Apr 16

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 with a local directional antenna. The problem is that most of the towers are oversubscribed, and upload and download speeds are very poor. (5Mbps down and 1Mbps up).

My experiment

For the past 3 months I’ve been experimenting with various configurations of 4G carriers and modems to tweak the maximum speed I can from the 4G data network. The results have surprised me!

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Oct 02

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 URL in a specified browser. To auto-login as a user see here. To customise the icon see here.

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Sep 20

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 account. In the Chrome browser you can switch accounts by going to the top right and selecting a different account but it’s clunky.

This article below describes how to automatically login to a certain account when you open a URL in a browser. To automate this with a script see here.

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Jul 15

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 have an amazing super special here with hosting for $2.65/month for 36 months. That’s very cheap to host your own wordpress blog.

If you are interested click this link below for me to get a commission for your sign-up…

www.bluehost.com/track/wayneconnor

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Sep 20

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 of your network?  Most routers don’t allow you to change the output power of your router, but there is a way around this. A lot routers have a ‘region’ setting. This adjusts the output power of your router to match the maximum allowable legal EMF level in your country. The USA has very high power levels. Australia and Europe have much lower allowable levels. So if you live in the USA but select ‘UK’ or ‘Australia’ as your region, it will potentially lower the power output of your router to 1/10th of the level.

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Aug 20

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 various Apps that monitor and track your internet usage I have found TripMode to be great for tracking my usage. 

TripMode is a little menu bar application that monitors every application on your computer and it’s internet use per application. For example here is a display of my usage in one day:

As well as keeping track of how much data each application is using, you can manually enable or disable the internet for each application. For example, in the screenshot above I have disabled internet access for the ‘Slack’  \application. This is handy if you are low on internet allowance and what to control what each application uses.

Tripmode will also let you choose whether to view the data for a day, a week, or the entire month.

 

Tripmode costs $10, but there were no free alternatives that I could find, so after running the trial for 7 days I decided to purchase it.

I use it a lot.

  • It gives me a general feel for where my internet usage is going.
  • It allows me to see when new apps are trying to access the internet.
  • It allows me to see how much data the Apple software updates are using.
  • It allows me to see how much data I am using in Safari or Chrome when I access a youtube video.
  • When travelling I can control which apps I want to have access to the web. I can turn off apps off (eg software update) and only let the important apps (eg mail) access the internet.

I have no relationship with Tripmode, but I love it!  I purchased it for $10 and I think it’s well worth the price. You can download it here.

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Jan 16

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!

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Oct 16

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 years, and it seems that some of that has been published in a massive document recently.  This includes people’s login details from companies like Adobe, Dropbox, Kickstarter and more.

So it is not your email password that has been leaked,  it is your login email address and password for those websites. Read on to find out if your email address was involved.

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