iPhone in Italy

Our friend Megen is an ER nurse by trade, but a Mac and iPhone geek for the sheer fun of it.  She got her first Mac in 1995.  She enjoys blogging about medical stuff, Macs, iPhones, and productivity (and how to squander it by messing with productivity tools).  Her reviews of iPhone apps and usage in particular are excellent; thus with her permission we plan to start re-posting them here.  Enjoy!

In case anyone missed it, I just spent 10 days in Italy, and I did a ton of research before going about using my iPhone over there. It was hard to piece everything together. Here’s my own experience.

In a nutshell, unless you put the iPhone in airplane mode and resign yourself to being cut off for the time you’re there, it costs big bucks to use the iPhone overseas. Digest that, and then read on for ways to minimize the pain. Read the rest of this entry »

Mac improves your business. Want proof?

Is switching to a Mac a good business decision?  Unequivocally, YES!

Don’t just take my word for it.  What follows are recent studies and articles that support a business decision to switch to a Mac-based network.  If you’re presenting this case, as I often do, and really want to drive home these facts (and yes, despite my obvious bias, there are actual FACTS present here):

• Mac networks are less prone to security and malware problems
• more workers have a better, more productive experience on a Mac
• Mac networks are less expensive to own and maintain

…then read on.  Need a little more help than that?  Call me; I’ll come in and talk to the decision maker. Read the rest of this entry »

The No Spin Zone: SSD Awesomeness

What is SSD you might be asking yourself? Or maybe you know exactly what it is but think its either too expensive or the benefits are too small to warrant an upgrade. Either way, I hope to show you why SSD is awesome and why it might be a worth while upgrade for you and your computer. Read the rest of this entry »

Cloud Computing: A Warning.

Over the last week there have been a series of outages in the cloud computing community resulting in the loss of thousands of end users personal data. If you are unlucky enough to be the owner of aT-Mobile branded Side-Kick then you likely know the story. This article from roughly drafted highlights the key points of the failure and how it could have easily been prevented. Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile Calendars

A lot of what BestMacs currently does with our calendar sharing is going to go away when we install our Snow Leopard Server. (I hope.)

But the solution we put in play works quite well for us. It is driven by the one killer app that we just had to have: push calendar to/from iPhone over the air with MobileMe.

Of all the cool tricks that MobileMe brings to the table, I would argue that wireless data sync with iPhone over cell signal is the best. I can make a new appointment (or modify any calendar, address book, or Safari bookmark) and within a minute or two, it’s on both of my Macs and vice-versa.

And most (soon to be all) of your BestMacs team does this with our iPhones.

But then the challenge remained: how to get our calendars shared with one another? One catch to MobileMe sync is that it is all of your calendars or none of them. You can’t say, “this is my personal event calendar, don’t sync this.” And none of us really want to see each others’ personal calendars. Read the rest of this entry »

MacBook Air Experiment Phase 2

If you follow the site, you know that a few months ago I pondered the role of MacBook Air in the Apple portable line-up. After mulling it over, I got one and ran it as I have every other laptop I’ve owned: my one and only computer.

The second phase of the experiment is a paradigm shift for me. I’ve never split my work across two computers before.  Every other “second” computer I’ve owned has been to kick around for experimentation or testing.  Never was it to be a workhorse like the Air.

But in keeping with the premise of the experiment, a couple weeks ago I put a mid-2007 Aluminum iMac on my desk.

Read the rest of this entry »

State of Mac Backup Pt 2 – Planning

This is part 2 of my 4 part series on the state of Mac backup.  If you missed my tribute/hopes for Retrospect, you can read Part 1, here.  In parts 3 and 4 we’ll look at software for the home/small office, and for the larger organization including servers.

Before we take a look at what Mac backup solutions are out there and rate them, let’s set the parameters for which they will be judged.  We can do this by reviewing our typical planning process.

The Point

One of my childhood friends once lost his home in a fire. Fortunately no one was hurt but the home and everything in it were destroyed. I remember his mom lamenting the loss of all the baby pictures.

Here at my house, we have over 6000 pictures of Jack. And while they’re all digital and stored in iPhoto, the same rules apply – without proper backup, a house fire destroys the pictures in your hard drive just a easily as the printed variety.

This is usually what I think of when I think of backup; total catastrophic loss. But sometimes the loss isn’t so dramatic- maybe it’s hard drive failure. Maybe it’s a bug in the system or some malady that takes out a volume or maybe just a few folders. Of course, data loss could come from a habitual swipe of Command-S when you meant to do a Save As.

That’s why computer pros harp on backup so much – losing important work can come from simple sources.

Read the rest of this entry »

DroboPro: Part 2

I wrote a couple weeks ago about a cool new offering from Data Robotics here, called the DroboPro. Well, here we are a couple of weeks later and i thought i would share my findings with this cool new tech, now that we have it in the field.

I had previously mentioned that Drobo worked on a technology called iSCSI where as the more expensive solutions currently available will typically use Fiber Channel. I have to admit that installing the DroboPro at a large client had me worried with regard to data throughput. I was unsure whether a device like this could match up to an XServe RAID when dealing with large amounts of data. Apple used to reccomend this product exclusively for server deployments and has since adopter the newer Promise Tech RAID solution. These ranged in price from $7,000 dollars and up depending on your storage configuration. This piece of hardware used Fiber Channel as its only means of data transfer which adds significantly to the cost of ownership. Read the rest of this entry »

Going on a Data Diet

If you have followed The MacBook Air Conundrum by comments here or on Facebook, you know that my trusty black MacBook is up for auction on eBay and my new MacBook Air is en route.

I really wanted to try new solid-state disk instead of conventional hard drives (more on this in a future article) so it will arrive with a 64GB internal disk.

And my 160GB internal on the MacBook is nearly full.

Ooh, this is gonna hurt. Read on to see how we cram it all in.

iPhone Data Plan

I was talking with a client who wanted to get an iPhone, but he had a question that I felt was post-worthy: why should he pay $30+ a month to AT&T for a “Data Plan” when he already has internet service at home.

Read on for why he didn’t need one…