ISSUE 23.31 • 2026-08-03 ACCESSBILITY By Will Fastie Tesla’s Full Self-driving (FSD) capability affects more than everyday convenience. It’s a little jolting to realize that the then-called Tesla Motors was founded in 2003, 23 years ago. You don’t need me to tell you about the success of the company, which I consider unmarred by recent […]

COMMENTARY By Will Fastie I don’t have a problem embracing change, except for grocery prices. In most cases, my complaints are usually centered on things made worse by changes or on things that should be changed but aren’t. I want stuff to advance, to become better and more helpful. My complaints seem to be rising. […]

COMMENTARY By Will Fastie AI could ruin YouTube, not only for viewers but also for creators. YouTube has been a tremendously useful resource over the years, for both entertainment and education. Want to learn how to hammer a nail into a board? Tens of thousands of videos. Want to learn how to use Blackmagic Design’s […]

FROM THE FORUMS I recently wrote the article Older software to the rescue, which included a note about my having replaced Adobe Acrobat DC with the ten-year-old program PDF Fusion. The forum topic associated with the article received a lot of traffic. Although I mentioned other old software in the article, forum participants homed in […]

SOFTWARE By Will Fastie Adobe continues to be very annoying, to the extent that I reverted to older software to duck the problem. In the past three weeks, two of my “clients” (of the friends-and-family variety) came to me asking for help. In each case, the problem was Adobe software. Then I finally got fed […]

I was talking to a friend who probably needs a new PC for creative work on a budget, so I suggested that she think about a Mac mini. Just to check that my thinking about the price was correct, I visited the Apple site. I got the pricing right, but then noticed that delivery would […]

ISSUE 23.25 • 2026-06-22 COMMENTARY By Will Fastie The past few years have witnessed a surge of Arm processors. Of course, the Arm architecture has been around in phones for a long time. But even though phones have cohesive ecosystems built around Arm, we tend to think of phones as nothing more than appliances, not […]

EDITORIAL By Will Fastie I’ve greatly enjoyed my forays into the wilds of computing over the four decades I’ve been engaging with the public and with vendors. I miss it, so I’m offering to do it again — virtually. And, exclusively for our valued AskWoody Plus members. Here’s how it will work. Read the full […]

On Monday, NVIDIA shook up the processor market with its introduction of the NVIDIA RTX Spark chip at the opening of the COMPUTEX trade show in Taiwan. The stock market reacted quickly; NVIDIA up seven percent, Intel down two percent. This coming Monday, the newsletter will feature an article by our own Matthew S. Smith […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie In last year’s Terabyte update, I mentioned chaotic pricing and the difficulty in stating future trends. This year, it’s far worse. To the extent I mentioned cause and effect, I was wrong. Tariffs bounced around and eventually settled down; they had little effect on the storage market. Inflation was a factor […]

This year, I’m going to find some time to practice voice dictation for my writing. I’ve been typing for over 60 years and I’m still pretty good at it, but these old fingers aren’t what they used to be. In the past few months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of typing errors and noticed something […]

APPLE By Will Fastie Nineteen years after the introduction of the iPhone, I succumbed. It was an emergency purchase; I had not planned to do so for a few more months. But my Samsung Galaxy A53 5G received a One UI update, and performance crashed. Action was needed. The battery was bad, too. Having done […]

I saw headlines yesterday, such as “Apple Removes $599 Mac mini, Raises Starting Price to $799.” The knee-jerk reaction to a headline like that is that Apple raised prices. It’s not true. There is a readjustment. True, a Mac mini priced at $599 is no longer available. The lowest-priced mini is now $200 more, at […]

ISSUE 23.18 • 2026-05-04 HARDWARE By Will Fastie Somewhere in the AskWoody archives, you’ll find an article stating my ultimate goal — to reduce the number of PCs on my desk from four to one. Hah. That didn’t happen. I did manage to cut it down to two, though. Then I bought a Mac mini. […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie Physically putting the NAS together is easy. Setup takes some time. You’d think somewhere along the line I’d have deployed network-attached storage for someone, client or friend. This is the first time. It’s different from putting together a RAID solution for a business’s server or creating a mirror for my own […]

HARDWARE By Will Fastie With the NAS now up and running with an accessible storage volume, it’s time to make it useful. What’s useful? As stated in the previous articles, I want the contents of my D: drive out of my daily driver, Obsidian. But I still want all that data to be easily accessible. […]