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. […]

Maine’s legislature passed on April 14, 2026, a bill prohibiting the “construction or permitting” of any new datacenter which consumes more than 20 megawatts of power. If signed by the governor, it would take immediate effect but expire on November 1, 2027. Other states have proposed similar bans, but Maine’s is the first to pass […]

On April 10, Alex Oot from Microsoft’s Windows Insider Program team posted Improving your Windows Insider experience to the Insider’s blog. If you are participating as an Insider, you’ll want to read the post. There are several announcements in the post, but one might catch your attention. Under the heading “Clearer channel definitions,” the post […]

ISSUE 23.15 • 2026-04-13 FROM THE FORUMS By Will Fastie Last week, we published a Public Defender column by Brian Livingston titled Any USB drive or cable you plug in might be a silent killer. You might have seen the reaction in the column’s forum topic. The forum exploded. So did my inbox. Read the […]

I was chatting with Copilot, doing some research about vintage drum machines. I have a little BOSS DR-220 Dr. Rhythm synth that provides the basic functionality I want, but it does not have variations. I was looking for something slightly better. The research session was pretty good, telling me about some equipment I’d never heard […]

ISSUE 23.14.1 • 2026-04-09 By Will Fastie Fresno is experiencing a freak taxation event. Reports remain sketchy, but it appears that an unusual event has occurred in the Fresno area. Apparently, a well-known accounting firm is undergoing a targeted forms attack. Its building has been completely covered with paper tax documents, trapping the staff inside […]

Apple garnered a huge amount of publicity with the MacBook Neo, which is still exploding on YouTube and other social media. I don’t think the Neo is selling at a loss, but if it were it would probably be worth the “Hey, look at me!” moment. I’m starting to think this is an opening salvo […]

I received a call from a friend yesterday morning asking me to remove something from Outlook. It just showed up. “It” was a Copilot icon on the left edge of the message block when writing an email. A grayed-out instruction suggesting using Copilot has been in the message block for some time, but it vanishes […]

I received this email yesterday: I have received notifications about photos in OneDrive, along the lines of “This day in OneDrive” or something similar. After experimenting with that long ago, I simply ignore and delete them. Because this was unusual, I decided to click through and take a look. I was taken to an online […]

I use OneNote every day, all day — primarily to keep our master editorial calendar. I paste text into it all the time. I call this “quicksand.” That’s because the keyboard shortcuts for this simple task keep changing. Even worse, the actual “paste as text” function keeps changing. To the left you can see “Keep […]