The MacBook Air has always been a sweet little machine, but with the noteworthy constraint that there is no means of fast input/output -- USB 2.0 is as fast as it gets on most of them, and that's not even as fast (in actual real usage) as FireWire 400, much less FireWire 800, much less Gigabit ...
A full computer that’s a fraction of the size and cost of the Mac Mini?
If you like the idea of a computer that's both smaller and less expensive than, say, dinner for two, then dine on Raspberry Pi. It is a full featured computer for $25 that fits in the palm of your hand. It's a small circuit board into which you can plug a monitor, USB devices (e.g. keyboard and ...
Need to get contacts off an old mobile phone? iSync to the rescue!
We recently visited a client who had a typical mobile phone -- you know, the kind intended for making phone calls and not much else. She had a bunch of contacts in her phone's address book that she needed to keep. Fortunately, Snow Leopard (and Tiger and Leopard before it) had a feature called ...
MacTech Boot Camp: Back Up Your Mac
Yesterday I spent the day at MacTech Boot Camp, for Mac IT professionals. Sean Costello, founder of Irongate and Background Backup, gave a presentation on backups, archiving, and restoring data on the Mac. The information he provided is useful to anyone running a business—because it's important to ...
Thunderbolt lets you have FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet for your MacBook Air
The MacBook Airs are lovely machines, but they lack ports. You get USB 2.0, SD (on the 13") and headphones, and ThunderBolt. No FireWire, no Ethernet, no eSATA. In other words, no fast connectivity, except for Thunderbolt. Apple's $29 Ethernet adapter is only 100Base-T, not Gigabit; Belkin has a ...
No More Computer Passwords?
An article by Randall Stross that came out in the New York Times last week, Bypassing Those Passwords, discussed an exciting future for those of us who are tired of remembering all those computer passwords. Many people and organizations, including Darpa (the federal government’s Defense Advanced ...