Operation Gadget

Category: Productivity and Organization

  • AirCell Gogo Successfully Used for a VoIP Call on a Transcontinental Flight

    Reading Time: 2 minutesI haven’t really talked about AirCell or its Gogo inflight Internet access service since it first became available on American Airlines. But Andy Abramson turned me on to a little experiment with the service that he and Laptop Magazine’s Joanna Stern did yesterday that is absolutely worthy of mention. Andy reports that…

  • Assigning Locations to OmniFocus iPhone Contexts

    Reading Time: 4 minutesMy latest Inside iPhone post is called How an iPhone Can Help You Be More Productive When Commuting Via Mass Transit. One of the things I talk about in that post is the power of using location-based contexts within the OmniFocus for iPhone application. I realized while writing the Inside iPhone piece…

  • Gadget Links: Post Memorial Day Weekend Edition

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteSixty-Six on Daring Fireball: “The idea that Apple now sells two-thirds of retail computers costing $1000 or more is simply stunning. I (along with many others) have long argued that a simplistic “overall PC market share” number has never been a good metric for gauging the Mac’s success because the “overall…

  • MacBreak Video Shows Finer Points of Quicksilver Utility for the Mac

    Reading Time: 2 minutesOne of the utilities programs that veteran Mac users swear by is Quicksilver which at first glance appears to be a keyboard-based application launcher. It turns out that QuickSilver can be used for a great deal more than application launching, but a lot of the productivity that you can gain from it…

  • Why I Updated to MacOS X 10.5.3 Right Away

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteApple released MacOS X Version 10.5.3 earlier today. I first learned about the release when I was checking out Summize for the first time and saw references to Mac OS X and Leopard on the home page as “trending topics”. MacWorld has a good summary of the important fixes and new…

  • Twitterific vs Spaz: The Twitter Client Face-off on My Desktop

    Reading Time: 4 minutesI’ve been using Twitter for several weeks, because there are things that friends of mine might be interested in hearing about that will never make it into an email or an Operation Gadget post. Twitterific vs Spaz: These two desktop Twitter clients that run on the Mac are competing for space on…

  • Smart Playlists Suffer Because of Logical Limitations

    Reading Time: 2 minutesOne of the best techniques for using an iPhone with a large iTunes library is to use Smart Playlists to automatically select tracks from your library according to logical rules. I discussed this in Use Smart Playlists for Endless Combinations of Christmas Music. I wanted to provide an update because I see…

  • Gadget Links: Running Amok Edition

    Reading Time: 2 minutesHow to Eat Healthily at Top Chain Restaurants on Lifehacker: “The food experts at Health magazine have scoured the menus at popular restaurant chains in search of the healthiest foods on the menu, rounding up several healthy menu options at otherwise unhealthy chains.” They found reasonably healthy choices at Denny’s, Ruby Tuesday,…

  • Looking for a Way to Automatically Secure My MacBook Pro

    Reading Time: 2 minutesOn our trip to Buffalo this weekend, Kathleen, Jimmy, and I stayed in two Marriott properties that had public WiFi networks. The thing I didn’t like about them is that they are wide open networks which means anyone can join and do pretty much anything they want locally. I have my MacBook…