David Pogue

There’s a lot of good, practical advice for stupid people who insist on living on floodplains, in high risk forest fire areas, on American coastal areas, and in tornado zones.

But Pogue ends the book on a naive upbeat that technology and electric cars will end our dependencies on fossil fuels. The green movement relies on too much of this fuzzy green boosterism.

Big companies will continue to finance Donald Trumpism, as will midwestern bumpkins. And he didn’t believe in climate change, remember?… (mehr)

I'm currently reading this book and it's an extremely useful read. I've learned all sorts of ways to simplify tasks. The only thing bad about this book is that it makes me feel so ignorant! How could I *not* know all of these gems! Hey, they're undocumented! Well, now Pogue documents them. (But how did he discover them all?)

Hmm. Perhaps the secret is to do everything on the Mac with the Option key held down :-P (It certainly seems like Pogue advises holding that key down several times a page.)

I do wish Pogue would have spent a little time clarifying which things *only* work in Mountain Lion as it is relatively new and I (like others I figure) still have Lion systems. So it's a bit frustrating having to try things and find they only work on some systems.

Cons: Amazingly, Pogue missed a few things. For example, he seems *not* to know that you can indeed enter all Unicode characters from the keyboard. (He says it's not possible.) And some of his explantions are just too brief and could use more examples (because I couldn't get them to work.) There are also a number of typos which suggests he needs a better copyeditor.

I'm only about halfway through the book so I'll probably come back and add a few things when I'm done. Feel free to comment on my comments.

Conclusion: Despite some very minor flaws, the book is well worth the price and I give Pogue kudos for creating a fantastic resource.… (mehr)