Another Apple Con (as in Pro vs Con)

A WhatsApp message for help from my granddaughters led me to checking out Bluetooth transfer between my devices, and to the title of today's post, 'Another Apple Con'.

I had no difficulty replicating their problem! Transfer between either an Apple iPad or iPhone with a non-Apple device over Bluetooth does not work!

I tried both my iPad 3 and iPhone 4 (iOS6) with several Android devices, and they simply cannot pair! i.e. Apple does not allow them to pair...

My efforts did lead me to an app 'Photo Share Pro' which simplified transfer of a photo between my iDevices (very slowly), but my granddaughter's iPod Touch was out of order so this didn't help them transfer between a Nokia phone and iPad 2.

Why Apple. What did you gain by creating this limitation?

So, its another Con added to my list, each new one merely makes it more unlikely I'll ever buy another Apple product.

Patriot Gauntlet NAS caught my eye

Not sure whether I first heard of it via Reader, or whether it was on PC Perspective, though I believe it was the latter.

Its a small portable wi-fi storage container for a 2.5" hard drive or SSD. You can find a Presentation of the device by PC Perp's Ryan on their YouTube page.

Its all very well buying one of these, but I was interested in finding out how it could be accessed from an iPad 3 or a Nexus 7. Finding workable solutions for both platforms took a while.

I used Apple's Airport Disk to check things out, by connecting a spare 500GB WD drive to the USB port on my Airport Extreme Base station, and transferring some MP3 folders to it.

To cut a long story short, I was able to access these from the iPad using FileBrowser, which found the NAS drive with a quick scan of the Lan.

The Nexus 7 took a bit longer until I tried a free app called ES File Explorer A simple click on Lan, then Scan, enter User/pwd and away it went.

An educational experience, but with all the Airplay and Cloud solutions which are available, one must really need SSD speed in a real Gauntlet Node to justify purchase, unless you happen to be a 'technology nut' like someone I know!

Changed my mapping software

Several reasons made me leave Mindnode Pro and Touch.

First, there was no Android version, and no hint of one in the future..

Secondly,, I got fed up with the OSX version. The Inspector was constantly required to correct text size, node breadth, etc. grrr!

I found SimpleMind, which works great between OSX, iPad and Nexus 7, and most important, imports the Freemind map mm format, so I have easily exported the Mindnode maps I wish to transfer and synced them via Dropbox

MacBook Pro backup

Helped Susan to get SuperDuper going this afternoon, but she had 400GB on her 500GB drive and the first pass of the app always takes a long time. She probably didn't complete the clone before leaving for Bangkok and HK by Finnair today, but she'll be able to run it overnight when she gets there.

The new 1TB Western Digital drive is unbelievably tiny!

Almost bought a MacBook Pro

I have been concerned about the possibility of my daughter losing her MB Pro, and was thinking of getting a similar model as a kind of reserve, but it would have cost NOK 17.5K, which is a hell of a lot of money under the circumstances..

Instead I ordered a 1TB WD external drive, and we'll take a SuperDuper clone before she leaves for the East again this weekend.

Not sure if we would be able to run from this clone on my New iMac, which runs either Lion or Mountain Lion, but we'll check it out. If it works, at least she has the opportunity to work while waiting for a replacement.

Just dusted off the T91MT

It must be many months since I last powered on this, my remaining Windows device, probably stimulated by all the talk of Surface RT..

Spending the usual hour or so slowly installing updates, and removing a couple of unwanted apps, has been enough to put me off Windows for life...

Forwarding to Gmail

Decided to return my online.no mail to forwarding it to Gmail as a way of ridding myself of a growing bunch of Spam reaching the Apple Mail acct.

It didn't work reliably for a couple of hours and I'm not sure whether that was due to the time passed, or my changing the Inbox style to Classic, but after the latter things worked perfectly as desired.