Apple sent me an email saying, “You are currently using 4.8 GB of your total 5 GB of iCloud storage, which means your iCloud storage is almost full…device backups to iCloud will stop and apps will no longer be able to save documents to iCloud. To ensure your iCloud services continue without interruption, you can free up space or buy more storage by following the steps below…”
My settings show two iPhones. Is one of them my old phone?
From the picture you texted me (heh, that sounds funny), yes, your old iPhone is still in your iCloud backups and can be deleted from the settings in your new phone. Just tap the old phone and tap “Delete Backup.” That should free up adequate room.
To remind you how to get back there: Settings > iCloud > Storage & Backup
Perhaps later on, when you start to acquire more apps, or take more pictures at one time, or add an iPad to your arsenal, you might fill up your 4.7GB of iCloud backup storage legitimately, and will then need to tap “Change Storage Plan,” and choose from:
Note that you can also tap on your new phone (tagged as “This iPhone”) to get a list of what apps are taking up the most room on your device—Camera Roll for most people—and perhaps turn off apps that you don’t need backed up. Be judicious here. Few people will be surprised that I prefer that you buy more storage rather than remove app data from the backup.
Google recently entered the ISP business, they held a contest in which one small US city would get gigabit internet for its citizens. Kansas City, both KS and MO, won. And they are lucky bastards.
First, definitions:
“Fiber”, a.k.a. fiber-optic a.k.a. FIOS a.k.a. fiber to the home, is simply a faster land-based internet connection.
In order of speed, we have had:
First dial-up, then what we have called “broadband,” including ISDN (rare in a home) > T1 > various flavors of DSL > cable > T3 > fiber-optic
Wireless broadband comprises internet connections delivered through the air.
Wifi strictly means wireless networking on a local network. Wifi doesn’t deliver internet to the home or business; it distributes network resources, including the internet connection or a server or networked printers, to devices at the home or business.
You can think of wifi (I guess it’s “Wi-Fi,” but I say that’s fucking stupid, as is hyphenated “e-mail” or capitalized “Internet”)…You can think of wifi as the same link in the chain as an ethernet cable, more convenient, more hip, less secure, less reliable, and possibly more expensive or possible cheaper.
Random bonus jargon: WiMAX is more comparable to Google Fiber or cable internet, a “last-mile” solution for Internet deliver to the home that hasn’t really caught on.
Finally, and real crucially, gigabit means 1 million bits-per-second1, or 1Gbps. That’s a Dr. Evil-level number. Means fast fast fast. My home broadband connection, currently from Grande, is 30,000 bits-per-second = 30 megabit = 30Mbps. It’s satisfyingly fast. But gigabit will, reportedly, blow the face off all the internet to which we’ve so far been accustomed. It’s well above the norms of Japan or Europe, behind whom the US currently lags.
Google has always said, and loudly, that the more time that people spend on the Internet, the more money Google makes. Hence the Google Fiber contest, and the implication on their page that Kansas City is simply the first of many. I hadn’t seen the hardware they’ve developed, the stuff they pitch on their fiber page. Looks cool, at least.
Whatever the benefits for Google, faster internet is good for the nation.
1 Bits-per-second can be called baud. The term no longer appears much, but when dial-up was common, modems were measured in baud. Imagine a time when you might brag about your 2400-baud modem! So “gigabit” is a foreshortened term, but who’s gonna say “gigabaud”?
I am currently migrating a client’s data from a MacBook Pro to a new MacBook Air.
We have tried it twice over Wi-Fi and it failed both times, so I asked her to bring it over, and I did it using a hard drive as a middleman. This time is working flawlessly.
Historically, migrating from one Mac to another has been the easiest thing going. But since they started eliminating FireWire, and thus Target Disk Mode, from many Mac models, they have had to kludge a solution together. They went with Wi-Fi, rather than telling people to use a hard drive in between.
My own previous experiences with migrating over Wi-Fi have been less than stellar. But my contractor said it always worked for him, so I’ve run with telling people that.
In short, if you run into problems migrating over Wi-Fi, try doing it from your Time Machine backup. And if that doesn’t work we can do it with an external hard drive.
