Tag: mac

At last! A Mac Mini Server!

There have been many arguments over the years about Macs being more expensive than PCs and though I have often thought that the arguments justifying this opinion are mostly without base, they seem to have stuck quite firmly in the minds of the consuming public and the business community in particular. In one area though the reverse, since the release of OS X, has always been true: a Mac Server is significantly less expensive than a Windows Server.

However, a Mac Server has generally remained mostly outside of the purchasing range of a small businesses, especially those focused on low-cost, due to the general need to buy a Xserve, a rack, and all the associated costs. Now for those in the know, a Mac Mini accompanied by a copy of OS X Server (10 user version) has for many years been the easy route around this problem, but required a bit of know-how and was certainly not an off the shelf purchase.

Now this has all changed with the release of a new Mac Mini Server by Apple. For the low price of £799 (inc. VAT) you can have your own dual 500GB, 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4GB of RAM and an unlimited edition of  OS 10.6 Snow Leopard Server. Now that’s affordable. Even for a small business with only a couple of computers. And off the shelf and with you within 3 working days!

Mac Mini Server

Now for those Borg lovers who are already going blue at the notion that a Mac can be cheaper than a PC I have one reply: it’s the licences stupid. With the Mac Mini server you get an unlimited copy of Apple’s server product, no user restrictions, fully featured, add as much as you dare to the little powerhouse and if you need to add a second cheaply (and no rack required just a 12″ square of desk space).

Now back to the licences. Appleinsider has a great example of the cost comparison between the new Mac Mini Server and a similar SME orientated Windows servers:

mosxs vs sbs

See how cheap? I can’t wait to have an opportunity to install my 1st Mac Mini off the shelf server. If you’d like to read an indepth review I highly recommend the Appleinsider review by Daniel Eran Dilger. Read it here.

Update

Macminiloco has published it’s annual “The State of the Mac Mini”, which gives an excellent breakdown on the new Mac Mini. Read it here.

Filed under: GeneralTagged with: , , , , ,

It’s the little details

It’s the little details about Apple’s products that make them so great. I’ve been using Address Book for years. I store all my contacts in it, some 987 people and companies at last count. But Apple’s not perfect and for years I had to cobble together solutions from one place or another to ensure that my contacts were synced with my mobile, especially as because of the American focus of Apple they were particularly slow to realise the scope and penetration of mobiles in the European market and add native support in iSync for new models as they were released. Fortunately the developer and open-source community has always made up for this gap and I’ve been able, with a little hacking and manipulation, to keep my phone’s contacts synced for the last five years or so.

Syncing calendars has always been much harder and before I traded my Nokia N73 (never have I used a more robust phone, although I have to confess in it’s second life with one of my friends was short lived (it died under the heel of a stiletto – RIP)) in for an iPhone I generally ignored my calendar applications and relied instead on iCal for my daily schedule, after all my laptop generally comes with me as frequently as my phone, so not the end of the world. However, since the syncing of the iPhone was so good, I have moved on to relying on my phone…

This has however not been without consequences. I rely upon my calendar alarms to remind me of most of my appointments, if it is not alarmed, with a busy schedule I often don’t see some appointments that come without reminders, even when I’m staring straight at them. Over the last year one area that this has effected is my remembering of birthdays, when I relied on iCal I was required to be more observant, now I’m less so, and as Address Book’s automatic generation of the birthday calendar creates effectively a read-only event from the perspective of the calendar I’ve not been able to add reminders for myself. This is clearly a little detail too far for Apple… :-(

Fortunately tonight I stumbled across the following solution, courtesy of the forums over at MacRumours and in particular the skill of Andrew Bussman who wrote the following AppleScript:

Code:
tell application "iCal"
	tell calendar "Birthdays"
		set all_events to every event
		repeat with this_event in all_events
			tell this_event
				delete every sound alarm
				make new sound alarm at end with properties {trigger interval:-21600, sound name:"Basso"}
			end tell
		end repeat
	end tell
end tell

Which when you compile and run in AppleScript Editor adds an alarm to all your birthdays! It’s great and simple solution to the problem of adding alarms to your birthday’s calendar. Once run in a few seconds it adds a reminder to all your birthdays. I imagine the only problem will be that you’d have to run it again once you add any additional birthdays. I think Andrew has proved it should be a relatively easy process why can’t Apple solve this?

