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The Tired Donkey

Navigating the digital ecosystem. With your Mac.

Tired Donkey

The Tired Donkey

Sitting Donkey
The Tired Donkey blogs about ways to get the most out of your Mac at home, work, college . . . wherever. He used to write about the unending abuse suffered by the 51% of Americans who actually pay the federal income tax. But this became too depressing, and, frankly, no one wanted to read it.

Nevertheless, if you came here looking for the Tired Donkey's brilliant analysis of our dim-witted tax system, you can still find his earlier posts. Just check the archives or the
Site Map.

Note: The Tired Donkey is not advertiser supported, and he gets no benefit from any product mentioned on his site.

The Tired Donkey

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Trophy Wife in Charge




Trophy Wife in Charge
As autumn approaches, the Tired Donkey is really looking forward to the new Brooks Brothers catalog. Why? Because last year’s catalog was so unintentionally, uproariously funny.

The Tired Donkey must admit that the original did not contain dialogue and captions and storyboard panels, but the whole story was in there, just waiting to get out. And now it’s been released from its cold, WASPy prison.

Click the picture of the front cover to the left and enjoy the whole story.

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Rethinking Our Tax System




donkey-1
Despite his great wisdom on the matter, the Tired Donkey swore off writing about taxes long ago because (1) of the thousands of visitors his blog gets every month, about two of them look at his tax-related posts, and (2) writing about our tax system became so depressing that the Tired Donkey nearly expired. Unfortunately, the recent brouhaha over the debt ceiling and a run of staggering stupidity at the New York Times is forcing the Tired Donkey to come out of tax retirement. So here we go. The Tired Donkey will try to make it brief.

On the day after the announcement of the debt ceiling deal, the New York Times’ editorial page, under the headline “
To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal,” opined that the Democrats “held out for a few basic principles.” Among these, the paper observed, was the principle that there “must be new tax revenues in the mix so that the wealthy bear a share of the burden . . .” Hmmm. A share of the burden? Let’s check that out.
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Why the Big ISPs Are Lying to You About Net Neutrality




What You Should Know
I wrote about the Net Neutrality debate back in August, and it’s time for an update because you are being lied to on a daily basis by the people who control your access to the Internet. It’s time to get educated.

First, the basics. Last year a federal court of appeals in Washington, D.C., declared that the FCC lacked the authority to prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from restricting the websites their customers could visit. That’s a big deal if you care about an open internet.

An analogy here should be useful. As hackneyed as it is, imagine the internet as a highway over which information flows. The only way you can access any of that information is via an an off-ramp, and the ISPs own all of them. Get your internet from Comcast? You’re at the end of a Comcast off-ramp. The traffic on the highway below you, like the traffic on the internet, flows unimpeded regardless of rules governing the on-ramps and off-ramps. But you can’t access any of it without your off-ramp controller (your ISP), and they are fighting as hard as they can to be allowed to make decisions about what you are and are not allowed to see.  
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Speeding Up a Sluggish Mac




Tired Donkey
Is your Mac feeling slow? Does iTunes take forever to start up? Do programs that used to feel snappy suddenly feel like they are running on a virus-clogged Windows machine? Then this is the post for you, with one caveat: if you came here looking for hardware-based fixes for a slow Mac like additional RAM, faster hard drives or new video cards, this is not the post for you. But you might learn something useful anyway.

Slow Mac issues are generally caused by one of three things: RAM over-utilization, too little free space on your hard drive or various, esoteric issues with system permissions and the like. It is undeniable that two of these three could almost certainly be helped by hardware upgrades, but it is also undeniable that there are likely things you can do to optimize the performance of the Mac you have rather than the Mac you might have someday in the future. That’s what this post will help with. So read on because even if you are planning on adding RAM or a bigger hard drive, there is no sense in using what you already have inefficiently.
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Don't Let Your Password Slow You Down



airportExtreme
The Tired Donkey’s mini-series on getting your WiFi network running properly continues with this post which contains this startling revelation he came across in a helpful article in MacWorld by Ted Landau: if you are not using WPA2 password with your 802.11n network, you may be reducing it to 802.11g speeds. Why is this startling? Because the Tired Donkey has never come across this important piece of information before. And he’s a man who would normally know this kind of information. So what do you do to make sure you are getting this password setting right on your AirPort Extreme Base Station? It’s easy. Read on to find out.
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The Tired Donkey

Sitting Donkey
The Tired Donkey blogs about ways to get the most out of your Mac at home, work, college . . . wherever. He used to write about the unending abuse suffered by the 51% of Americans who actually pay the federal income tax. But this became too depressing, and, frankly, no one wanted to read it.

Nevertheless, if you came here looking for the Tired Donkey's brilliant analysis of our dim-witted tax system, you can still find his earlier posts. Just check the archives or the
Site Map.

Note: The Tired Donkey is not advertiser supported, and he gets no benefit from any product mentioned on his site.

The Tired Donkey

Archives