Remember those winmail.dat documents in my email? There is always a way to get around things…I sent the document (a photograph) to another person, and they sent it back, and I could see the photo. So is the problem is with my Mac, or with the sender?
Thank you for the tip about winmail.dat attachments! I am still not certain which side is the issue. I suspect it’s really Microsoft Outlook on their side, but the person you asked to relay it back to you also has Outlook, so it worked for them.
But I wonder, what would happen if one mailed the winmail.dat file back to oneself? Also, can we see the attachments fine on your iPhone? I’ll update the post if I get further feedback from our client.
Here’s a simple 3-step troubleshooting procedure for email:
Try going to your webmail—e.g. gmail.com or iCloud.com—in a web browser. Can you log in and get your mail there?
Does email work on iPhone or iPad?
Finally, can you surf other webpages on your Mac?
OK, on iCloud, I can send email there & on iPad & iPhone & can surf the web.
Excellent! So we know, then, that your internet works, your password is correct, and your email service is not down.
We have also established that you do have a couple of options for emailing while we resolve the problem on the Mac.
Do you see an error when you try to send?
When sending I get a message the server failed, try selecting another, but that hasn’t worked either. It’s just spinning. Messages get stuck in Outbox.
That info helps a lot! Try this: move all messages out of outbox into drafts then create one new message, and try to send.
That worked.
Groovy. So now try opening each message in drafts and sending, one at a time. Let’s see if one of them gets stuck.
Can’t send: “Server failed, select different outgoing server.” When I try another it asks for password & each one I try is wrong.
Try moving that message into drafts, and send another message to a different recipient.
If that works, we can guess that there’s something wrong with a specific address in your To: or CC: fields.
This is such good news. Forstall's presentations always creeped me out, and I had a suspicion he was in charge of all the things I didn't like in Apple products, skeuomorphism ranking toward the top of that list.
I think Sir Jive is most capable of realizing whatever vision Jobs had of the future. With Cook steering the ship, and Ive laying the course, I think we'll have some badass action coming up!
Home Sharing is a super-handy feature of iTunes, Apple TV, and iOS thatlets you access items that exist in other iTunes libraries. Those other
iTunes libraries can be in another account on the same Mac, or on a
different Mac.
Home Sharing lets you do a bunch of different things with the music, movies, TV shows, and apps in your iTunes libraries:
* Copy items from other iTunes libraries to
your own iTunes. This is a great way to avoid paying more than once for
the same thing.
* Play content from one machine on another machine. Stream from iTunes to Apple TV, or pull from iTunes to Apple TV or your iPhone.
* Remote control your iTunes or Apple TV.
To use Home Sharing, both iTunes must be on the
same network, that is, connected to the same router over wi-fi or Ethernet cable.
To play an item that was bought at the iTunes
Store, that iTunes must be *authorized* with the same Apple ID that was
used to buy the item.
#### Enable Home Sharing
This is the most crucial bit to know: *Enter the **same Apple ID and password** in every
iTunes that will use Home Sharing.* Any Apple ID will work, but be
consistent:
![Turn On Home Sharing][1]
#### Using Home Sharing
To access other iTunes libraries, those iTunes must
be open. If it’s iTunes on another computer, that computer *must be awake*
with *iTunes open*.
On your iTunes you see a **Sharing** section in the
sidebar. Select the library you want to get items from, and wait till
the main window displays items in that library:
![Shared Library in iTunes Sidebar][2]
Now click the triangle to the left of the shared
library name. You see categories of items, as well as other
sub-categories with their own clickable triangles:
![Subsections of Shared Library][3]
Items in the category you select are display in the main window. You can
play music and video tracks, but the great thing is you can drag items
to your own library to copy them into your iTunes. Your library is the
first section in the sidebar:
![iTunes Library][4]
#### Authorizing
If you want to play an item bought under a particular Apple ID, you must
authorize your computer with that ID. A maximum of 5 computers can be
authorized for a single Apple ID. (Always *deauthorize* computers before
you get rid of them!) You need the Apple ID and the password to do this:
![Authorize This Computer][4]
**Bonus tip:** If you forget to deauthorize a computer before you sell it, and then find yourself running up against the message “You Have Already Authorized Five Computers,” you can Deauthorize All Computers in your iTunes Store > Account. Then all you have to do is reauthorize each device you still own. (This is all way less dramatic than it sounds, but you should know that it works only once a year.)
