The trite wisdom of contemporary folklore instructs us that the arrival of the New Year is a duration to reflect on the achievements of the preceding 365 days and to bear down and “resolve” to achieve more in those to come. by moment, we learn what a hydra-headed beast that is: no matter how many …

Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAWIn that final Ask TUAW of the year we’ll tackle questions on password protecting files, starting Front Row without a remote, booting problems with a date Machine drive, configuring the OS X firewall, updating an offline Mac and more.As always your suggestions are most welcome, and questions for next w…

Filed under: Laptops
Shockingly suitable, Laptop magazine — of all magazines in print today — wanted remind everybody that tonight’s the last night your hard earned (and increasingly devalued) American currency can be exchanged for an OLPC. But they plus got a few words out of NickNeg as to how many OLPC units sold in the decidedly successful Giv…

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
Ah, how we do love a good root-hacking resulting in the ability to run homebrew cipher. And being that we additionally have a soft spot in our heart for Archos’s 605 and 705 series players, ARCwelder ought to do our kind and yours quite nicely. whether yours is running firmware 1.7.13, check it out, it sh…

Filed under: Software, Beta Beat, DeveloperThis one is ostensibly for developers, but whether you ever rock a revision control system or get excited about a little late-night diff-and-merge for whatever reason, your life may have just gotten easier. Changes is an app designed to simplify project synchronization and differencing for groups or indivi…

An anonymous reader writes “NASA released part of a controversial study about air traffic safety Monday. The space agency spent $11 million on a survey of airline pilots. Agency officials were so disturbed by the findings that they intended to destroy the knowledge rather than release it. But at an October congressional hearing, NASA administrator …

Filed under: Gaming
It’s been ten days since we started tracking The Great Xbox Live Outage of Late 2007 — ten days that the team at Microsoft has spent working 24/7, apparently unable to quash the issues affecting untold thousands (or millions) of users. Things were supposedly looking better until earlier today when they apparently got worse agai…