Category: internet
How to spot a fake website
Spam emails can be so convincing. How to you know if the link to a website is real or fake? Here is a short video showing the main difference between a real and fake website is the URL. You cannot rely on the logo or how real the website looks.
iblog
I am releasing the macintoshhowto wordpress theme for public use. It’s is a wordpress theme that has been running on this site since 2010. I’ve made several improvements since then, many to make it responsive to mobile devices and also to make it faster. The original free iBlog theme has been removed from public distribution.…
Tweaking your 4G internet speeds when your NBN is bad.
An apology to international readers – some of the details in this post apply specifically to Australia, although there will be principles here that you can apply. I live just 5 km line of sight from a regional Australian city and our internet comes by ‘fixed wireless.’ Fixed wireless is essentially a dedicated 4G connection…
How to open a URL in a certain browser.
One click on this icon in my dock and Google calendar opens in Firefox from my Dubbo.org G-mail account. This script has chosen the browser and the website and the account that I want to be logged into when I visit the website. This article below describes how to write the script to open a…
How to open a browser window that’s logged into a specified Google account
I have four different Google accounts and quite often I find myself in a browser in the wrong account. For example I might be trying to edit my church calendar, which resides in my work Google account, but because I have just been reading my personal mail in Gmail, I am logged into that Google…
Super cheap hosting deal
I host macintoshhowto.com with Bluehost. Here’s a post I wrote 10 years ago raving about how good they are. Here’s a post from a year back complaining about their billing. In conclusion they offer rock solid reliable hosting, but they are so big it’s not easy to get support or billing help from them. They…
How to lower the power output of your wifi router if you live in the US
There are lots of articles about how to increase the range of your wi-fi network, but there are reasons to decrease the range. Perhaps you are worried about EMF levels and their impact on your body. Or perhaps you want to stop your neighbours hacking your wireless network. So how do you decrease the range…
Monitor internet usage of individual applications in OSX
Have you ever wondered which application is using up all your internet data? We live out-of-town on a rural property and I’m on a plan that only has 60GB per month. Sometimes I am tracking along fine when overnight my data usage spikes and I lose 10GB. Where has it all gone? After trying out…
Is Bluehost a good company for webhosting?
I just wanted to let people know of a very interesting billing issue I had with Bluehost recently. I was overcharged for my hosting, but when I enquired into the billing problem they bullied me into stepping down my enquiry or else they would shut down my website!
Make sure you are using strong passwords
News.com.au today published an article encouraging people to change their email passwords. The article begins “The email addresses and passwords of 771 million people have been published online during a gigantic data leak”. This is not exactly correct. What has happened is that login information from various companies has been hacked into over the…
Facebook slow today
If facebook is not working well this week, don’t panic. It’s not you computer or iPhone or browser that’s causing the problems. Apparantly Facebook are having some problems. There’s no fix that I know of other than to wait it out and try again a little later. This site allows you to check if others…
Reflections on how Google rankings shape website content
I have now been running macintoshhowto.com for 10 years. Here is a graph of visitors over the last 10 years: You will notice that there are some turning points on the curve. Most of these changes correspond to Google changing their Page Rank algorithms. For example macintoshhowto.com was slowly and steadily growing in popularity until…
Australia – how to connect to the NBN.
In Australia at the moment they are rolling out the NBN. If you have a Macintosh computer it doesn’t matter which company you go with – they are all “Macintosh compatible”. The main thing affecting the setup of your NBN connection and the equipment you will need is whether you are fibre to the premises (FTTP) or fibre to…
Massive Bluehost sale Sept 15 & 16. $2.95/month
Bluehost are offering a two day sale with web hosting for $2.95 a month. Don’t miss this great deal!
How to bookmark lots of tabs at once in safari
Have you ever searched the internet with lots of webpages open at once? You could be doing research or booking a holiday, you might even have ten pages open at once. Then, all of a sudden, you get interrupted and have to do something else. Don’t worry, you can bookmark all of your tabs at once to have them saved…
How to reduce data usage when travelling with your laptop
If you are travelling with your laptop (or iPhone) and your data is limited, here are a few simple ways to make sure you don’t use too much data.
How to sell something on ebay
Here’s how to sell something on ebay from your mac. It’s all fairly simple. The only real trick is how to easily get your photos from iPhoto into ebay. Here’s how.
How to get your website to appear in a google search
Web pages generally  do not automatically appear on search engine results pages. To make your site appear in google and other search engines you need to manually add your site. This is called submitting your site to a search engine. You don’t have to pay to do this – it’s free. Read on to find…
New web server!
Macintoshhowto.com has been averaging 150,000 visits a month lately.
A great password manager
I’ve been using 1Password for about 3 years now, Â it’s great. A password manager remembers all your web login usernames and passwords on every blog and website you visit.
How to download a dropbox movie file from Safari.
I recently was sent a link to a movie file in someone’s dropbox via email…