Filed under: GeneralTagged with: , , , , , , ,

Still buying PCs

Oh dear… Off to a client this morning who despite agreeing with me about buying a new Mac ended up buying a new PC four weeks ago. It came with Vista not Windows 7 and despite it being “cheap” (I’m yet to find out how cheap) and urgently needed (they could have just boosted their ram (at significantly less cost)) it is still in its box. Why oh why are people so blindly faithful to the PC platform? Especially in SME? Sometimes I just despair.

Filed under: GeneralTagged with: ,

Never rely on one backup solution

So continuing my posts on my virus stricken computer drama, see the earlier posts “Poking a hornets nest” and “Dropboxing my way out of a crisis” I had decided after the crisis with iSure (which we had been paying £8.30 a month for the privilege of using and had replaced with a free 2gb dropbox account) to see if we could place the accounts files in the dropbox.

Unfortunately it became clear after a day or so that this solution would not work. As the accounts files (Quickbooks Pro if you need to know) were accessed from two different computers very quickly duplicates started to appear. So it was off hunting for another solution. Fortunately I had one up my belt. I’d been using Mozy since it first went into beta on the Mac and I thought it’d be ideal for this.

So again taking advantage of another free package, some 2gb before you need to pay, I installed it on the accounts computer and went back to sharing the file over the company network. So dropbox might have failed in my enterprise to handle these particular files (I suspected it might, but c’est la vie) but Mozy came through for me and provided a quick and easy solution to my problem.

In most of my personal dealings I use Mozy’s free service to backup the libraries of my MBP, whilst using dropbox to manage my files (I have a lot of files so I am using the 50gb account for that) as a type of replacement NAS as my one of my good friends @tsmarsh termed it. And I have to say it’s worked well for me so far and helped me out of a few sticky situations, so I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking for a peace of mind.

The benefit to these services when used free is that you can recommend them to your friends and family and get a little extra space each time someone takes up your referral, meaning it can satisfy a great deal of your needs without you having to spend a dime. All in all using this solution for my client has led them to a saving of £99.60, which in a recession the pennies truly count.

Filed under: GeneralTagged with: , , , , ,

Dropboxing my way out of a crisis

Dropbox

So in my previous posting “Poking a hornets nest” I had to deal with a dead XP box at a clients. Fortunately for me I had moved the company files over to dropbox a couple of weeks prior. So when this computer went down I knew not only did I have copies of their files independently on two other computers I had a copy too.

After a comprehensive check of the other PC in the office I established that the virus had not spread, I have to say I did have some concerns that dropbox might make such a spread easier, but fortunately for the moment virus writers haven’t seemed to cottoned on to this method of transferring viruses! Phew. But I think that this is something they had perhaps better consider as a potential risk in the future.

One of the reasons I spent so much time in attempting to restore this PC rather than wiping and starting again was the accounts files for the company were stored on it and we had been using a service provided to the company for the last couple of years by Barclays Bank called iSure, though Barclays had sold them an unlimited account, it’s primary purpose was to backup the accounts files.

Not only was there limited documentation in their business subscription pack telling you what to do when a disaster, like the one we were experiencing, happened, an hour or two worth of phone calls to their support line (where I had to give limited security information (it would be very easy to fake)) I managed to log onto their site and find the files we needed.

Unfortunately although the computer was left on 24/7 so that backups could run twice daily and it had gone down on a Friday morning, the most recent copy of the accounts they had was from the three days earlier. So to save having the work done that week have to be repeated, as well as the lost days, I had to recover the data from the hard drive that had been affected.

If we had been relying on this to backup the company’s main set of files, some 30,000 files or so they would all have had to have been checked for validity. And though files might not be changed on a daily basis we would have needed to check just to be sure. Though I had to rescue the account files, with the others once my re-install was complete I just added the new computer and hey presto the files downloaded. Genius.

