This will, in reality, be the shortest review I have ever written (as well as I can remember. I may have slammed something in a sentence or two some years ago, but blocked it out due to trauma). If you look to your left you will see a screenshot of a Get Info box on my Desktop. This is a picture of the info from my Boot Camp partition, Cacophony, which is what I named my Vista Ultimate partition. As you can see, I allocated 80GB to it, I have about 32GB free, and I have modified the default icon.

What, you say? You can’t modify the default icon because any partition larger than 32GBs needs to be NTFS, and Mac OS X doesn’t natively support NTFS, just FAT32. You will recently recall that I announced the release of NTFS for Mac OS X from Paragon. Well, this is it. In fact, this is all you will ever see of NTFS For Mac OS X. If you look to the very bottom of th Get Info dialog, you’ll see that, under Sharing & Permissions, it say “You can read and write”.

Yup, that’s all it does. It enables your NTFS partitions or drives of any size to be readable and writeable in Mac OS X. I’ll just tell you that its not possible to beat this with a stick or any other blunt object, for that matter. There are no options. You don’t need any. It just works, and for a mere US$29.95 for now (regular price will be US$39.95). See? Shortest review ever.

written by Tyler Regas

If you’ve been reading The Dojo (or PDA Handyman) for any length of time, you’d know I’m a semi-unabashed Palm lover. Yes, on occasion I have questioned Palm’s decisions (i.e., my poor, dear Foleo) and on a few occasions wondered if they were about to plunge themselves into the fires of hell to disappear forever. Well, the reality is that Palm’s not been doing so well, mostly because they’ve been sitting on their thumbs. Its even possible that sitting on their thumbs for so long has caused them to create something equally frustrating as it is brilliant.

I speak, as indicated in the title of this review, the Palm Centro, which is currently an exclusive offering from Sprint. To see the Centro is to love it. Its small, sleek, nicely proportioned, and… well, that’s where it sort of ends. Maybe a few years ago in 2003 I would have been egged on to see the recent growth in the venerable Palm OS, but by this time the changed-in-name-only Access Powered “Garnet OS” has stagnated and festered. Sure, Sprint has managed to eek our some cool abilities, and the hardware certainly does run the beasty quite swiftly, but its just old. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas

Someone at Kensington went into a meeting somewhere and said, “Damn, if only I had a trackball-type device I could use instead of this wireless mouse to run this presentation with, then I’d be happy.” Thusly, the Kensington SlimBlade Trackball Mouse, or Mouthful as I like to call it, was born. The idea is simple. Integrate a laser mouse with a little trackball instead of a scrollwheel. Next, make the center click button into a mode switch button so you can change from Mouse to Trackball mode. Finally, stick in a Bluetooth radio so you don’t have to fiddle with wires or RF dongles. Voila! The Mouthful is born. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas

Since we don’t do any hardcore specification reviewing here at The Dojo, its difficult for us to review products whose benefits are subjective on many levels. The hard drive is certainly one of the most difficult devices to review since it really just stores data. For a mobile human on the go, however, a large hard drive in the lappy can make a huge difference, and this is where Western Digital’s new Scorpio 320GB 2.5″ SATA drive comes in.

This particular review has two primary components. First is the drive itself. Second is the installation. The first part I can get out of the way quickly. The drive looks like any other standard 2.5″ SATA drive. Made of metal and some plastic. SATA interface on the back. Label on the top. Little hole with a warning not to cover it. Holes for various screws and whatnot. Specification-wise, its a 2.5″ drive with 320GBs of capacity, it runs at 5400RPM, a reasonable 12ms access time, integrated drop protection, and has an 8MB cache. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: hardware, review

I’d like to point out in advance that Kensington does not have a history of making good laptop cases, mostly because it hasn’t at all until recently. I’ll have to say that I’m very pleased with their most recent offering, the Contour Active Vertical Messenger bag. The one that Kensington sent me is for 15″ lappies, so I immediately unpacked my MacBook Pro from my trusty BrentHaven Messenger (reviewed late 2006) and went to town.

I knew up front that the Contour Active wouldn’t hold everything that I could carry in the Brenthaven, so I pared down my mobile stash. I’m pleased to report that I’m now able to carry at least 90% of what I carried in the previous bag in the Contour. The only capabilities I now miss are the ability to carry a second lappy (yes, I’m a glutton for pain) and the Brenthaven’s neato expanding bag trick. I’m amazed a what a simple design change will offer in return, though. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas

There are some games which are just plain fun like Solitaire, Checkers, and Asteroids. There are others which are deeply disturbing or earnestly frightening like most of Rock Star’s games, most of IDs games, or the Half-Life series. There are few, however, which can bridge the gap, but tiny Mac games developer Freeverse, likely best known for Jared and Burning Monkey Solitaire, has done it.

Witness the advent of SimStapler Arena, the long awaited update to the original, non-networkable SimStapler. Marvel at its extraordinary depth and grace as you staple wantonly and without regard to human safety. SimStapler Arena brings more than personal satisfaction to the table, as it now incorporates an online component which allows you to bring the stapling beatdown to those of lesser quality and lacking in multi-page finishing capabilities. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: games, news, social

When was the last time you used something that just worked? That butter knife you used to spread jam on your toast this morning, did it require a reboot? What about the time you looked at the painting in your living room. You know, the one of the ship at sea or the sad clown. How about a freshly sharpened pencil, piece of bread, or a can of motor oil? You may now add MacDrive 7 to that list, and if you really use Windows on your Mac a lot via Boot Camp, you will find it invaluable. [Removed references to Fusion and Parallels. -Ed.] Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas

What can I say about VMware that I haven’t gushed about before. Yes, I am a VMware junkie about as much as I am an Apple freak, and now the twain shall meet. For years now VMware has provided tools and services for Windows and Linux platforms. Now, however, they offer Fusion, a VMware Workstation for Apple’s sublime Mac OS X. Why now and not earlier? In case you didn’t know, Apple moved from the PowerPC processor line (made by IBM, Motorola, and FreeScale) to Intel’s CPU line, mostly because the PowerPC wasn’t growing fast enough and Apple’s laptops were losing their edge.

Because of that change, all of a sudden Apple’s computers were running the same virtualization platform as Windows and Linux were, so all it took was re-writing their Workstation application to run on the The Jewel of Cupertino. That, however, took a while and in the meantime another product called Parallels had the opportunity to build a solid market lead. I will be reviewing Parallels 3 on The Dojo soon, but I have to say that after Fusion became available, it didn’t require a bachelor’s degree to figure out which one I would be using. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas