James Nimmo

Author: James

  • Affordable IP Phone Systems

    Asterisk has been around for a number of years now, most tech consultants will be aware that there are open source PBX solutions that can run on your PC. However, until I discovered the Atcom IP series of Asterisk appliances, I knew I would have a hard time convincing small businesses of the benefits of…

  • DNS Performance Test Utility

    Recently I have been trying to tune the internet performance at work (and find out whether it is faster to run a DNS forwarder on our VPS hosted in a data centre, or to do queries directly to OpenDNS), and found this cross-platform tool which looks very useful for checking out query speeds of different…

  • Sysprep, Standard PC, ACPI, Ghost Images

    NEVER try creating a ghost or sysprep image with your source computer’s HAL set to Standard PC! I wish I had noticed this critical point in documentation earlier: You can deploy a Sysprep image created on a computer that uses a Standard PC, Non-ACPI PIC HAL (Hal.dll) to a computer that uses the following HAL types:  •…

  • 'Back to My Mac' flak?

    Back to My Mac is fundamentally flawed in their decision not to have a hosted SSL solution for it, and for the fact you can only use it from other Macs.

  • OK So I'm Addicted…

    … to the iTunes Music store! It finally launched in New Zealand a few weeks ago, and I can’t keep away from it! I think my best buy off it was probably the Chili Pepper’s Stadium Arcadium, which for $17.99 had the two CDs and a video of the making of their video, and a…

  • MacBook Pro Defects Update

    I took my MacBook Pro down to iLike Computing, who kindly arranged to have it sent off for warranty repair. After spending some time and being put through to many different people at Renaissance New Zealand I finally got a woman named Claire who basically said that because I had parallel imported it, they couldn’t…

  • Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts

    I just found a fantastic article with some keyboard shortcut tips for Windows Users switching to Mac. If you use a Mac – check them out. This page also contains a good list – if you want to see every keyboard shortcut on the market

  • MacBook Pro Defects

    On Monday, my MacBook Pro arrived. Fantastic piece of equipment, but that isn’t what this post is about. It didn’t take me long to notice some out of box issues that really made me mad. When one pays as much as they did for a laptop, they want it to be perfect, and with Apple’s…

  • MacBook Pro

    After spending many hours trying to find the best deal, watching the NZ dollar and all the rest, I finally ordered a MacBook Pro on Friday from Sparco Computing. I feel this is probably as good a time as any I will get to buy one – I figured that next year I will be…

  • Firefox 2.0

    Today I installed the shiny new Firefox 2, and it is Oh So Very Nice! Just as Internet Explorer 7 is released, and has caught up on some of the features Firefox has had for years, Mozilla Firefox remains unbeatable. Although Firefox 2.0 is not yet officially released, I am told by good sources that…