Able Mac

Math Cards, the newest iPhone App from DollarApp.com, offers kids a fun way to improve math skills. Imagine math practice so rewarding it's hard to stop. Great practice for the four foundational forms of math: add, subtract, multiply, and divide.


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Math Cards is currently #4 in "Top Paid Apps" of the Education Category of the iTunes App Store.

When we first heard about the iPhone, I knew it'd be big. I drove 300+ miles, two states away, to be in line the first day to get one.

There were plenty of ideas for Apps, but the one that "stuck" was to build a math trainer for my two precious daughters. It was something I could boil down to being super simple if I had to, and it'd still be beneficial to those who use it. I'm all about making things that get used.

iPhone Development. You may have noticed that I haven't posted in a while. That's because I've been hitting the books hard (PDFs actually). Learning a new language syntax is one thing, but then there is the new development environment (Xcode) which has a lot of drag and drop. Drag and drop sounds like a good idea, however, when I first started, I had no idea how to connect the things I was dropping.

Time Machine is the "Defining Feature" of OS X Leopard (10.5). There were a lot of improvements in OS X, but Time Machine alone would have made it worth the cost of upgrading. It's brain dead simple. Plug in an external drive that's dedicated for Backups, and say yes when Leopard asks you if you want to use it for that.

But then there are those of us who don't want to have to plug in a hard Disk drive (HDD) to back up, let alone leave it plugged in to get the most out of Time Machine.

I'm brain storming combinations for an ultra geek home office.

So lets say a person has an old laptop, and a newer, but standard level MacBook (non-Pro).

Let's give this office a secretary who happens to be trained in the Microsoft Corporate solutions like Outlook and the rest of MS Office.

Now let's add to our goals a desire to use the HDTV in the Living Room with iTunes content (Rented, Purchased, Free from the web, and self created).

There's a new Time Machine menu in the Menu Bar:

The new Time Machine menu bar menu has a "Back Up Now" option, however, they did not add a backup now button to the System Preferences Pane for Time Machine. So if you uncheck the "Show Time Machine status in the menu bar" option, you can't start a "Back Up Now".

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Able

Recently I installed 2 different distros of Linux on my 80 Gig model PS3 (Christmas 2007) . Both Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) and the community favorite Ubuntu take a long time to install (almost 1hr) and then don't perform very well. They feel slugish, like running Windows XP on and 133 MHz Pentium II laptop.

I love the Invisible Shield products I have, and I'm not alone. They bring peace of mind and they are made of a high quality material. That said, the iPhone is not an easy shape to apply a sticker to. They've come up with an interestingly shaped precut sheet to try making that easier.

The Question: How do I get the installer for MySQL on OS X?

The sort Answer: Download the DMG file, run the install. Open System Preferences and click the "Start MySQL Server" button to start it. DONE. (On Leopard, apply the fix to get the System Preferences Pane working).

Every want to take that bluetooth mouse from your laptop bag and use it with your desktop? How about using that bluetooth headset with more than one phone or computer? Wouldn't it be nice if there were a away to pair with multiple devices, then use the devices to request pairing?

This does actually exist in one form that I'm aware of. There is a bluetooth speakerphone that can pair with 5 devices.