#### But Wait, There’s More
If you have an Apple TV, turn on its Home Sharing: Go to **Settings >
Computers**. Now you can play items on your computers while sitting on
the sofa looking at the Apple TV. (This doesn’t work for the original
silver Apple TV, but there are other ways to accomplish the same thing on
that model.)
Home Sharing on your iPhone and iPad is in **Settings > Music**. With
Home Sharing on, you can play items in other iTunes libraries with the
sound coming out of the phone.
Finally, the neatest trick: Download the free *[Remote](http://itunes.apple.com/app/remote/id284417350?mt=8)* app from the iTunes Store to your
iPhone or iPad. When you authorize the Remote app with the same Home Sharing ID you’ve used elsewhere, you can control your Apple TV or iTunes on your computers. That’s entertainment!
Note: Before you read this, you owe it to yourself to head over to Dropbox and sign up for a free account. It will be the best thing you’ve done on your computer all month. There is a video on the front page of Dropbox.com to explain why.
Besides straght use of its core feature—syncing your files and data between all your devices—my tip-top favoritest thing I can do with Dropbox is edit plain ol’ text files. Whether I start them on my iPad or Mac or iPhone, once they’re saved into Dropbox, they immediately show up everywhere else.
Johnny Depp as the lonely writer in Secret Window
That may sound mundane, but trust me: this is cutting-edge stuff! Writers have always been chained to big clunky mechanisms. From ink-and-parchment to typewriters to the first massive “portable” computers (with their 5-inch screens) to modern laptops, we’ve never had true mobility, the liberty to change our writing environment at a whim. The archetype of the lonely author—in his favorite bathrobe, seated in his library pounding away at his keyboard—may go the way of the telegraph and the horse-drawn carriage.
My goal for my own writing life is to find my own perfect environment, not a physical one, but an undistracting digital space, where I can find all my drafts and finished pieces, no matter where I may find myself. Dropbox has become the key to that.
The right to write
Since finding this solution of plain text, synced with Dropbox, I’ve tried and recommended several different text-editor apps for the Mac and iPad. Elements, Nebulous Notes, OmmWriter, and Apple’s TextEdit have served me well (at least, when Elements wasn’t throwing frustrating error messages that forced me to quit and even reinstall the app). Meistergeek Brett Terpstra has supervised an insanely comprehensive matrix of all the text apps in iOS.
Just recently, however, my best writing app for the Mac has made it to iOS. Byword is just fantastic: clean, simple, and with just the right features to make me kick everything else to the curb, at least for the moment.
Byword in full-screen mode
Byword’s default mode on the Mac is full-screen, hiding all other windows and toolbars behind a light-cream shade.
It behaves similarly on the iPad; the few buttons and controls are designed in faded grey, and the developer has included only the most important features and preferences, eliminating the urge to fiddle rather than write.
If I create a document on the Mac, which I can do in any text editor, I just save it in my Dropbox folder. I have linked my Dropbox account to Byword on iPhone and iPad, so it sees any text file in any folder there. Whatever edits I do get automatically synced. With Lion on the Mac, I don’t have to remember to hit Save.
This easy, no-save syncing is simply impossible with Microsoft Word. I haven’t used Word for writing in years.
When I’m ready to ship, I can just copy and paste, or email straight from the iOS app, or from the Mac file system, as an attachment, or as plain or formatted text.
The real magic
Wait, did I just say formatted? Indeed I did. For this is the big new tip for modern writer: you can format a plain-text file. Bold, italics, bullet lists, web links, even web images and footnotes…you can do it all.
The secret is Markdown. Markdown is a set of simple text codes you can use to indicate formatting. It takes just minutes to learn, and once you’ve got it, it’s yours forever.
One asterisk on either side of a *word*, for example, means italics. **Two asterisks** is bold.
Use asterisks or plus signs to make a bulleted list, so…
* my first item
* my next item
* my last item
…becomes…
my first item
my next item
my last item.
You can read the full set of syntax on Daring Fireball, the excellent web site of Markdown creator John Gruber. I recommend that you start with the basics. Everything after that is pure gravy.
