In this post, I describe why, after years of using the wonderful Mac/iOS VPN product, Cloak, I’m experimenting with an alternative approach, that combines Private Internet Access (PIA) and Little Snitch. (2015-08-28 — As mentioned in an update at the end of the article, I’ve actually now switched back to Cloak, but using Little Snitch as the kill-switch.)
The passcode to unlock my 1Password keychain is long—very long—and typing that in on an iOS device is time consuming and error-prone. Fortunately, Agilebits provides…
I transport my MacBook Air daily between home and the office—closing the lid to put it to sleep, and opening the lid to wake it.…
In my daily work, as well as the maintenance of three blogs, I frequently need a tool that allows me to conveniently share files and screenshots. This article discusses my search for that elusive perfect app.
For many years, I stored the majority of my data in Dropbox. A few months ago, however, I migrated to BitTorrent Sync (BTS), and haven’t looked back. This article explains why.
I recently switched from DreamHost’s DreamPress to GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting service. This article explains why, and discusses my experience so far. [Update: Since writing this article, I’ve switched away from GoDaddy, and now host my blog in a VPS at DigitalOcean. You can read about that switch, here.]
Earlier this year, I described how I used Dropbox to share confidential documents among our family’s Macs. Unfortunately, that approach proved too problematic and I’ve since had to switch to a new approach—based on the Tresorit service—which, while not a perfect solution, does represent an improvement.
A while back, I ran across an article (which for the life of me I can’t find now) in which the author meets with a computer hacker at a public location—a Starbucks coffee shop—and demonstrates the surprising amount of information he can collect by intercepting the traffic between the Starbucks public wifi and the locally connected customers. It is truly scary!
I have an internet-hosted Mac mini running OS X Server, and recently decided to figure out how to host websites on it, and in particular, WordPress websites. After a few struggles and speed bumps, I finally got a site up and running, and wanted to document the process here, pulling together the various bits of information I compiled along the way.
After a friend passed last week, I was forced to reflect on the matter of how our personal and confidential digital data would be passed on and entrusted to others in case something unexpected happened to my wife and I.
For more than a decade, I’ve been accumulating music and curating playlists in iTunes, all of which has physically been located on the SSD of my MacBook Air. And for the past couple of years, I’ve been sharing that library with other devices—computers, Apple TV, iOS devices—via iTunes Match.
About a month ago, a notice was posted to the Pin Drop blog announcing that the app would be shutting down. Even though we make a competitor app called Rego, it was sad to read this news. There’s plenty of room in the location bookmarking space for a couple good apps, and Pin Drop was definitely one of the few we admired.
I’ve been unable to install Yosemite on a mid-2011 iMac. Apple are aware, but so far haven’t been able to help. Here’s the story.
I’m in the process of recovering from a Dropbox disaster, and wanted to document it here in case it may prove useful to others. I…
For years, I’ve been accumulating an archive of files at home on an external drive connected to a Mac mini. These are files that I do not expect to need in the future, but at the same time wouldn’t really be happy about losing—for example, snapshots of filesystems of computers I’ve retired, some source media, etc. All in all, the drive contains some 300 GB of data.
A couple of days ago, I posted an article detailing how to use Keyboard Maestro to create todos in OmniFocus 2 that are linked to original messages in Mail.app. Security-conscious Ben Brooks thought the idea was neat, but couldn’t give it a try, as it relies on the use of the OmniSync Server.
That got me thinking, and I came up with a simpler way to achieve the same thing—directly, without having to generate and send messages to the OmniSync Server Mail Drop.
About a year ago, I switched from OmniFocus to Things, in part because of a dislike of the OmniFocus Mac app. Today, I’m switching back to OmniFocus for two reasons.
As I wrote about in the past, I host my email on a Mac mini with OS X Server, and on which I run Mail.app and SpamSieve together to provide a server-side spam filtering and rules-processing solution. While this setup works great for remote spam filtering and management, it is somehow causing a separate, irritating and confusing problem.
This morning I was trying to create a Keyboard Maestro macro to automatically send an email to my team members on the last day of each month. I got stymied when I realized the the time schedule trigger is basically limited to “Daily at a certain time”.
A few weeks ago, and way late to the game, I started listening to podcasts. Of the several I’ve heard so far, the ones I enjoyed have included Horace Dediu’s “The Critical Path“, Benedict Evans’s “Cubed“, Gabe Weatherhead and Erik Hess’s “Technical Difficulties” and Shawn Blanc’s “The Weekly Briefly“. The ones I’ve disliked have included John Gruber’s “The Talk Show” and Marco Arment’s “Accidental Tech“.
I wanted to take a moment to reflect on why I liked some and disliked others. This is mostly for my own benefit, since going through this exercise will likely reveal my motivations for listening to podcasts in the first place.
While waiting for version 4 to be released, I’ve had to temporarily uninstall the MailTags plug-in from Mail.app in OS X Mavericks. One of the…
In the past, all the devices in my home operated over a single wifi network—including four Macs, an AppleTV and several iOS devices. I’ve long suspected I was probably overtaxing the wifi, and listening to the recent “taming wifi” episode of the Technical Difficulties podcast inspired me to do something about it.
For the past few days, the CPU on my 11″ MacBook Air, running OS X Mavericks 10.9.1 has looked like this: Periodically—and frequently—a process called,…
