AuburnCom Weblog

Another good question from a valued client:

Dear Brendan,
for a long time now I have had no alarm clock, mostly because there is
scant room for one next to my bed. So I have been relying on Elsa to wake
me and she’s pretty consistent. She assaults me regularly between 530 and
six o’clock in the morning. She has no respect for weekends.

But I was wondering now that I have a handy dandy spanking new shiny iMac
if it might have its own alarm clock. If it did, that would be fortunate
for it would force me to get out of bed to turn it off! Of course I’ve
been known to go back to bed anyway in such events.

Here’s the Answer:
Indeed, I’ve often wished for a good alarm clock on the Macintosh, I’ve had good results with this free application called Alarm Clock Pro, it’s available from http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/audio/alarmclockpro.htm, and is free except for donation requests.

If for any reason your Mac is going to sleep or turning off at night, you may configure it to wake up by itself(about five minutes before the alarm is due, perhaps)by going into the energy saver system preferences (to do this, type “energy saver” into spotlight).

One can tell the computer to wake up at a certain time every day, once this is done, the computer will be on and the Alarm Clock Pro can do it’s work, hope this is helpful!

The Macintosh line of computers, has, for many years implemented quick, simple and powerful networking technologies years ahead of other computer makers.This post is about the dual gigabit ethernet ports that have been standard on the Power Mac G5 and the recent Mac Pro computers.  Apple led the field in 2000 by shipping its PowerBook and PowerMac computers with Gigabit Ethernet.

 Initially, gigabit Ethernet was deployed in high-capacity backbone network links (for instance, on a high-capacity campus network). In 2000, Apple’s Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 were the first mass produced personal computers featuring the 1000BASE-T connection.^[1] It quickly became a built-in feature in many other computers.

But Apple innovated again when they shipped the Power Mac G5 in June 2003 with Dual Gigabit Ethernet Ports, praise reigned on the Power Mac for this:

 The Power Mac G5 supports up to 16GB of 533-MHz DDR2 SDRAM and now includes two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Multiple Gigabit Ethernet ports are well suited for users who plan to utilize their Power Mac in an Xsan environment — that’s Apple’s storage-area network technology for high-performance computing. 

But, what can these dual ports do for us in our day to day computing? Well, simply put, your Power Mac can connect to your Router through both of these ports simultaneously and instantly double your network bandwidth.Many operating systems including Unix, Linux and Windows XP require intelligent configuring on the part of the user or the “System Administrator”, on the Mac, however, It Just Works.This trick will work for you even on your laptop, where a windows laptop would become confused with a WiFi connection as well as a Wired Gigabit connection, the MacBook will happily use both network connections simultaneously to get the most efficiency from your home router. Remember, the greatest home routers are the Apple Airport line of routers available from the Apple Store, Amazon or AuburnCom, your San Francisco Mac Evangelist!  

Try using Command+H to hide your Mac OS X windows, it’s faster, skips effects and saves space in the dock…

MacBreak Weekly, hosted by Leo Laporte and part of the TWIT network, has been getting better and better recently, The Macalope has made a few appearances and this week in episode 64, John Siracusa, writer of this wonderfully intricate review of Leopard on Ars Technica
, is a guest and provides fantastic details of how and why Mac OS X Leopard is such an important step.

Listen to it over on http://www.twit.tv/mbw64

An Apple certified evangelist is awaiting your phone call to help you get the most out of your Mac. Certified by Apple in OS X support, I provide consultations on Panther, Jaguar, Tiger and the amazing New Leopard operating system. Would you like it to do more for you? automate your calendar events, simplify your music collection, handle the party music for your elaborate home audio system.

or lets talk about video, I evangelise the Apple TV, apple’s great product that brings your entire iTunes library to your living room, your bedroom, in fact any rooms in fact you’d like to listen to the large music library that you’ve spent so much time building, wouldn’t it be great to play all that music from the comfort of your living room couch? Call for a example of it’s usefulness.

Mac Hardware, software and Networking is all under our microscope, Apple has certified us as experts and we are so happy to bring this expertise to you.

AuburnCom is a registered San Francisco company with clients from Marin county, Sausalito, Yerba Buena island, the city of San Francisco and as far south as Daly City, we make house calls to the East Bay, and ship replacement and upgrade superdrives to faraway states including Texas and Massachusettes.

