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He was the editor of NZ Macguide magazine for five years and has worked exclusively with Macs for 20.

Mark is the author of the NZ history book Assembly: NZ Car Production 1921-1998 (Reed Books, 2002).

He is a speaker on Information Technology and automotive, historical and Apple subjects, and works as a Mac trainer with wide experience. Mark has dispensed Apple knowledge at Natcoll, to MAINZ, for ImageText, to 3Media, MacMillan Publishing and for Microsoft, and to dozens of individuals.

Russian spy Mac user

Thursday, 01 July 2010

Russian 'spy' loved her Mac: Anna Chapman (pic), arrested by the FBI for belonging to a Russian espionage network called “the illegals,” may also go down in history as the spy who loved Macs.
On January 25, the 28-year-old told her 175 Facebook friends: “My new Mac has been the buy of the year…Love it!”
It wasn’t an easy relationship, though. According to the FBI documents, her spy job was plagued by network problems that made transmitting her weekly Wednesday intelligence reports via a private wireless network at Starbucks and Barnes and Noble in New York a major hassle. 
When asked how she was doing by another Russian agent, Chapman replied, “Everything is cool apart from connection,” which the FBI investigator understood to mean the technical difficulties with the laptop-to-laptop covert communications. Alas, even today’s agents of espionage aren’t as tech savvy as one would assume. He responds:
“I know you are having some problems with the connections. I am not the technical guy…I don’t know how to fix it, but if you tell me, I can pass it up.”
Documents didn’t mention which Apple laptop she used ... and uh-oh, in movies and TV series like 24, the good guys use Macs and the bad guys use PCs – what's the case here?

What are Smart Folders? A cool facility in OS X that I don't use at all, that's what! Cult of Mac runs an explanation: "A smart folder is one whose contents are partly or completely determined by a set of rules that you’ve created.
To set up a Smart Folder, make sure you’re in Finder and then select File >New Smart Folder. You’ll see a Finder window appear, but it’s slightly different to normal ones.
At the top of the window, just below the toolbar, there’s a new bar of controls. You choose whether the search scope covers everything on your Mac, or just the current folder. You also choose whether you’re searching file contents or file names."


Eyes peeled: keep tuned for an important Auckland announcement involving Apple today – but no, not an Apple Store.