Faithful reader Dick Fiddler has a question regarding cordless phones and Wi-Fi interference. He writes:

I’m having interference issues with my AirPort network and cordless phone. Repositioning has helped some, but I’d like to pursue restricting the channels used by the Extreme. Unfortunately, I need a little more information to make it work. My Uniden phone says only “5.8 GHz” with nothing in the specs at all. The Airport Utility seems only to list channels without much reference to which are which. Any ideas on how to figure out which channels to use?

After researching the subject in greater depth I’m going to take the advice of my betters—and pass that advice along to you.

Leave it alone.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As a Mac user, why would you ever consider buying a high-end router other than Apple’s AirPort Extreme? Easy, because some non-Apple-specific routers cost less, offer more features, and deliver better performance. When I pitted the AirPort Extreme against the highly rated Asus RT-N66U, the Asus boxed its ears on most of the benchmarks I ran.

But benchmark performance isn’t everything; you’ll also want to consider the experience of installing and using a non-Apple device. Apple’s “think different” concept isn’t just advertising copy. So in addition to performance, I’ll also discuss the feature sets offered on each router.

Features

Before we dive into the benchmarking numbers, let’s examine the features of each router. The AirPort Extreme and the RT-N66U are both based on the tried-and-true IEEE 802.11n wireless networking standard, and both routers have 3-by-3 antenna arrays to support send-and-receive rates up to 450 megabits per second (mbps).

Apple

Note that 450 mbps is a link rate that doesn’t take into account protocol overhead, range, or many other factors. You can expect the real-world performance for both routers to be significantly lower than that. I’ve found routers based on the draft 802.11ac standard to be faster and to offer better range than 802.11n routers, but the IEEE won’t officially ratify that standard until 2014. Apple doesn’t offer an 802.11ac router today, and none of its current computers have 802.11ac network adapters onboard.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo and Apple may be the latest superhero team-up to hit Silicon Valley, while Apple could be considering plans to space-ify its retail stores. And Steve Jobs’s life is translated into yet another genre. If it be a sin to covet honor, the remainders for Wednesday, April 10, 2013 are the most offending souls alive.

Yahoo, Apple Discuss Deeper iPhone Partnership (Wall Street Journal, subscription required)

While Apple’s long used data from Yahoo for its Weather and Stock apps (as well as, more recently, Siri’s sports scores), the partnership between the two companies may expand under new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. A sticking point, however, is said to be Yahoo’s excessive use of exclamation points.

Apple hires Norman Foster’s architecture firm to revamp its retail stores (Marketing)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Walt Czeka’s iPad has suddenly turned a blind eye to his local network. He writes:

After using my iPad for a short time this morning it suddenly wouldn’t recognize my AirPort network, even after I switched it off and on. I picked up my iPhone and it sees the network perfectly well so I don’t think it’s a network problem. What should I do?

There are a variety of things you can try and they work with any router. The first (and the one most likely to meet with success) is to shut off your iPad, pull the power plug on your AirPort base station to power it down, wait half a minute or so, plug the base station back in, wait for its green light to shine, and then switch on the iPad. This can clear out some funk in the routing portion of the base station, which allows your iPad’s network connection to return.

If this doesn’t work because the iPad’s the funky character in this passion play, you can fiddle with a couple of its settings. First, go to Settings > Wi-Fi and toggle the Wi-Fi switch Off and then back on again.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Have you ever wondered just how fast your home or work network really is? Or needed to troubleshoot a network connection? There are some solid command-line (Terminal) tools, such as iperf, that let you do this, as well as a number of traditional Mac apps. But Speedy Net (Mac App Store link), which I discovered last year via Twitter, is my current tool of choice. It’s a little app that does one thing, but does it well and simply: It lets you test the performance of a network connection between two Macs (or, using the $1 Speedy Net iOS app, between any combination of Macs and iOS devices).

Launch Speedy Net on two Macs on your network—it works only over a local network—and, assuming the Macs can see each other, each will show up in the Network Devices list on the other. On either end, select a connection to test, choose the amount of data to transfer (10GB, 1GB, 500MB, or 100MB), and click Start Test. You’ll see a progress bar as the data is transferred, along with live-updated data on network speed (in Mbps), latency (in ms), and time (in minutes and seconds). When the test finishes, you see the overall results.