Once you’ve finished writing and editing your doc, all that’s left is to ship it. I mentioned that you can email text directly out of Byword. BUT…if you format with Markdown, you can send email that’s all kinds of pretty, in ways that Apple’s Mail app just won’t do.
For bloggers, Markdown changes everything about generating a post, because it will convert all your formatting into sweet, sweet HTML code to be pasted into WordPress or your choice of platforms. My favorite CMS, Squarespace, even lets you edit in Markdown directly on your site.
Power editing
Back to Byword: The biggest reason I landed on Byword as my go to composer is how super-smart it is about Markdown. There are quick shortcuts to the most common codes, and special behaviors to make the syntax even easier.
If, for example, I’m editing a numbered list with “1.,” “2.,” etc., I just hit return after each line and the next number is generated. Ditto for bulleted lists. Also, on the Mac, all the Markdown codes fade into the background, and keyboard shortcuts will insert codes for bold, italics, links, lists, and images.
Copy rich text from Marked
Always-on preview: I have just one more Power Tip. Once you have started using Markdown, it is worth popping on over to the Mac App Store and picking up Marked for $3.99. Wen you open a Markdown file in Marked, you get a constantly updated preview of your formatted file. This is as opposed to hitting Preview in Byword every few minutes to see what your end result will look like. Marked also offers the best HTML and rich-text export for pasting into email or your blog.
The end result
I guarantee, if you follow these simple recommendations, the combo of Dropbox + Byword + Markdown will rock your writing world. I wish you a happy life of letters!
Do it. Lovely piece of machinery. Fast, fluid, and so very pretty. I smile whenever I turn it on.
I like pretty pictures…
Yes, photos and videos are magnificent. I’ve got this one shot of mountain laurels that makes you wanna sniff the screen. Netflix looks fantastic, as do iTunes flicks and the high-def DVD rips that I stream from my Mac mini media server (Air Video rocks!).
The Retina display on the iPad makes any other computer screen look like Donkey Kong. But smarter folks have used smarter words to describe the experience, so I’ll leave it at: you just gotta see it.
The iPad announcement also included the release of iPhoto for iOS. I don’t know how much I’ll ever use the iPad cameras, but editing my images is a different story. This experienced Photoshopper has long dreamed of using more natural and intuitive strokes to make my photos sparkle. With iPhoto on the iPad, that dream is realized. Apple has brought professional-quality image processing to anyone with a finger. That’s big, big stuff.
…But the reading
Man, a 10-inch Retina display gives new meaning to the word “read.” Kindle books, Flipboard, Zite, and Instapaper are so very smooth. Or just go to a web article in Safari and hit the Reader button in the address bar…
I know some folks will get all steamed when I say that the iPad is better than a book, but there, I’ve said it. Thanks for everything, Gutenberg. iPad is the new book.
Do more, wait less
Apple didn’t put a much better processor in the 2012 iPad than the one in the iPad 2, but I traded up from a 1st-gen tablet, and the difference is dramatic.
The new device handles like a champ all the extra-big graphics that iPad app developers have pumped into their new versions. I have felt barriers to my productivity evaporate. And I start to understand how people like Harry McCracken have come to use the iPad as their main axe.
(Site note: Of the iPad owners I’ve talked to, there seems to be a unanimous, and annoyed, sensation that the first two iPads started to feel sluggish about two weeks before the new iPad was announced. I’d like to think that the benchmark nerds out there would have a good explanation for this, but I’ve seen nothing, and the complaints seem to have fallen off since iOS 5.1. Please contribute your own experiences to the comments.)
Dissipating the heat, with puns
Amazingly, Consumer Reports’ headline about the iPad hotting up managed to take some steam off the release. Apple took a lot of heat after that report, but reality quickly cooled the heels of the link-baiters, and the magazine seems to have warmed up to Apple’s new tablet.
The Marcus Report: After an Infinity Blade II marathon (which in no way delayed the writing of this review, the new iPad is noticeably warmer at one corner, where the processor is. The effect is slight, and doesn’t bother me in the least.
But do you really need it?
