My friends MArk and ronnie both mentioned the Airport Express to me and caused me to revisit the thing, I’d forgotten how much I love this $99 single purpose device.

It’s awesome, and lo, read this Windows/Linux loving guy gush on how great the Airport Express is, despite is unreasonable distaste for apple products:

Apple Airport Express: Okay, Okay, I love the damn thing.

Awesome Post by Kontra over at Counter Notions, (it’s a must read, even though it’s quite long), makes me change my search provider on iPhone to Yahoo, and Bing on Macs, think about it.
Curated hypocrisy: How Google camouflages its attacks on Apple

Did you know that you can just turn off access to the Safari Browser on the IPhone OS (ergo iPad/iPod touch), meaning you have a completely clean and porn free environment for your kids? The Android phones apparently don’t let you do this.

Did you know that Skype isn’t available on all Android Phones? or perhaps any? I played with the HTC Hero the other day, and Skype isn’t in their marketplace?

Things like this assure me that the iPhone OS has a strong future.

NetNewsWire is still a valid and good RSS reader, it’s been updated several times (you’ll wanna check the website for more info on exact details, but I know they’ve made several changes to it in the last couple of years)

That said, I believe that more people then ever now read RSS, and as such there are a plethora of good RSS readers, as opposed to two years ago when there was one(NNW), current tech geeks like Scott Beale swear by “Google Reader” to read their RSS feeds nowadays.

Other Tech Geeks like Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani say RSS takes too much time and rely on Twitter or Facebook to raise interesting news onto their radar.

I on the other hand use an incredible new thing called Fever, by a wizard called Shaun Inman, you can find it at feedafever.com, and it’s main point of differentiation, is that, after you give it all the RSS feeds you’re interested in, not only does it show them to you web based so you can read em on any mac,pc, iphone, google phone, but it does some algorithmic work to calculate what stories(or news) is “hot” (or relevant to you.

So, for example, I subscribe to six apple blogs, all with RSS feeds, but most days all six of those will “blog” about the same story, say “the new iPhone”, now with google reader or net news wire, that’s six posts to drill through to clear your “unread posts list”, whereas in fever, only the main story (or the one all six point to) is displayed. It’s marvelous.

Google reader, twitter and facebook can all surface stories to you based on the “friends” you follow, and that’s really cool. But fever surfaces based on the definitive sources. So, if LA times, Ny times, and BBC news all point to a certain story, you’ll see it for sure. For me, the combination of Fever (extremely focused) plus Twitter(extremely broad) meets my need for keeping up to date.(though I really try to avoid Twitter because of it’s high noise level.

Remember Undercover? The amazing software I recommended that tracks down your Mac if it’s stolen, using clever techniques like screenshots, mugshots and IP addresses?

Well, 4.0 just came out, and it’s a huge upgrade, providing web based tracking of all the Macs, remote lockdown, and easy theft reporting. For $49 per Mac or $250 for a 25 Mac Site License, plus a money back guarantee if the Mac is not recovered. There is no reason not to deploy it on all your Macs.

Give us a call if you’d like assistance rolling this out for your organization.

Online Storage in the modern age…

Dreamhost gives you UNLIMITED for $120 per year
Google gives you 1TB for $256 per year
MobileMe gives you 60GB for $200 per year

These guys offer free storage, and a comparison chart. But I’m not sure how accurate any of this is.

http://www.drivehq.com/about/storagecompare.aspx

Here at AuburnCom, we provide Mac Consulting for businesses huge, large, small medium, and individuals and families. And believe it or not, the concerns across all these groups of people are surprisingly similar.

Shared Contacts, Shared Calendars, Shared Media, Backup and more.

If you’ve got questions or would like a custom built solution for your national, global, state or local business, organization or family, give us a call to arrange a meeting. 415-843-1622. In the meantime though, let’s talk a little about a “simple” shared calendar system for a husband and a wife using Macintoshes, iPhones, iPods and the like (We may even venture into Outlook and Entourage compatibility!)

By Far, the most advanced and powerful way to share a calendar between groups has always been off your own in house server, most large companies will use Microsoft Exchange on a windows server for this, but that’s an expensive option, with both ongoing maintenance costs (search for Exchange Hotfixes on google and you’ll se how often that has needed to be patched), and per user licensing fees. So alternatives, like now up to date, and google calendar started to proliferate.

At the same time, Apple, which formerly had it’s XServe servers selling for a minimum of about $2500, or their unlimited client edition of their server software for $999, decided to get aggressive and unleash the double combo of a low priced ($499) UNLIMITED client version of Snow Leopard Server that can run on ANY intel mac, and the Mac Mini server, a powerful little server packed with 4GB of Ram, two 500GB hard drives and the UNLIMITED license copy of Snow Leopard Server for $999, this compares to wild costs of windows server as displayed in the complicated table’s on Microsofts site, I’ll highlight just a few lines of their pricing here:

Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
$1029
Available in 64-bit only. Includes 5 User Licenses (User or Device, chosen after purchase)

Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
$3,999
Available in 64-bit only. Includes 25 User Licenses (User or Device, chosen after purchase)

Remote access Licenses:

Windows Server 2008, RDS Client Access License 20-pack
$2,979
Twenty additional Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop Services User Licenses (User or Device, chosen at time of purchase)

And so on…

Reread my earlier paragraph, and you’ll see, that Apple charges $499 for a full, enterprise level, 32bit OR 64 bit, unlimited, unrestricted server operating system, with lower maintenance costs, lower upgrade headaches, and world class server features.