Speedy Net can be useful for more than just satisfying your curiosity. Last year, I was experiencing very slow Internet and network performance on my office iMac; the other Macs in our home weren’t exhibiting the same problems. To eliminate my Internet connection as a culprit, I fired up Speedy Net and tested a local transfer between the iMac and the Mac mini in the family room. (Both Macs were connected to our home network using Ethernet.) The results were, frankly, horrible—the transfer speed, around 60 to 70 Mbps, was slower than it would have been on a bad Wi-Fi network.

I switched the iMac to Wi-Fi, keeping the Mac mini connected via Ethernet, and ran a Speedy Net test again, and the data-transfer speed was dramatically better. In other words, the problem was likely with Ethernet, and it was likely on the iMac’s end. I swapped Ethernet cables on the iMac and ran another test, but the new cable didn’t fix the problem. Next I switched the iMac to a different Ethernet port in my office; when I ran the Speedy Net test again, I got speeds of roughly 500 Mbps. It turns out my iMac’s normal Ethernet jack (the wall port, not the one on the iMac) had gone bad, and Speedy Net made it easy to find the problem.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kanex's meDrive is supposed to make it easy to set up a file server on your home network. It’s a small device that you plug into your network router after you’ve attached your own USB storage device. But a few little quirks made using meDrive more trouble than it should’ve been.

Before you set up meDrive, you have to provide your own USB storage device. You can use something as small as a USB thumb drive, but you’ll probably want to use a more substantial device, like a hard drive. I used a portable hard drive for most of this review, though I did successfully use a 1GB thumb drive.

Kanex says that meDrive supports “all the popular formats such as FAT32, MSDOS& [sic] NTFS” and when I used FAT32- and NTFS-formatted drives, I had no problem accessing the connected drive. When I used an ExFat or Mac formatted drive, however, I always got a login failure after entering my user name and password.

You might have to provide a power adapter for meDrive, which requires 300 milliamps of power. If your router has a USB port, Kanex says you can use it to power meDrive using the included mini USB cable. But if your router doesn’t have a USB port (like mine), or you want to connect meDrive to an Airport Express (which doesn’t provide enough power), then you’ll have to dish out some extra cash and get a power adapter. You can use an iPad or iPhone power adapter, or any power plug that lets you connect a USB cable. You also might have to buy a USB extension cable if the bundled USB cable isn’t long enough.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The $50 BearExtender Mini is the follow-up to the company’s 2010 BearExtender n3 (). Like its predecessor, the BearExtender Mini’s goal is to let you use your Mac from further away from your wireless base station. The new model is half the size of and more powerful than the original n3.

The company says that the BearExtender Mini can pick up Wi-Fi signals from two to four times further away than the AirPort card built into your Mac.

The BearExtender Mini doesn’t plug directly into your Mac’s USB port, which would be nice. Instead, the dongle connects via the included Mini-USB cable. The unit measures barely larger than a house key. The included detachable antenna offers 2 dBi; a $6 upgrade gets you a 5 dBi omni-directional antenna.

Have Wi-Fi, will travel

To use the BearExtender Mini with your Mac, you first need to install special drivers. With the software installed, you’ll get a BearExtender icon in your menubar. Since the device is meant to replace your built-in wireless card, you’ll need to disable Wi-Fi on your Mac to use the BearExtender Mini.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kanex’s $60 MySpot aims to let you easily create a secure Wi-Fi network in a hotel room or any other location where you have an ethernet port that provides automatically assigned IP addresses. This seems like a marvelous idea, but the MySpot doesn’t quite live up to the promise on scrutiny.

The MySpot weighs just a few ounces and is tiny, at just three inches long by a bit over one inch square. The MySpot is powered by USB, but doesn’t use USB for data transfer or configuration. You connect its built-in USB cable (which snaps into the body of the device when not in use) to a USB port on a computer or to a USB-to-AC adapter (not supplied) for power, and then connect an ethernet cable to the other end of the MySpot for data. You supply the ethernet cable—some hotels may have an ethernet stub or cable in the room, while others provide just a jack.

I tested the MySpot while traveling, plugging it into a hotel room’s ethernet jack during a conference in which the facility’s Wi-Fi was regularly overwhelmed by the quantity of attendees trying to connect. The MySpot gave me quasi-private access to the fast, wired Internet connection through a separate Wi-Fi channel. I also performed similar tests elsewhere, with the same effect. The unit powers up rapidly, as well.

As one would expect from a compact device using an outdated Wi-Fi standard (see below), the MySpot’s network isn’t strong enough to be usable from rooms away. Within a single room, coverage is fair to good, and in most circumstances where the MySpot makes more sense than the larger and heavier $99 Apple AirPort Express, you’ll be within line of sight anyway. I didn’t exhaustively test speed, but the MySpot keeps up fine with high-speed cable broadband compared to directly wired and other Wi-Fi connections.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hundreds and hundreds of products are released for the Mac each year. A few products truly stand out as impressive examples of quality, value, and innovation. These are the products that we recognize with an Editors’ Choice Award.

When it comes to the Eddys (as we affectionately call them), Macworld editors start with a list of candidates; this year, the list included well over 200 products (eligible products must have been released between November 1, 2011, and November 1, 2012). We take a close look at all of the candidates, debate the pros and cons of each, and determine whether a product meets our stringent standards for quality, utility, innovation, value, and excellence. After weeks of deliberation, we assembled a final list.

Ladies and gentlemen, Macworld presents the winners of the Eddy Awards.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The redesigned 2012 model of the AirPort Express Wi-Fi base station has become the mouse that roars. The revisions transform this model into a tiny powerhouse by adding to its previous modest attributes a second ethernet port, simultaneous dual-band Wi-Fi, and a guest network option all in a form factor identical to the Apple TV (except white and an ounce lighter).

At the same $99 as the previous two models, the AirPort Express might serve an entire apartment or single-floor home, or act as a main base station to which other base stations are chained via Wi-Fi or ethernet, where previously the $179 AirPort Extreme base station would be required. The Express uses the same configuration tools and options as its bigger siblings, the Extreme and Time Capsule. In testing, performance and throughput are in line with those models.

It’s extremely difficult to offer generically useful advice when testing the range for a base station, because every home and office varies in what blocks or reflects wireless signals. The new Express provided excellent signal strength across my 90-year-old house, which requires three base stations to cover its modest size due to materials in walls and the floor between the main story and basement that block signals. The Express compares favorably to two different models of Extreme in use in the same house. As with all base stations, you may need to try out an Express, and even move it to different locations, to determine if it can cover the area you need. (Try the free NetSpot mapping program to help with that task.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Back in 2009, I reviewed Bluetoggle, a nifty utility that lets you toggle Bluetooth on and off using the keyboard, as well as disable the Bluetooth menu extra to free up a bit of space in your menu bar. The very first comment on that review? “I would love to have this for the Airport menu.”

Two and a half years later, Axonic Labs, the developer of Bluetoggle, has obliged—Airtoggle is the AirPort (Wi-Fi) equivalent. Open the Airtoggle System Preferences pane, and you can choose your preferred keyboard shortcut: any function key (F-key) along with any combination of Shift, Control, Option, and Command. I chose Command+F12 on my MacBook Air.

You can now press that keyboard shortcut at any time to toggle Wi-Fi on and off; a semi-translucent Wi-Fi graphic appears on the screen to confirm the action. Airtoggle doesn’t affect how OS X’s Wi-Fi feature connects to networks—when you enable Wi-Fi using Airtoggle, OS X uses the same procedure for joining networks as it would if you’d enabled Wi-Fi using the Wi-Fi menu or Network preferences.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thanks to iPads, iPhones, and ever-lighter MacBooks, we’re doing more work and play while on the go than ever before. A caveat of working this way, however, is that most public Wi-Fi networks (hotspots) are anything but secure, which means they’re prime targets for would-be hackers, identity thieves, and general do-no-gooders. If you’re lucky, your company provides you with a virtual private network (VPN) for securing your Internet activities. But if you’re like the rest of us, you need to fend for yourself if you want to hide your login credentials, email, and other sensitive activity from prying eyes. That’s where Cloak comes in.

Put simply, Cloak is a VPN that just works. It encrypts all your Internet traffic so other users on the same network can’t snoop over your shoulder, so to speak. But Cloak does away with the typical VPN song and dance of digging into System Preferences and filling in a bunch of cryptic server details and protocols—not to mention having to shop for and set up your own VPN service in the first place. With Cloak, you simply sign up for an account at GetCloak.com and install a little menu-bar utility.

