy, and even if you’re past that, they are often quite receptive to helping out folks who just shelled out a ton of cash on a machine that has been freshly discontinued). Of course, being obsolete is very different from “not able to do what it did when you bought it,” which is a situation that is going to go on for years. After all, technically, car models are rendered obsolete every year also, but no one has a spasm and insists their car is now worthless.

Curiously enough, one of the most significant ways that your computer is eventually going to show its age is internet access. While most websites, at their heart, are simple amalgamations of text and images, the technologies they use to provide services get constantly updated, and have heavier and heavier system requirements. For many of my clients, the biggest reason Facebook won’t work on their older computers is because newer versions of Flash won’t run on older Macs with a PowerPC chip. It’s not that these new flash videos are any more awesome than they were a year ago; it’s just that you won’t be able to play them.

And if your computer happens to be satisfying you in every other way – which is entirely possible, because many computers running PowerPC G5 chips are still very capable machines – that can be really, well, lame.

But rather than drown our sorrows in digital pity, we have options! Many of them, but here are some internet options that are frequently overlooked:

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Should I get an iPad?

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This certainly falls under the category of ‘has been covered elsewhere a thousand times,’ but it also falls under the category ‘top ten questions to ask Michael.’ So here’s my answer:

Depends!

And you thought this was going to be short and sweet.

First, if you love gadgets and are made of money, there’s no point in waiting around. Get one today, and buy an extra for me as well.

On the other hand, if you aren’t made of money, you have some questions to answer about yourself. How do you primarily use a computer? People tend to fall into two broad categories:

1) Write email, check email, surf the web, view Microsoft Office documents, play music, look at pictures.

2) Creating relatively (or very) complex documents, editing files of all types, five bajillion songs, six bajillion photos, and simply must use program X.

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Steve Jobs, bicycles, and other things I get cranky about.

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Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you live under a rock. Or perhaps you are a particularly happy person in a particularly remote portion of Borneo. If that is the case, then you probably don’t know that a fellow by the name of Steve Jobs has died. Otherwise, you would know.

Because of that (knowing), and because my interactions with Borneo Rock Dwellers are limited, I didn’t see a reason to write anything about it. He was dead, you knew that, and chances are all the topics would be covered five or six times over.

As it stands, I feel there’s a topic that hasn’t been covered.

This thought was inspired by reading an article by Maria Bustillos over on The Awl titled ‘Less Human than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple.’ Ms. Bustillos’s point seems to be that Apple’s design aesthetic – and by extension, that of Jobs – isn’t human. It’s impersonal, it’s cold, it lacks good human values. This dovetails into other things that frequently start to crop up whenever people talk about Apple’s former CEO: Apple is trying control us, the machines are our enemies, there is no soul in this technology, and the only thing of value that Apple has brought to our lives is, well, nothing. They make expensive crap that has turned us all into zombies. Zombies, man! Zombies that don’t even like brains, but just shiny things! And oh, Steve Jobs was a jerk! And didn’t give money to charity! And I’m a unique flower who doesn’t buy into the hype!

On a personal level, I feel that there are so many logical inconsistencies in the article that my toes start to curl just reading it, but I found myself wondering why I cared. After all, people aren’t logical all the time and you don’t see me walking around with curled toes. I disagree with most of the human race on one topic or another, and don’t feel compelled to write anything about it. What was the difference?

Being misunderstood, cliche though it may be, is a trigger point for most of us. When someone starts saying things about us that just aren’t true, that, then, is what gets our goat. I don’t mind that you disagree, it’s that you are making up the topic of disagreement!

So, before I can start frothing at the article in question, it might be helpful to explain a few things about those of us who do like Steve Jobs, to clear up misunderstanding. Why do I care? And not just I, but a great many people in the same position as me; people working in the technology field, passionate about technology? At the end of the day, the reason is really simple:

We agreed with him.

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Why is my Mac slow?

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What is the number one technological hurdle of computing? What problem plagues people more than anything else, despite massive leaps in hardware and software in the past twenty years?

“My computer is just so sloooooow.”

Ironic, really. Think about it – the one thing that vendors incessantly bombard us with is how fast their new product is. That alone is a clue, I suppose, that something is amiss – if someone is constantly yelling at you that the reason it’s better is because it’s faster, obviously being slow was a problem in the first place. And the more people are yelling about it, the bigger a problem it probably is.

The catch, though, the great reveal to this particular magic trick, is that the reason our computers never seem any faster is because they aren’t actually slow in the first place.

Nope, I’m not about to pull some zen mystical “it is what you want it to be,” although if you can pull that off, more power to you – go do that and stop reading this. For those of us who can’t do that (raises hand) we’ll be better suited by applying a staple of troubleshooting: if a problem hasn’t been solved by trying the same thing 500 times, perhaps we should try something else.

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How to Be Efficient, or: the Blind Leading the Blind

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It’s ironic that computers, whose very purpose for existence is to increase your efficiency, are so very incredibly efficient at making you waste time. Like any good tool, if you decide to make it do something, they will do it quickly and well – get my work done? Sure! Find ways for me to get loads of dopamine by obsessively checking social websites, email, and various other time sinks? Absolutely! With great power comes great responsibility and all that, and if you aren’t too careful, you’ll find yourself where I have been, far too many times – wondering how you got derailed from the middle of your project about 20 minutes ago.

Rather than gnashing your teeth and spending another 20 minutes reading up on the benefits of Neo-Luddism, turn all that great power towards defeating the time-sink beast. 

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