As I type this, my friend is sitting nearby, very happily surfing the net and watching videos on my original iPad. It did for a time feel a little mopey, but I don’t get that feeling any longer. Any iPad is an awesome iPad, and I think I’m gonna keep that one around for a while.
That said, if you enjoy your iPad 1, but don’t get a really fluid vibe from it, you’re gonna go ga-ga over an iPad (3 or whatever).
If you own an iPad 2, you’ll see all the difference in the new screen. And what a difference it is.
Steve Jobs said that conventional PCs will be trucks on the road, while tablets and app phones will be the passenger vehicles of the infobahn. The new iPad brings that clear-eyed vision into ever sharper focus.
It’s official: Macs are finally vulnerable to nasty viruses. There are malicious programs that can infect a Mac without the user having to do anything accidental or unwise. It ain’t an apocalypse, but we should be increasingly careful.
Last week saw the emergence of a version of the Flashback trojan. This bad bug sneaks into your web browser when you visit an infected web site, and starts reporting things like your browsing history and logins.
There are really good writeups about Flashback, like these from TidBITS, MacWorld, All Things D, and this nerdy one from Basics4Mac, with plenty of technical details and descriptions of the . For the purpose of this article, I’ll simply say that Flashback uses the programming environments Flash and Java to run. (These names may sound familiar, from discussions about how the iPhone has neither of them.)
Apple has also now, for the first time, posted a response to an emergent Mac malware. It’s brief and worth a glance.
So now I am going to try to distill, in as few words as possible, what the average Mac user should do about the virus.
What Now?
1. Run Software Update from the Apple menu.
Apple has released a patch to Java that prevents Flashback from infecting your Mac.
2. Don’t click on unknown or untrusted links to web sites.
Even some legit web sites have been infected, but they will be cleaned up. When you see a link in an email, before you click, hover your cursor over the link and read the address that pops up. If it doesn’t look right, don’t click.
3. Don’t enter your password…
…unless you know why you’re being asked to do so.
4. Test your Mac for infection.
This takes just a bit of effort, but is not hard. You have three reasonable options:
Download this small app by long-time Mac nerd Mark Zeedar. Once the file test4flashback.zip (lowercase) is in your downloads folder, double-click it to “unzip” it, and then double-click the resulting file called Test4Flashback (with capital letters).
Go to this web page by security firm Kaspersky. It can supposedly compare your Mac’s unique ID against a database of known infected machines.
Open the app called Terminal. You can find it using Spotlight or in the /Applications/Utilities folder. Copy and paste each of the following commands into the Terminal, hitting return after each.
Or follow these brief-but-nerdy instructions posted by F-Secure.
What Next?
But what then? How should Mac-o-philes stay vigilant against these intruders?
Please understand that all of the following are just suggestions, not prescriptions. All of us want our Macs to just keep working, without the tinkering and worrying characteristic of Windows users. But to that end, I have myself adopted the following methods, and I believe they help protect my computers and my data from the bad guys.
1. Uninstall Adobe Flash from your Mac
Adobe has this page, from which you can download the Flash uninstaller for Mac.
I know, I know, you’re saying it’s going to break your internet. Read on, dear reader.
2. Use Google Chrome instead of Apple Safari for web browsing
Chrome is a fantastic, free web browser that Google created to make the web better and faster.
Google built their own version of Flash into Chrome, and Chrome updates itself on a regular basis behind the scenes. So you don’t have to keep up with Flash updates, and you’ll never be tricked into downloading a fake version of Flash.
Sometimes I browse in Safari, but mostly I use Chrome.
3. Should I disable Java?
You can read in the other articles how you can disable Java entirely, both for your browser and on your whole Mac. The problem is that, as of this moment, Java is even more important than Flash. Many of our clients are using CrashPlan for internet backups, or LogMeIn for remote access to their computers. Both services rely on Java.
As an experiment, I have disabled Java on Safari, in Safari menu > Preferences > Security. Ping me if you’re curious whether that has affected my experience on the web.
Back up, and be vigilant
If you follow the 3–2–1 rule of backups, then you can recover from anything that happens to your computer.
And from here on out, it behooves us to keep an eye on what goes on on our computers. The days of cavalier surfing are over for Mac users.
Yes, photos and videos are magnificent. I’ve got this one 
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