Once you’ve done that, the next time Cloak notices you join an unsecured network—currently defined as any network that doesn’t require a password, though the company is working to broaden this rule and your control over it—the utility will leap into action and activate your VPN. Once Cloak’s icon glows solid blue in your menubar—and, optionally, displays a Growl alert—you know you’re connected to Cloak’s network of secured servers that encrypt everything you do on the Internet. You can instead opt to manually connect and disconnect using Cloak’s systemwide menu, but in my testing, the auto-connect feature works well all on its own.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

I was fairly positive in my review of the 2010 version of Apple’s smallest server, and fortunately, I can say that it’s very easy to be happy with the 2011 Mac mini with Lion Server.

The Mac mini server is not a big enterprise server. It’s targeted at the small office/home office (SOHO) market and small and medium businesses (SMB). As such, it does not have redundant power supplies, hot-swappable components, and other features found in enterprise servers. (Then again, for the same price as Apple’s discontinued Xserve enterprise server with the proper specifications, you can buy several Mac mini servers to get redundancy. Apple does offer a Mac Pro with Lion Server if you want the heavy-duty hardware.)

Apple upgraded the Mac mini server’s processor to an 2GHz Intel quad-core Core i7, which is a major upgrade in CPU power from the 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo in the 2010 model. Apple also increased the overall memory bandwidth; the Mac mini server uses 1333MHz DDR3 RAM, an improvement on the 1066MHz DDR3 RAM in the 2010 model. The new processor and faster system bus add up to a box that can handle rather serious data-transfer speeds when configured properly.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Your iPad may soon fly as freely as you do, which is good, because apparently you’re really using those devices in the air. Elsewhere, a judge tells Apple to produce the goods. The remainders for Friday, March 8, 2013 are going to fly like an eagle.

Bill would allow iPad use from takeoff to landing (Politico)

Might you soon be able to use your iPad during your entire flight? That’s what Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri is shooting for with her new legislation, introduced on Thursday. We assume that the “no compromises” Microsoft Surface will still have to stay in your bag until you hit 10,000 feet.

Infographic: Staying Connected in Air (Gogo)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Photographers love the freedom and flexibility of creating images, but when the shooting environment becomes complex, the folks behind the lens need all the help they can get. Hyper’s CameraMator, a wireless tethered photography device, lets you see and remotely control your shoot from a distance on an iPad, iPhone, Mac, or Android device.

Long in development as a Kickstarter project, CameraMator was released just in time for last week’s Macworld/iWorld with a $299 price tag. The CameraMator device attaches to your DSLR’s hotshoe or a tripod and the USB connection on your camera body (Canon and Nikon only). CameraMator uses Hyper’s iUSBport technology to wirelessly connect your DSLR’s USB ports with Wi-Fi mobile devices either via an existing Wi-Fi network or by creating its own network. When you shoot an image, the CameraMator sends the photo to your device, allowing you to review your shots on the larger screen. You can use it to share your photos and collaborate with remote colleagues and clients through the cloud.

The device works in conjunction with free apps for the Mac and iOS that are available on the Mac App Store and the iTunes store. The app features live viewing from the iPad or your Mac monitor, wireless camera control, instant image review, a 500-plus image buffer for continuous shooting, an intervalometer, HDR bracketing, a self timer, photo sharing to your laptop or iPad, and integration with Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.

CameraMator competes with a similar device called CamRanger, which was released a few months ago and offers extensive control over your camera function via a free app from an iPad or iPhone. An OS X application is still in the works.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kanex on Thursday introduced its new DualRole device at Macworld/iWorld. The DualRole is a hub that provides three USB 3.0 ports and a gigabit ethernet adapter.

With the lack of ethernet in Apple current MacBook models, the DualRole provides ethernet connectivity by connecting to a computer’s USB port. And since the DualRole has additional USB 3 ports, you don’t give up an USB port on your Mac.

The DualRole runs off of the power from a USB port, but Kanex also allows you to connect a power adapter, in case you connect devices to the DualRole that require more juice.

The DualRole is $69. The device is on display at Kanex’s booth (#630) at Macworld/iWorld.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This week’s roundup of Mac accessories offers options for music production and computer protection—and a nifty little twist on the traditional Swiss Army Knife.

Apogee: The $1,295 Apogee Quartet is designed for serious music-making professionals, featuring four inputs and eight outputs that connect the instruments in your studio to your Mac for high-level audio production. The Quartet also features a MIDI connection for keyboards, synthesizer, and DJ controllers. The device also works with Apple’s iMovie, for users who want to create sound and soundtracks for their video productions.

