Stories by Mark Gibbs

An iPad stand, a WiFi access point, and a honeypot

I've checked out many iPad stands over the last few months and I just found what I think is one of the very best: The Uprise 360 produced by Hub Innovations. This is a dead simple design which your iPad (version 2 or 3) snaps into and you can rotate it to portrait or landscape as required. It's easy to remove the iPad when you need to and that's it ... as I said, it's dead simple and does the job. For $39.95 the Uprise 360 produced by Hub Innovations Uprise 360 gets a Gearhead rating of 5 out of 5.

Patents, iDevice docks and GenuineCheck

First up: The U.S. Patent Office just granted Microsoft a patent for, and I am not making this up, controlling an audio signal of a mobile device by giving it a whack. My friend Jerry spotted this gem sliced and diced on the Patent Bolt Blog with the headline, "Microsoft Patent: How to Silence your Device by whacking it off."

Opinion: Is it a phone? Is it a tablet? No! It's a phablet!

If there's one thing that annoys me it's the obsessive miniaturisation of electronic products. Although I don't have anything like RSI or arthritis or poor motor skills, with most teeny digital devices my fingers become inaccurate banana-like appendages stabbing at the minuscule keys with a success rate of maybe 50 per cent at best.

Looking for the perfect iPhone case

Few iPhone owners are so bold as to leave their elegant Apple hardware unsheathed against the rigors of everyday life, which is too bad because most iPhone cases defeat the Apple aesthetic: It is pretty much the case (pun intended) that the tougher the case, the less elegant your iPhone will look.

Cell service bogus charges and limitations

If there's one thing that chaps everyone's butt it's how the cellphone carriers seem to just keep grinding away to extract a few extra cents from their customers through bogus charges and ridiculous limitations.

Opinion: The privacy cat is out of the bag

There comes a point in many situations where you have to recognize that the cat is not only out of the bag, it has stolen your wallet and your car keys and has taken the I-15 to Vegas.

Summer holiday gadgets

Gibbs just got back from his summer holiday and he took a load of gadgets with him ...

Organizational knowledge and temporary staff

Your organization does stuff. You buy things, you make things from the things you bought, you write things, you send out invoices for things you've sold ... there are thousands of things you do and these procedures are what drives your business.

Apple's Mountain Lion OS keeps crashing my iMac, and raises BYOD questions

Ever since I upgraded to Apple's "Mountain Lion" (Version 10.8) release of OS X I've been having a "small" problem with my iMac ... it keeps crashing. At least once per day, OS X gives up with a kernel panic and the System Diagnostic reports either "type 13=general protection" or "type 14=page fault." For what it's worth, the last two kernel extension events are for loading and unloading com.apple.driver.AppleUSBCDC4.1.21.

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