Category archives: Mac

Same old rubbish…

Mackeeper, everyone’s favourite sketchy and trojan-esque piece of Mac software malware, has had a little branding update. And a little branding fail at the same time. As I’m sure I’ve pointed out before, their advertising is sketch to say the least, even at the level of rebranding what they do at every possible juncture, just so you get fooled again (ladies and gentlemen, take advice from The Who here please) into trying it.

MacKeeper: Legit?

So you may, or even may not, have heard of a Mac software cleanup/antivirus/antislow program called MacKeeper. It markets itself on Google as:

Ensure your Mac’s top performance with MacKeeper – an award-winning system utility for Mac that offers a completely new approach to system care.

Judging by their advertising, which if you haven’t seen it, is just overly invasive, and presented in such a way that a certain type of tinned meat [[spam]] comes to mind as soon as you see it, you’d think they’re not legit

How to ruin an app…

This could alternatively be titled ‘How can iOS and AppStore design ruin perfectly good apps’. I feel bad about writing this, but I’m writing this for a reason, and frankly this is in a similar light to a lot of the new Skype for Mac criticism. The application in question here is Awaken, by Embraceware, what I considered to be the best of the alarm clock applications.

Upgrading old Macs…

Recently, being on holiday and all, I had the time to upgrade an old Powerbook G4. One of those 12″ ones, that were basically netbooks before the whole craze started. It was running some old old version on 10.3, which was probably pretty state of the art in those days, and still isn’t that bad. But it’s just plain crazy with no Spotlight and trackpad gestures (partly a hardware thing…). A little bit crazy how much I use some of these features…

A quick note…

Just adding a quick note as I head down to Cambridge to start Easter term of my first year. So far, it’s been phenomenal, the course, while being quite hard (and the workload just fairly intense at points), is excellent and thoroughly enjoyable. I’ve had the chance (and still have it from what I see) to try all aspects of engineering with all sorts of different practicals and labs and exercises, including some that have been tedious, and others that have been incredibly useful and even then not necessarily directly engineering related. But alas, finally, there are exams coming up. A mere 12 hours so I recall. So fun times ahead! (On a sidenote, it felt like I was about to come to a conclusion in that previous paragraph, but clearly it was going nowhere fast so I just ended it… oh well!)