Sounds good right? Your own “owned” twitter like service, located on your own servers, able to be turned on or off, and completely managed, all GNU…

Check it out: http://status.net/

Example (full of Cats): http://www.petstatus.com/

Quesation:

So if I get the Overdrive from Sprint and basically carry a WiFi hot spot in my pocket all the time, then I would not need the iPad with 3G capability, correct?

The 3G model just behaves like an iPhone that can connect to the cellular network; and the WiFi only is like the iPod Touch that requires you to find a hot spot to connect to the Internet. Again, referring to the first sentence the Overdrive creates that Hot Spot – so long as I have Sprint coverage, Correct?

Thanks. Just looking over all the iPad features, etc.

It’s personal preference, convenience, and budget related.

Personally, I see the fact that we’re at the dawn of 4G, where Sprint is deploying 4G, Verizon is promising it(LTE) by year end(http://bit.ly/dbPuUG) and AT&T planning 4G(LTE) for 2011(http://bit.ly/dsrQXn), I (reiterate personally) do not see an incentive to invest in embedded 3G in my iPad(which I would hope to use for a lifetime of about three years).

On the other side of the fence,

AT&T is making progress on upgrades to their 3G network(http://bit.ly/8HeOOj), which mean that it can faster internet over existing 3G devices.

and, AT&T’s iPad deal is a no contract affair,

AND, the Wifi model has NO GPS capabilities.

So the 3G model could be attractive to some for these reasons.

Have I confused you, or helped you with this information?

Brendan

On Mar 14, 2010, at 1:09 AM, Christopher Aguilar wrote:

Developer Connection

via daringfireball, absolutely mesmerizing:

Harmony, works great on the iPhone too. and that other thing that you can hear coming down the tracks…

From Cnet Crave:

Despite Google bragging about testing the Nexus One with some aggressive poking and dropping, as seen in recent behind-the-scenes video, we got the message that this phone is too high-strung to survive in common phone environments. “People sometimes forget that they don’t go in pockets,” said HTC.

This is real! and coming from Penguin books:

On the other hand, Microsoft is releasing concept videos of a project called courier, which who knows when it’ll see the light of day:

And for pickup (or delivery) on April 3rd!!!!

Learn more over here: Apple.com/iPad

drobo is the hot new(2 yrs old) device, that makes redundant arrays of independent disks an easy easy proposition.

They sell the Vanilla Drobo on Amazon for just $350 now, and you can buy 1.5TB Seagate 7200RPM drives on there for $109 a piece to populate your Drobo.

There are discussions and forums online discussing how and if a drobo can be used with or without an Airport Extreme, a Network, Time Machine or many other details. These date back to April 2008 when there were some restrictions, you could only use 2TB for storage and other factors. But today the situation is as follows:

Plugging your Drobo into a Mac in your office through the Firewire 800 port, and installing the Drobo utility will allow you to format the disks you’ve loaded as you please. This process can take five minutes. The next step is to connect your formatted drive to your Airport Extreme and mount it on your office Macintosh(es), enable it as a Time Machine Backup location, and Bob’s your uncle.

To learn more about backup for yourself, or your company, and to have us build a design or custom solution for you, give usa call on 415-843-1622, or email us.

Thanks!

Mail.app is definitively the greatest Mail program in the world, it’s wealth of features are rarely explored, but if you go over to Apple’s wonderful Tutorial page, or Hawkwings.net, you’ll be able to learn about all the powerful things mail can do for you. If you need to know more, or have your company trained on this, or know specifically how your company can gain productivity and time saving without having to dig through all the tips, you can call us in for a consultation. Our number is 415-843-1622, and you can email brendan@auburncom.com too.

In the meantime though, the topic of this post, is how to get Mail to show you all mail after you’ve sorted it into all your different folders. a quite useful feature, if you’re trying to see a timeline of all your messages for a certain period of time.

The best solution I’ve found is to run a search for “mail” in all folders, in all fields and save this search. It’ll then appear as a smart folder in your left sidebar and present most every mail you’ve sent, received or filed away.

to a 500GB, 7200RPM drive, with Snow Leopard and iLife 09, it’s running like a dream.

Remoted to a clients server and resolved this in five minutes flat!

This is pretty nifty. I’m presuming the ipad will work with this…

http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=10849

Just found a good write up about the iPad by Louis Trapani over here.

He drew my attention to the PADD from Star Trek, the next generation, and the all knowing handheld from The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, both of which I’d long forgotten (The tricorder I certainly remember, and is how the iPhone, and in certain less powerful ways, the palm, android and other phones seem). And made good points that I agree with. Like:

The possibilities are bountiful.

But I have some comments.

