T-Mobile is now providing 200 MB per month of free data for tablet owners. Compare this act of generosity to Verizon’s game of deactivating their pre-paid SIM cards to steer you into a post-paid plan. T-Mobile recently had an offer for free SIM cards for pre-paid service, so I took them up on it.…
Author: Dan
Dan Kessler is the owner of MacMaven Consulting.
The iPod Shuffle remains a solid choice for playing music while working out. It’s small, lightweight, and relatively inexpensive. However, the absence of a display can make the Shuffle a little confusing to use. It’s not intuitive how to play songs in the order you’d like. If you load your albums into the Shuffle, you’ll…
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Google Apps for Business
Google Apps for Business is a cost-effective solution for email, calendar, contacts, and productivity applications. All of the Google Apps are cloud-based, so you’re always using the latest version. While iCloud offers email, calendar, and contacts in the cloud, iCloud is not suited as a business solution. The Google Apps infrastructure is extremely reliable, and offers business-friendly collaboration…
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Secure email
Generally speaking, sending an email over the internet is not secure. The message can be intercepted or even modified before it reaches the recipient. There are several technologies that can be used to provide point-to-point security. Two good options on the Mac are S/MIME, which is built into Mail.app, and Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG). GPG…
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iTunes streaming from iCloud
Media files take up gigabytes of space on your hard drive. If you’re running out of space on your drive due to iTunes purchases, there’s a little known option to stream your media from iCloud. With streaming enabled, you can delete the downloaded movie, TV show, and music files from your Mac’s hard drive. When…
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Photos in the Cloud
iCloud is a great way to push your photos to all your Apple devices and share photos with friends. However, iCloud is not intended for backup or archival storage of your photos. iCloud will store 1000 photos for 30 days. This gives you plenty of time to import your photos into iPhoto on your Mac.…
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Multi-WAN routers
Internet connectivity is mission-critical for most companies. Even a minute of downtime can have a material impact on revenue. Large organizations have extremely expensive infrastructure and a full-time engineering staff to keep their networks up. Most of the mid-sized companies we work with in New York City don’t have the luxury of spending millions…
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Fixing split albums in iTunes
One of the more common questions we get about iTunes is “why do some albums get split up?” The reason is that one or more songs on the album are credited to a different artist. For example, on Phil Collins’ Hits album, every song is credited to Phil Collins except for one, Separate Lives. The…
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The menu bar debate
One of the more notable user interface differences between Macs and PCs is the location of the menu bar. On Macs, one menu bar is located at the top of the primary display. On Windows, every application gets its own menu bar. The advantage of the Mac approach is that it saves screen real…
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Fusion Drive
The Fusion drive is a $250 build-to-order option for iMacs and Mac minis. Apple doesn’t push this option very hard, but it’s something you should strongly consider. The Fusion option gets you a 128 GB solid state drive in addition to the standard (mechanical) hard disk drive. The read speeds on the SSD are…