Call us on 415-871-9683, email brendan@auburncom.com or visit http://www.auburncom.com to find out more about us or how we can make things better and easier for you.

A sample of one of our tutorials:  

Obviously, to use this, you’re going to have to have a mac with at least Tiger, and a copy of VisualHub.Let’s say you’ve got your iPhone, your mac with Tiger, and a copy of VisualHub.

First, you need to be able to script VisualHub. To do that, you’re going to have to download this special script dictionary.Next you’re going to install this script library. To do so you need to…

To learn more, call or email Brendan at AuburnCom 415-871-9683 for expert Mac advice and tutorials.   

OS X began the use of using it’s development code names as marketing tools with verion 10.2 (Jaguar), prior editions were marketed as Version 10 and Version 10.1 while engineers and developers referred to these versions by their project or code names, Version 10 was code named internally as Cheetah and Version 10.1 was known internally as Puma.
We know from Wikipedia entries that Apple’s marketing team decided to use the code name Jaguar after huge buzzprior to the release of 10.2. 10.3 was then marketed as Panther and 10.4 as Tiger. By now, people have heard that the impending version of 10.5 is known as Leopard, in fact, Leopard is a much more familiar name for the upcoming release.
A client today suggested we may see Ocelot as the name for the Leopard’s successor, an eduacated guess and a most interesing name for the next iteration of OS X, the truth however, may be more mundane, Trademark filings show Apple has trademarks already on two neat names, Lynx and Cougar.

With all of that cleared up, we can speculate that Apple wouldn’t use sequential code names beginning with the same letter, namely L, thereby giving us the probable code name (and marketing name) of 10.6, Cougar.

The future of OS X is wide open though, viewers of the wonderful high definition nature series will have gained glimpses of some of the most impressive and elusive big cats roaming this planet, can anyone comment here on what names they expect or think we might see?

Macworld is an enticing, exciting oppurtunity to see Apple’s new products and developments, Steve Jobs always provides an exciting Keynote, and last year, visitors were treated to the amazing iPhone revelation which made the whole week very exciting.

There’s lots of after parties, connections, and discounts on great Mac accessories and software to be had so run over to the website and grab your four day pass for just $25!

Via TUAW

I am happy to report that registration for Macworld 2008, happening in San Francisco January 14 through the 19th, 2008, is open.
If you register before October 5th you can get a free Exhibit pass (using Priority Code: 08-E-VF01) or special rates for the higher end passes (which allow you into the various classes and labs offered at the Conference).

Matt Cutts gave a great talk at wordcamp on Saturday, regarding Whitehat Search engine optimization. I checked his blog today to find what else he’s been writing about and he has written a good piece where he explains that rmail has been taking too much of his time and gives some examples of how he’s been trying to manage it, many of these will be useful for you if you’re just starting to think about more carefully managing your email.

I’ve tried all kinds of tricks to reduce the email load:
- I archive any mailing list that I don’t really need in my inbox.
- I try to check email fewer times during the day.
- I write replies to emails, then save them as drafts for a while before replying, so I don’t get stuck in a cycle of replying, getting a response, and quickly emailing again.

This week (with a little prodding from a friend), I realized that it’s still not working. I’m barely keeping my head above water, email-wise. I need a different approach. I can see a couple options:

1. Go “lossy.” Let a few emails drop on the floor. I’m already doing this from time to time, like when someone emails out of the blue asking for an interview or something that would take too long.
2. For emails from outside Google, shard the workload and ask for help.

The website RoughlyDrafted has written a long and detailed article summing up some of the facts regarding the iPhone, who and where it has received hype or criticism from and how these folks fare on a histrorical basis, one of the best parts is this: 

Gizmodo called for an iPhone boycott “for the foreseeable future” as a righteous protest against AT&T, a brand it associates with “Microsoft-style anti-competitive maneuvers and anti-privacy efforts á la RIAA.”  

Interestingly, Gizmodo offered no opinions last fall about boycotting the Zune to protest genuine“Microsoft anti-competitive maneuvers,” or the Zune’s actual connection with the RIAA with its over the top DRM, self destructing media, and the Universal “music theft tax”Microsoft bundled into its price. Why not? 

To continue reading (it’s worthwhile), click here