Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

Smarter Parental Controls

If you've been using the parental controls options in Mac OS X to lock your child out of using a particular computer late at night, but would like to employ a more clever technique to limit Internet access, turn to MAC address filtering on an Apple base station.

To do this, launch AirPort Utility, select your base station, and click Manual Setup. In the Access Control view, choose Time Access to turn on MAC filtering. You'll need to enter the MAC address of the particular computer, which (in 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard) you can find in the Network System Preferences pane: click AirPort in the adapter list, and click Advanced. The AirPort ID is the MAC address.

 

 

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MobileMe Backup 3.2

Apple has released a minor update to MobileMe Backup that purportedly improves overall reliability in restoring from backup - though no specifics are provided in the release notes - and introduces a feature that helps the program use disk space more efficiently. That feature is called "recycling" and amounts to the deleting of old backups to recover disk space. Limited scheduling options are available to those backing up to hard disk or optical discs; users backing up to iDisk do not have the option of choosing when backups are recycled. Users may also choose to disable recycling. More information on recycling is available on Apple's Web site. The update is available via Software Update or the Apple Support Downloads page. (Free, 6.73 MB)

 

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Comments about MobileMe Backup 3.2

Gee, does anyone actually use Backup? I've tried it repeatedly but it has never, ever worked, even the first backup. I'm not planning to renew MobileMe!
Yes. Successfully for 4+ years now.

If you have a failure it will be obvious in the logs.

A corrupted file will cause a failure and that file will show itself over and over again in the logs at the fail point. Delete and enjoy.

BTW MobileMe is available for a 30 dollar savings from Amazon..70 bucks. Well worth it for all the features.
Works great for me, and the update seems snappier and more reliable. Off-site backup beats on-site.