Kanex: The $50 USB 3 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter offers an easy way to add a Gigabit Ethernet port to your MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, or any other USB 3.0-enabled computer. It’s particularly aimed at travelers who find themselves on wired networks at hotels and in conference rooms, allowing you to share and access files over local networks at rates of 1GB per second. Also new from Kanex is the $60 4-Port USB 3 Hub.

Mujjo: If you’re looking for a lovely, sleek carrying case for your 13-inch MacBook Pro, you could do worse than Mujjo’s €60 MB Pro Retina Sleeve. The sleeve is made of wool and features a leather flap that attaches with a single snap. Inside the sleeve there’s an additional storage compartment that lets you store documents, earbuds, and more.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The next two years promise much faster short-range and medium-range wired and wireless networking, and zippier mobile connections.

What’s the point of these increasing speeds, when today’s networking gear already feels reasonably fast? Video, primarily. The name of the game is streaming or downloading high-definition video—across a room or from one end of the house to the other—while still leaving enough room on the network for other activities such as file downloads, Facebook, and email.

Connecting devices

Back when Thunderbolt technology was still under development, Intel (its main mover) said that optical cabling would enable multiple-gigabits-per-second connections to displays, peripherals, and networks, and would permit cords to run as far as 30 meters. Things didn’t quite pan out that way.

Apparently optical cabling was hard to produce and expensive, so Apple and Intel switched to copper wiring instead. That wiring still supported the Thunderbolt spec’s two channels of simultaneous bidirectional (“full duplex”) 10-gbps data. But it didn’t allow for those long cables; instead, connections could be no more than about 10 feet (3 meters). Using wire also necessitated the addition of chips to the cables, to handle signaling and to ensure backward compatibility with DisplayPort. The one upside: Thunderbolt cords can pass up to 10 watts per device, more than double USB 3.0’s capacity.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Under fire from its customers in the higher education market, Apple has proposed creating a new industry standard that would fix problems with its Bonjour zero configuration networking technology that is causing scalability and security problems on campus networks.

Apple described how such a standard could be used at an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting held in Atlanta this week. Apple and other vendors including Xirrus, Check Point, and IBM support the idea of creating an IETF working group to improve network services like Apple’s Bonjour and Linux Avahi, which use an existing IETF protocol called Multiicast DNS (MDNS). The new working group would be called MDNS Extensions or MDNSext.

Built for the home

Bonjour is Apple’s marketing name for zero configuration networking, which allows a MacBook user to easily log into a local network and find an available printer. Behind the scenes, Bonjour provides automatic address assignment, looks up the host name and delivers available network services.

Bonjour uses MDNS, which transports DNS queries in a zero configuration way but only across local networks, not campus or enterprise networks. When it is deployed on large networks - particularly wired and wireless networks run by universities - Bonjour creates a flood of MDNS traffic, causing headaches for network managers.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A highly anticipated patent infringement case between Apple and Motorola Mobility was dismissed by a Wisconsin district court Monday, hours before the trial was due to begin.

The two companies were arguing over license rates for patents owned by Motorola that cover parts of the wireless UMTS, GPRS, GSM and 802.11 standards. The patents are vital parts of the technologies and so Motorola Mobility is required to license them to competitors on "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms," often referred to by the acronym FRAND.

At issue was where the boundary lay between reasonable and unreasonable terms.

Last week Apple told the court it would pay up to $1 per device for a license to Motorola patents covering cellular and Wi-Fi technologies. Motorola Mobility was arguing for a royalty payment of 2.25 percent on each device.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thieves crashed a car into an Apple retail store, swept up a bunch of iPhones and iPads and then had trouble getting the car out of the store, according to security tapes released by police.

The early morning robbery on Thursday, Sept. 6, was caught by two security cameras in the Apple Store at Promenade Mall, in Temecula, Calif., about 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

The proximity to Hollywood suggests the thieves watched too many action movies. The footage shows what looks like a late-model blue car smashing its way under the front metal and glass entrance wall, into the unoccupied store. So far so good.

But the “entrance,” though wrenched and twisted, seems to now work as if hinged at the top, or like a garage door, and the bottom edge falls back to the floor, behind the car.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If your Web browser, email program, or any of a hundred other Internet-connected apps on your Mac starts complaining about not having a connection, you may have to do a bit of sleuthing to figure out the cause. After all, a disruption anywhere along the chain between your Mac and a distant server could cause an outage, and it’s not always obvious where to look.

I suggest trying each of the following steps, in order, until you’re able to connect again.

