Apple's Airport Series: A Router Worth Having

In my opinion, having one of these routers in your home is pretty much, if not definitely a necessary requirement. They make things oh-so-easy, and in true Apple style, clean, easy to use and wildly efficient.

Link: http://www.apple.com/au/compare-wifi-models/

Part of my job is to provide advice or make recommendations to my clients on new hardware or software to purchase when faced with a problem  that needs resolving, and usually needs resolving fast and permanent. I don't believe in a bandaid fix in my work, as it usually results in repeat work, and generally an unhappy customer.

Today I had a customer who was in dire need of a new internal network for his office. His modem/router/gateway device, whilst performing efficiently for at least the modem component is very dated and aged, and was starting to have DHCP and routing issues, as well as the wireless signal kept dropping out and was weak rendering it basically unusable. However, having had some experience with the AirPort line of products, I recommended he invest $119 in a small, simple and non-obtrusive device into his network, which would solve a lot of the routing issues, as well as enable easy shared printing.

I gotta tell you, it was great. Not only is the range on this little tiny device excellent, but the built in bonjour services as well as the static allocations for the various devices works excellently. I set the router up to be the PPP dialler also, meaning it handles the internet connection, all the modem needs to do now is keep doing what it does best, handle the data link between it and the DSLAM in the telephone exchange. The best part about this entire setup is that I configured the whole thing (except for the static allocations) without having to plug in a cable.

The AirPort family come in three different flavours currently. The baby of the group (the one I set up today) is the express model, which has a gateway ethernet port (to connect your modem to) and one ethernet port. You can either plug one device into this, such as a network printer, or computer that doesn't have a wireless connection. It has one USB port for either attaching a printer or a storage device, and apart from having the inbuilt wireless, it also has a jack to connect speakers to. Whilst the speaker jack is probably not so effective in an office environment, and probably aimed at the home user, it is great to have. Any Apple device can play music wirelessly through AirPlay to the speakers attached to the AirPort.

The bigger brothers of the AirPort express are the "extreme" models. You can either get one with a hard drive built into it for storing data or making easy backups, or you can get one without the internal storage. The extreme models also have a new technology built into them referred to wireless beaming as well as supporting the 802.11ac wireless standard. If you're streaming HD content, or need the extra range on wireless, this would be a better option over the express version. There are two extra ethernet ports (bringing the total to four, including one gateway port), and the speed of these ports on the extreme models is bumped up to 1gigabit up from 100megabit in the express model).

If you liked this post, or found it useful, please feel free to share with your friends to pass the info on using the buttons below.

How to tether your iPhone with your computer

This is one I get asked a lot.

I have an iPhone/tablet/iPad and I want to share the Internet connection it has with my laptop when I'm on the road. How do I set it up?

Luckily, this is an easy one!

From your iDevice, hit the settings icon

Then choose the personal hotspot menu option (usually 3rd or 4th option)

Then slide the switch on the following page to "on".

After this is done, go to your laptop, and search for available wireless networks. Your iPhone's name should be in the list, and all you need to do is enter the password on your iPhones screen. Mine in this case is cheese47

Once connected on your laptop you should be able to get online and browse the Internet.

Note that this also works for any other devices you need to connect to the Internet that have a wifi connection, but no 3G or 4G or LTE access.

Hope this helped!

Any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments below, and if this helped you or a friend, please share the love with the sharing buttons!

A quick guide to uploading videos to YouTube

Everyone on the internet has been to or watched a video on YouTube before, unless of course you've been living under a rock for the past 5 years. But have you ever shared one of your own videos? YouTube is the perfect place to share one of your videos with whoever you want, and you can choose if you'd like to keep the video private or not.

This quick guide will teach you how to upload your first video to YouTube which you can then use to upload subsequent videos if you like.

To start, let's point our internet browser to http://www.youtube.com/

Then on the right hand side, as shown below, click on the upload button. If it's not there, you may need to sign in, or sign up.

Then, you'll be presented with this screen:

Click on the button below the upload icon that says "Select files from your computer"

Once you've found the file you are wanting to use (I recommend saving the video to your desktop to find it easily) select it, and choose, upload.

Once you've chosen the file to upload, it will start uploading, but whilst it's doing that you'll be presented with this screen which has a few important options, so make sure you clearly select the options you want.

The green boxes are where you want to name your video, give it a description, and some tags. The title will help people find it.
The red box is the box that will determine how public or private a video is.
- Public speaks for itself
- Unlisted means the video can be seen by anyone that has the unique link, and it will not show up in searches on google or anything like that.
- The last option is only available to other people that have a specific YouTube account and require them to sign in.

I'd recommend an unlisted video. It allows anyone with the link, (that you will email to them so they can see) to view it, but stops it coming up in searches and to the general public.

Unless of course the video is one you don't mind sharing with the entire world, then choose public.

Once the upload completes, you can click Video manager, (top right) to be taken to the management screen of all your videos. From here you can get the link to your video, and then share it with anyone you like.

That's it! You've just uploaded your first video to share.

If you liked this post, or found it useful, please feel free to share with your friends to pass the info on using the buttons below.

Setting up any printer to use with AirPrint for iOS devices.

I'll start off by saying this problem has annoyed me for a while.

When I first learned of AirPrint, I thought great! What an awesome idea, then I learned that Apple only wanted to limit it to a specific range of printers and this annoyed me, why couldn't we just use any printer attached to a computer that was part of the same wireless network to print?

Apparently, according to many, many other people, I'm not the only one who thinks this way, and thanks to the developers at Netputing there is a solution! They've designed a handy little piece of software which allows sharing over the wireless network in your house to provide for AirPrint. And it works well.

Without re-writing their webpage, head over to http://netputing.com/airprintactivator/airprint-activator-v2-0/ to download their latest version, as well as a handy video and screenshots for set up. Normally, I'd be happy to do that here, however they've already done the hard work and made it simple to use on their site.

The best part about their software? It's free. If however you do like the software, and you'd like to thank them for their hard work, they do have a donate button on the top of their site, and for such a great, simple piece of software that works so well, you may decide you'd like to contribute. I did, as I have been really happy with it.