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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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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Feb 08

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 and ready to go for next time. Continue reading ⟩

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Jun 22

ipod

Apple have made it super easy to get music files from the iTunes store onto your iPod. But it’s not so obvious how to download a music file from the Internet to your iPod or iPhone.

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Apr 15

heart bleed

You might have heard on the news or web about the ‘heartbleed’ bug. I want to answer two questions: Does it affect Macintosh users? Do I need to do anything about it?

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Mar 16

google

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 to their index. 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 out how to submit your site to Google.

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Jan 11

Macintoshhowto.com has been averaging 150,000 visits a month lately. It sits on a server with 5 or 6 other web sites but I thought it deserved a server of it’s own. I moved it across it today. You can read more about it here.

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Jul 06

Apple have built in website filtering into OS X under the ‘System Preferences’ – ‘Parental Controls’ but Parental Control cannot be enabled for administrator accounts (which is probably the account you are running from) and  Parental Controls also becomes hard to manage if you have multiple users because you need to set it up for each one.  Here’s how to set up internet filtering on your whole home network at once using a free service called OpenDNS. Once it’s set up this can help block unsuitable content from reaching any computer, iphone, ipad etc connected to your internet. This approach can be used at home, school, or the workplace. Continue reading ⟩

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