Filed under: GeneralTagged with: , , , , , , , ,

ClicktoFlash

We all love browser plugins, it’s one of the reasons that Firefox is so darn popular. But if you prefer the cleaner interface of Safari 4 (as I do) you needn’t miss out from some of these essential improvements to your browsing experience, the most important of which (in MHO) is Click to Flash, your own flash blocker.

Click to Flash is the wunderbar creation of Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch of Chicago it’s basic job is to prevent flash from loading until you want it to. Replacing flash files with this nifty clean-looking replacement image:

Click to Flash Replacement Image
Click to Flash Replacement Image

Which you just click when you want to view the flash file in question. So no more annoying ads, preloading videos, Flash basically, which as I am sure you all appreciate is now a bigger preverbal pain in the butt since it was relegated to a sandboxed status is Snow Tabby.

So download, install and get back to browsing the internet quickly and efficiently, only seeing flash where you want to. Importantly it’s designed to allow sIFR images to load automatically, replace youtube videos with their H.264 equivalent played in quicktime where possible and allows whitelisting of sites where you always want flash to load.

I’m really enjoying this plugin, I hope you will too.

Filed under: GeneralTagged with: , , ,

Dropbox Gallore

Dropbox

I can’t help but love dropbox.

A couple of years ago whilst working for a property developer based in London, with offices in Brighton and Manchester I was instructed to bring a unified file system in place for the three separate offices, at minimal cost. This proved to be a difficult task. In the end I ordered three external hard drives and on a Friday after close of business I copied all of the core data from the London office onto the one of those drives.

First thing Saturday morning I got on a train and headed to the Brighton office  where I copied and merged the data from the two drives and spent an inordinate amount of time organising the files into the new filing system we were going to be simultaneously deploying. I then installed a great little piece of software I had found based on rysnc and configured it’s syncing capability over an ssh connection to the London office.

I plugged in the hard-drive, ordered a courier and sent off the hard-drive destined for the Manchester office and headed back to the train station and to the London office. I configured the London office and plugged in their hard drive. I then set the system up and configured the first sync between the two systems and left for the day as it required a great deal of time to go through the first sync.

Come Monday morning I was on the phone to the Manchester office, which had to refrain from using files for the day and began their sync. All in all the process took the better part of three days and required me to travel between two offices. As well as plenty of overtime, which I suppose was good for me, but was a great deal of unnecessary hassle.

The system itself was also very resource intensive, requiring the three computers that managed the service to be left on at night and spend sometimes hours at a time syncing the files. It also always lagged 24 hours behind the data system that monitored the creation of files. It was however a significant improvement over the duplication between the offices and cut down on the faxing and emailing of files back and forth.

At the time I dreamed of a solution like dropbox. It would have handled the synchronisation of three separate file locations without blinking and in real time, not with a 24 hour delay. The idea of having a copy in the cloud is also ideal, not only are backups taken care of, as well as permanent records of what has been deleted (after all who hasn’t deleted a file on a computer and then realised they needed it? try managing that replicated by a dozen or even half a dozen)

I’ve also found it incredibly useful adding in new computers, they’re up and running in minutes and download in the background. I eagerly await the ability to sync over wifi and then I can really start to centralise downloads of large software updates etc between computers. Or add it remotely from home and have it become available at multiple peoples computers for installation at the end of the day. Dreamy.

That’s all without touching on wonders such as 1password synchronisation, which has made flipping between my MBP and iMac at home as easy as pie. I am constantly stumbling across other innovative uses on a regular basis. I know for some the level of such data replication seems crazy, but hey space is cheap.

Trusting the cloud with confidential data also seems worrisome but as I tell my small clients if someone actively wanted to steal your data they so easily could. WAP cracks in what less than 60 seconds, WEP too now and most of them have offices where it wouldn’t be impossibly hard for someone to wander in and stick in a usb stick and steal their data. As a small business owner its simply not possible to protect against everything.

Dropbox is developing fast and I can’t wait to see what the future will bring for it. It is sure to make my life and the lives of my clients more easy.

Share the dropbox love and if you haven’t already signed up for an account do so now: www.getdropbox.com

PS For more info about what you can do with dropbox checkout this lifehacker article.