Nice post Louis, and I must ask if you’re closely related to Gina Trapani? But on topic, everything you wrote makes lots of sense, and you’re one of few who I find uses the Phone on the iPhone as little as I do, so cool, glad we meet there.
The only comment I can differ with you on is the space issue, with your portfolio in the cloud, then you have zero limit to your storage(depending on your provider), wheras 64gb is still a limit, so why get 64 over 16gb for simply media? Personally, I see, as does Tim Cook, the $499 model as an AMAZING value, with the price of 64GB of Flash memory costing maybe $50 at the store, why spend the $200 extra for that unamazing part?

For $499 you get the following features (ranked by amazingness in my eyes):
The Platform
The A4 Chip
Giant screen
Connectivity(Wifi N)
Keyboard capable
All the blood sweat and tears of the Apple engineers
Everything Else
Storage, dead last.

The only thing that can bite you on storage is if you dont have a permanent mobile connection to the net (boo, this will change rapidly, see the amount of places offering free Wifi? The honda dealership on market has it, unadvertised, welcome to the future, or drop your home comcast/dsl and grab an overdrive), OR, an app needs lots of room, so that’s the chance to take, but with Apple’s recent purchase of Lala, which will take your entire iTunes library online, the wealth of podcasts, and available resources online, and the increasing power and storage potential in the cloud, does your local storage on a mobile device still matter?

Comments welcome…

Two stolen iPhones recovered using MobileMe.

The officers dispatched another squad car to go to the displayed location, where a man sitting outside an apartment building hurriedly concealed a cellphone when the officers approached.

Last Week, at Ted an amazing demo of Bing’s new map technology was demoed, see the below video if you haven’t yet:

Now, this morning Google Maps is offering “Labs” feature if you’re signed in, and using Google maps, these features are quite basic, some, including “Smart Zoom”, which prevents you receiving the “no data available at this zoom level” message, one would have hoped would be a standard behavior of the maps, and another, “Beta” which adds the Beta label to Google Maps indicates pure silliness, and perhaps at a deeper level the reality that as awesome as google maps are, maybe in light of Apple’s own placebase technology, and Bing’s killer Augmented reality maps, Google’s maps really are only in Beta, Thoughts as always, welcome in the comments…

With a clean 10.3.9 Install, new 160gb hard drive, and 1.25GB of PC133 Ram!

The Sprint Mifi 2200 has been a nice device for me for getting internet everywhere, it’s free after rebate, and you can talk the guys at the store into getting a $50 per month contract with unlimited data, but they only advertise a $60 plan with 5gb cap on their marketing papers. Keep reading below though because there’s more to know.

Mifi:

http://bit.ly/b6WSu4

My main reason for getting the sprint mifi over the exact same device from Verizon is that Sprint have a new device called the overdrive, my sprint representative gave me the mifi as a trial till the overdrives come into stock (this week apparently). This device the Overdrive, is what I think I’ll be using for the next twelve months. It’s key advantages are support for an apparently forthcoming Sprint 4g Wireless network built using WiMax, with unlimited downloads on that network, and speeds ten times(allegedly)3g speeds.

I don’t see the iPad or iPhone having any 4g technology built in till 2011(but I could be wrong, it could be a june surprise, but with network rollout so slow, I’m sure apple will stick with 3G a while more), so the overdrive will give us about 12 months(say sprint has 4g in SF in June) or 6 months(say sprint has 4g in SF in December) of 4G speed on our existing MacBooks, iPads, iPhones etc… Pretty neat if it works out.

For the record, I keep a blazing 16mb downstream Comcast connection at my home for the niceish price of about $50 per month because DSL never was good enough here for me, and because 1mb down on the Mifi/Overdrive is a little slow for home internet. But your mileage may vary.

Overdrive:

http://bit.ly/9KQeyJ

These guys are writing good pieces on the wider, abstract ideas at work in theis marvelous device, the iPad.

Read them at their respective sites:

Frasier Spiers:

What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

Gruber:

AUTOMATIC TRANSMISSION

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

Steven Frank:

I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been on a veritable roller-coaster of “how I feel” about the iPad announcement, and trying not to write about it until I had at least an inkling of what was at the root of that.

For the record, Steven Frank is a relatively quiet and humble writer, who seems to think very deeply about what he writes, doesn’t write on a schedule(that I can tell) and is one of my favorites.

The iPad, to me is going to instantly accompany my Air and my iPhone as one of my work tools. And though most pundits (Patrick Norton, mouthy Ryan Block, Alex Lindsay who kept cutting off the excellent Merlin Mann on last weeks groundbreaking Live Twit Keynote coverage), think the iPad replaces your Macbook, for me, I believe the iPad will mostly replace the iPhone for me.

With my incoming calls all handled through Google Voice, and a million ways to make outgoing calls, Skype, iCall, Gizmo5(Googles latest acquisition), I’m trying to figure what the iPhone does that the iPad won’t do. Thoughts in the comments please…

If you’d like to get professional Mac Systems, networking, workflow, backup, automation or repair or upgrade advice, please get in touch with us. Through eMail, Voice or twitter!!!