Recently in Appletosh Category

Have you ever wanted to find the technical specifications of that Mac you’ve been using for the last couple of years? All you need is the Serial number (eg. YM0000XXEUH ) or even the model number (eg. MC561LL/A ).

As you would expect Apple have a support page that provides just what you need, what you may not have noticed is that it will use your products serial number to find the exact product specifications you’re after.

Keep reading if you need to find your serial number…

Like a lot of businesses we use an internal OS X Server for a variety of functions — one of them is to provide a local caching DNS service.

Also like other business we use BIND’s ability to serve up ‘views’ to let us have custom internal web addresses reflecting internal servers.

Occasionally, we need to add a new address to our private view and I never remember to drop the TTL ( time to live ) down to a shorter period. (Actually remember is the wrong word — usually I don’t get any warning that a new internal address is needed :D ).

As I don’t do this on a daily basis I can never remember how I cleared out the DNS cache previously — hence this post.

I like being productive and I like productivity software (well some of it).

That being said there is a lot of stuff out there that you wouldn’t use if they paid you but there are some gems.

Today I needed to add a few of them to a new computer and so I needed some extra licenses.

Productivity and GTD apps on Mac OS X are flourishing along with the whole Mac eco-system but there are a few standouts. I’ve got a few keys ones that I get everyone I work with to use.

The main ones I needed were:

• Mail Act-On
• TextExpander
• Keyboard Maestro
• Omnifocus for Mac

So imagine my surprise…

Just a quick one - I couldn’t find an up-to-date iCal calendar for the Queensland State School terms so I’ve created one that everyone can subscribe to.

Click here to subsribe to the Queensland School Terms iCal Calendar

The calendar will be updated for probably the next 5 years, given how many years of school life our children have left. Currently it has the 2011 and 2012 School Terms as stated on the Queensland Department of Education & Training website.

Hope you find it useful.

Apple has released a timely update to their Remote app for iPad & iPhone - timely in the sense that AirPlay control of your Mac based iTunes library is now available from the couch over the holidays.

Add to that control over your iTunes on Mac Internet Radio Stations and Movie & TV Show rentals and there really is no reason to get off the couch over the break.

Thankfully this version also appears to fix the iPad bug that occurred when a password protected movie was started by the physical remote and you tried to enter the password using the Remote.app on your iPad.

The somewhat infamous Camera+ is back in the App Store.

There’s a list as long as your arm of changes and it’s looking like a solid update, not to mention fixing a few bugs that were annoying to say the least. (Note the infamous VolumeSnap feature is gone.)

UPDATE: tap tap tap have also just launched a competition to promote version 2 and the return to the app store.

This is a nice and timely update to Aperture, weighing in at nearly 260MB, that fixes those pesky problems with publishing photo’s to Flickr (and MobileMe/Facebook).

According to Software Update :

As usual there’s a support document from Apple and this time it’s a bit more detailed: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2518

I’m a keyboard person, that is I prefer to use the keyboard as much as possible. It’s doesn’t matter that there are good metrics to show how much slower using a keyboard is, it’s just the way I’m wired.

So iTunes is a particular pain for me - as it doesn’t let me change the rating of a song from the keyboard - at least not fresh out of the box.

We’re going to change that.

Like millions of other people around the world I plugged in my iPhone toady and noticed that several apps were updated, and like millions of other I clicked on the “Update All” button. Amongst these was Stanza probably one of the better eBook readers for the iPhone, at least for pure ePub reading; I’m told the Kindle app is too bad either but I like my book DRM free - who knows what I’ll be reading on next year or next month for that matter.

As a creature of habit I read the update notes as the apps are downloading and syncing to my iPhone - unfortunately today’s update for Stanza was to remove a feature at the request of dear old Apple… which I read after it had downloaded and synced to my iPhone.

It’s Sunday night Australian time and still the world rages and swirls with the crys of “tech pundits”, “tech personalities” and “tech investment analysts” praising or bemoaning the iPad.

No surprise, but very few of them seem to get it, Gruber is obviously in the get it camp and he’s tracking the who get’s it crowd and who doesn’t (probably for future “Claim Chowder”). Somewhat sadder though, is the debate over the iPad’s lack of support for the already in decline Flash, the best two articles to date on this are Scobel and Gruber.

All of that doesn’t really matter though. Not to my Mum (or Brent Simmons “Mom”); nor to my clients that stopped installing Flash 2 years ago, nor to the 99.98% of the world that doesn’t want to hack every gadget they use.

I don’t think everyone sees what I see either.