1. Try another site or app

To make sure the problem isn’t restricted to just one website, try visiting another—preferably one that’s highly reliable, such as Google.com.

Similarly, to make sure the problem isn’t just your current app (such as your email program or Web browser), try connecting to the Internet with another app. If only one site seems to be having problems, try visiting Down For Everyone Or Just Me and entering the problematic site’s URL. The service will tell you whether computers elsewhere on the Internet can successfully connect to the site.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Concerned parent and reader Frank Reilly seeks a way to control his kids’ device use. He writes:

My two children each have an iPod touch and they spend a lot of time with them on Facebook and Instagram. My wife and I try to keep an eye on the time they spend, but we don’t want to be police either. I’ve looked at the iPods’ restrictions but they don’t do what we want, which is to limit the hours they can use these services. Any suggestions?

At the risk of offering parenting advice, the first step is to evaluate how much time the kids are really spending and then determine the harm it’s doing. If it’s interfering with more important activities—homework, chores, exercise, and time spent with the family and friends—it’s time for The Talk. And The Talk, in this case, emphasizes that while this technology is very cool, there’s more to life than staring at a screen and interacting with virtual friends. Then try to set up a schedule where social networking is placed in the context of a recreational pursuit.

If The Talk doesn’t take and the kids are spending more time than you’re prepared to allow, there are sterner approaches you can take. One of the harshest is to set up a system where the kids have to “check out” the devices during certain times of the day. When that time expires, they have to turn them over to you. Very few teenagers will put up with this approach, plus it puts you in the position of being the iPod cop.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Jeff Adelson scratches his head over a FireWire issue. He writes:

I recently purchased a MacBook Air. After setting it up I decided to migrate my data from an older MacBook Pro. I purchased Apple’s Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter but it doesn’t seem to work with Migration Assistant. The two computers won’t connect. What’s going on?

The connector does work, but not in the way you expect from a wired connection. If you sling a standard FireWire cable between two Macs that have FireWire ports, Migration Assistant does what it should. You choose one Mac to copy the data from and the other to copy it to. The “host” Mac (the one that will import data from the other) issues a code to the “guest” Mac and the two of them make the exchange once you’ve selected the data you want.

As you’ve observed, it doesn’t work that way with this adapter. The two Macs recognize each other, but the transfer fails. Similarly, if you try to establish a FireWire network between the two using this adapter, failure also ensues. (Though Target Disk Mode works perfectly well.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Dwayne Ahern has a question about the strength of his Wi-Fi network. He writes:

I have an AirPort Extreme Base Station in my home office, and I’m not sure I’ve positioned it in the best place for good reception around the house. As I walk around with my MacBook Air, I see the Wi-Fi fan in the menu bar drop a bit in some places, but that seems like a pretty rough estimate. Is there a way I can get a better idea of how strong the signal is?

There is, but it requires math.

Before I outline that math, let’s give credit where it’s due: A person going by the name Tesserax has written a helpful guide on optimal base station placement. In that guide he spells out the following steps.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When you have to copy files from one Mac to another, make big files available to others, or get files from your company’s shared volumes, you need to connect to a server. It may be a file server, a NAS (network-attached storage device), or just another Mac on your network. You probably already know a basic way to perform this everyday task, but is that method the quickest and most convenient? Here are eight ways you can connect to a server.

1. Connect from the Finder

One of the simplest ways to connect to a server is to click its name in the Shared section of a Finder window sidebar. (If you don’t see the Shared section, choose Finder > Preferences, and then check Connected Servers under Shared.) If you’re connecting to the server for the first time, you’ll see a dialog box asking for your user name and password.

You can streamline the process by checking Remember This Password in My Keychain. The next time you click the server in the Finder window sidebar, you’ll connect automatically.

When you connect to a file server—such as another Mac—in this manner, the Finder window will show you all available “shares.” The shares include your home folder, if you’ve logged in with a user name and password for that Mac (if, for example, you’re connecting remotely to your laptop computer); public folders for other users of that Mac; and any disks or volumes that you have access to.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When it comes to helping you troubleshoot wireless networking problems, Mac OS X can't seem to make up its mind. The old Network Utility was appropriate primarily for network gurus. OS X 10.4 came with Network Diagnostics, which took a user-friendlier hand-holding approach. Lion added Wi-Fi Diagnostics, but hid it away; it was largely intended to be used by AppleCare technicians or Apple Store Geniuses, who’d use it to generate detailed log reports. Now Mountain Lion comes with a network tool—a revised version of Wi-Fi Diagnostics—that’s once again intended for regular end users, not just network experts.