Filed under: GeneralTagged with: , , ,

Essential Communication Tools

When setting up a new system as well as setting up a standard email program such as Apple Mail or Thunderbird I also setup a couple of other essential communication tools, mostly to help me keep in touch with the user, in this case Glyn, but also to maximise the number of methods by which that user can communicate with the world.

Which Email program?

To be honest since 10.3 I’ve used Apple’s Mail as my principal email client, prior to this I used Eudora and I have, to be honest, occasionally dabbled with other programs such as Microsoft Entourage; but the email client I generally recommend to switchers is Thunderbird.

The reason for this is because when I am brought into consult at a small firm I generally find them running un-patched versions of Outlook Express, which is in my experience is the easiest and quickest root to viral infection in the Windows world, in these situations I replace it with Thunderbird, which being free adds no additional cost burden. So when we come to switching it seems best to go with Thunderbird to minimise the amount of adjustment the user requires.

However, as Apple has improved Mail, or more importantly improved it’s integration with the Address Book and iCal adding great usability functions like data detectors, (essential time savers once a user becomes more savvy) it has become an increasingly attractive client. Thunderbird 2 still uses its own address book rather than the system wide one offered by Apple, and although version 3 now offers integration it feels like it has been in beta forever.

The ability to sync Apple’s integrated address book with google mail accounts (including google apps accounts) in Snow Leopard has proved to be a great additional benefit for small businesses, especially as you can hack this to provide a locally available address book to all users in a company by using a single master default email such as info@foo.com to sync addresses to, which is great for small businesses. (if you’re running 10.5 this tutorial will show you how to hack this feature to make it available for you).

Google Sync from Apple Address Book
Just tick the box to activate Google Sync

So after a quick discussion with Glyn as to these pros and cons we decided to setup his email with the Apple Mail program, which ran smoothly, although I think it is a shame that you can’t select the type of mail service you are connecting to when you enter the initial details as this would cut down the setup time significantly whilst you wait for it to determine if there is a mail server present at the address you have given. It would also be great if you could tell Mail that it was a google apps account so it would pre-fill the imap and smtp details for you (come on Apple should be easy enough to do!).

Other tools communication tools…

It is really important for a small business to be reachable by as many methods as possible, as we have moved into an era of increased connectivity it is important that they adapt to this so that they can reach the broadest possible audience.

The first tool I always start with is Skype. Although I tend to use this less and less since the advent of Google Talk, I still find that many of my clients use the program on a daily basis. As Slingsby Interiors didn’t already have a skype account, Glyn and I downloaded the latest client and within minutes had managed to bag slingsbyinteriors as a name, surprisingly easy to do for most small businesses.

Then we moved on to setting up Google Talk, for which I always use a great little open source program called Adium, which is compatible with just about every protocol you can imagine from: AIM, MSN, Jabber to Yahoo to name just a few, meaning you only have to install the one program. As well as integrating with the built-in Address Book it offers tabbed browsing of conversations and all important growl notifications.

After a quick series guide around each of these programs, Glyn is up and running and ready to communicate with the world and more importantly after I installed skype on the PC in the 1st floor office he no longer has to run upstairs or use the intercom when he wants to ask Kay in accounts a quick question!

—

UPDATE –

Apparently you can bypass the automatic mail setup by holding down the option key after you’ve entered your email address and password, changing the button to continue and allowing you to continue as you normally would. For more see macosxhints.com

Filed under: General, MacTagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,

Catering to a Business Switcher

So I’m starting the rather insidious process of introducing a Mac to one of the businesses I consult for, why would that be insidious I hear you ask? well once you introduce one shiny new Mac in my experience it’s not long before more follow… after all when compared to the horrid beige (or slightly nicer black) desktops most firms seem to have it is unsurprising that a measure of jealousy starts to creep into the lucky recipients colleagues mind and before long they’re all clambering to have a nice shiny Mac (after all they usually (and correctly) argue, “It looks so much easier to use!”).

