Our thinking

September 8, 2011

If This Then That

This new-to-me website — officially known as “ifttt” (how do you pronounce that?) — is brilliant. I signed up yesterday (it looks like it’s currently in public beta), and it only took about a minute to realize ifttt’s potential handiness....
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September 8, 2011

Quick Review – Audioengine A2 self-powered speakers

Two thumbs up. These tiny desktop speakers punch well above their weight. They are amazingly well built for the price, have a more than powerful enough stereo amp built into the left speaker and feature a kevlar coned driver and...
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September 5, 2011

Quick Tip – telnet with ssl

I've often used telnet to connect to random ports to make sure a service is working (eg: telnet somehost.example.com smtp to see if it's accepting connections on port 25) but have been stuck with a suitable alternative to test connections...
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August 13, 2011

It’s a girl!

A new addition to the family arrived this morning at 00:17 weighing in at a respectable 4.33kg. Mum and bubby both doing very well.
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July 9, 2011

Putting my money where my mouth is…

I've always thought that there is a place and a time to use the cloud, and to be honest, Automatica has been using Google Apps for the past two years to host email and calendars. Overall the experience hasn't been...
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June 22, 2011

Apple Consultants Network

Automatica is now a member of the Apple Consultants Network. This means that Kai has undertaken certification by Apple and has passed all of Apple's background checks and will be featured alongside other consultants on Apple's web site.
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June 7, 2011

Set up a transparent Apple Software Update Server

Update - Jan 2013 - this is quickly going to become obsolete, with Apple's release of Server.app version 2.2 for Mountain Lion, this enables a transparent caching service. If you network clients are running Mountain Lion (maybe Lion as well,...
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May 30, 2011

How to get a real IP address on Telstra Next G

The Telstra Next G 3G internet service is fast, works well in a lot of areas around Australia and can be sorted out fairly cheaply these days. One big downside to the service however is that by default you receive...
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May 26, 2011

Console not updating or asl manager taking 100% CPU

Here's how to restart the Mac OS X 10.6 log managers after removing asl data. Corrupt asl data will either cause the logs in Console.app to not update or the aslmanager process to consume 100% CPU. Open the Terminal application...
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