Wi-Fi Diagnostics can help you figure out why your Mac’s Wi-Fi adapter isn’t connecting to a network. It can also find nearby networks (which in turn can be useful for tracking down interference problems) and services broadcasting their availability via Bonjour. It also offers a graphical front end to some common Unix network tools, much as Network Utility did, but in a form that those without command-line experience can use.

To launch Wi-Fi Diagnostics, hold down the Option key as you click on the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar. That’ll open the Wi-Fi menu with an Open Wi-Fi Diagnostics item at the bottom; click that item to open the utility. You can also launch the program directly from its hidey-hole: In the Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder, and enter /System/Library/CoreServices/. You’ll find the Wi-Fi Diagnostics app in there.

However you open it, you’ll see a welcome window with three options: Create Diagnostic Report, Turn on Debug Logs, and Capture Network Traffic. For your troubleshooting purposes, you can ignore all three and instead choose File > Network Utilities (or press Command-N).

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Nick Hamilton finds himself stuck between old hardware and a new operating system. He writes:

I have an older AirPort Express Base Station. I recently installed Mountain Lion and have found that its version of AirPort Utility doesn’t work with this Base Station—when I try to select the base station I’m told that I need AirPort Utility 5.6. I downloaded that version but when I attempt to install it Mountain Lion tells me it’s not supported. What do I do?

Mountain Lion is telling you an untruth. That version of AirPort Utility will run on your Mac (even under Mountain Lion) and work with your Base Station. The fly in the ointment in this case is the installer. It simply refuses to install this perfectly fine utility.

The way around is to extract the utility from the installer package. For this kind of thing I always turn to CharlesSoft’s $20 Pacifist. Pacifist lives to open .pkg package files, .dmg disk images, and .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .xar archives and extract their contents. I ran this very package through Pacifist, located the application, extracted it, and it ran like a champ on my MacBook Pro—allowing me to configure an ancient AirPort Express Base Station.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

“When your data passes through a public network—such as the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop or airport—it is at risk.” I’ve been writing variations on that sentence for 10 years now, and I expect I’ll be writing it for many more. That’s because it’s easy to snoop on such networks, and the data on them isn’t safeguarded against those prying eyes. You have to take action to keep your data safe. Fortunately, doing so doesn’t have to be hard.

You could encrypt networked data one service at a time, by securing your email sessions or configuring your Twitter and Facebook accounts to use HTTPS. (Actually, I recommend both steps regardless of whatever other security measures you take.) But that means adjusting settings in lots of different apps, one at a time. There’s a more comprehensive solution: a virtual private network (VPN).

When you set up a VPN on your Mac or iOS device, client software encrypts all of your outbound data (wrapping it in something often called a secure tunnel) and sends it to a secure server. That server has the appropriate encryption keys and other credentials to unwrap the data and send it along to wherever it’s supposed to go. Likewise, the server returns data—requested webpages, email messages, or even streaming audio and video—to the client through the same tunnel; only the client can unravel those responses or streams.

VPNs are valuable because several segments of the path between you and the Internet are easy to exploit. It could be the segment from your Mac, iPhone, or iPad to the coffeeshop’s Wi-Fi network. It could be the ethernet network behind the counter to which that router connects. In some cases, such as countries without a firm grasp on the idea of free speech, the weak link could even be the ISP that connects that coffeeshop to the Internet at large. VPNs can help protect your data along all of those vulnerable segments. (That’s why VPNs have become critical tools for dissidents worldwide.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Robert Zavod would like greater access to his photos from his iPhone. He writes:

When using my iPhone on the road, I’d like to access my iMac and its iPhoto library and move some of the images in that library to my iPhone. Is there a way to do that?

Yes. There are a couple of ways to approach this. The first is the dead-simple way (recently suggested to me by reader @snaab via Twitter) and the second is my original method, which can be more broadly helpful for communicating remotely with your Mac but is more complicated. We’ll start with the simple solution.

On your iPhone download a copy of Tunaverse Media’s free Blinq Photo app. On your Mac, travel to Tunaverse’s website and grab an equally-free copy of Blinq for Mac. Fire up the Mac client and create an account (this requires that you create a username and password and enter an email address). Once your account has been created you’ll be asked whether you’d like Blinq to use your iPhoto or Aperture library. Choose iPhoto.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here