So I thought I’d share with you the process I go through when configuring a new Mac, what programs I add to make sure that their transition is quick and easy and they gain the maximum benefit from switching. I’ll also be giving a shout out, for my first time, to some of the best shareware, open source and small developer maintained software that I use on a daily basis that is so helpful to me and many other Mac users round the world; feel the love developers! As well as posing some questions about what are the best methods and approaches for going about the task.

I’m going to stretch this over a number of posts, but we’ll start with the setup process, so:

I’m working with a new 13″ Macbook Pro. We bought it online yesterday morning and it had arrived by lunchtime today (which impressed everyone in the office) I opted for a refurbished model, as it was 16% cheaper than a perfectly new model and effectively the same. It’s going to be used by Glyn, the youngest member of staff who is currently sharing a desktop in my client’s show room with an older colleague. I’d normally start by letting him open and unpack the box, but he was out at lunch when I arrived so I got straight to the unpacking and getting ready for his arrival.

When introducing a new computer, especially when someone is switching from PC to Mac I always start by allowing them to run the initial setup process, it’s always good to let the new user experience the speed and straightforwardness of getting a Mac up and running from scratch, their genuine surprise at how quickly they are up and running is always a source of encouragement and help in getting them to engage with the new machine and I find can help make the transition from Windows to Mac much easier.

So 15 minutes later we are up, connected to the office network and begin our configuration. First things first I tutor them on the importance of keeping the machine up-to-date, something people who run PCs rarely do as much as they should, by introducing them to the apple button in the menu bar and getting them to run their first Software Update.

10 minutes later we and we are running 10.6.1 and have installed all of the available updates. I’m amused by Glyn’s surprise at how smooth this process is and especially by the reboot time after the installation, which is down to seconds (he normally goes and makes coffee whilst his old desktop boots up in the morning! LOL – I guess he’ll just have to carry his new MBP with him from now on!)

Whilst we were downloading the updates I walked Glyn through program switching and the strange notion for most PC users, especially those with older systems, that you can actually run lots of programs simultaneously without having to wait an inordinately long time  for the system to respond. I am not helped at this point by my own MBP slowing to a crawl by the fact that I am running a dozen programs and have 120 or so sites open in Safari, which adds a frustrating 2 min delay to me finding their computer passwords so I can connect the new MBP to the windows printers available on their network.

This does however cause Glyn much amusement as he normally has to go and find the piece of paper with such passwords written on, rather than relying on a technological solution to the problem. Anyway whilst we wait for my MBP we switch on sharing to allow me to place the printer drivers we will need into his public folder. I am disappointed to say that the new method of not installing all printer drivers by Snow Tabby means I have to resort to running installers, including activating rosetta, which is an unnecessary pain.

Anyway five minutes later we have the Windows shared Epson setup and have printed a test page successfully, although we did have to resort to using the Gutenberg printer driver for their Epson Stylus SX200 as the Epson drivers don’t work (fortunately I installed the printers on my MBP earlier in the week to test and had identified this problem). The HP3600 is a little more problematic. It doesn’t automatically detect the driver, even after installing it from disk (as expected) and we have to manually select the printer, as well as running Software Update to make sure that we actually have the right version from Apple.

This process only takes ten minutes however, and whilst we were waiting for these things we installed the stella Dropbox, which installs in a few seconds and lets me run through the drag and drop process of installing apps and warn of the dangers of running programs from a disk image, Glyn handles the transition like and pro and I’m not seeing glazed eyes, so I think that the message will stick. Phew.

Now on to Mail. It’s simple and quick to add Glyn’s Google Apps account via imap and in less than a couple of minutes it’s downloading all of his email and now he’s pretty much ready to go. Although there is lots more software to install, all of which I’ll come to in other posts, he can email, print, and courtesy of Dropbox he has all of the files he needs access to. Textedit will keep him going with word docs for the rest of the day, as he finds his way about the system and I go head upstairs to move the remainder of the companies folders across to dropbox and recreate their locations with symbolic links, whilst he has a play.

Now that the most essential basic programs are installed, or configured I’ll be taking the new MBP home with me at the end of the day to install the rest of the programs he’ll need to become the savvy Mac user I know I’ll be proud of. Catch you later.

Filed under: GeneralTagged with: , , , , , , , , ,