Checking Available Disk Space on a Mac

I get asked this question lots - here's how to check your available space step-by-step when running Apple Operating System  OSX 10.7 or greater.

Step 1
Click the Apple icon in the upper left hand corner of your screen and this drop-down menu will appear.

Step 2
Click About This Mac from the drop-down menu. The following dialog box will appear.

If you are not sure which OS version you are running you can see it here. Notice I'm currently running OS X Version 10.8.4

Step 3
Click the More Info... button and the following will appear (note: I've covered up my serial number).

Step 4
Click the Storage (top of dialog box between Displays and Memory) option for the following.

There you have it broken down nicely into Audio, Movies, Photos, Apps and Other categories.

So..... this is a little embarrassing..... I've only got a little over 1.7 GB free..... looks like I need to do a little drive housekeeping or I'm going to be out of space soon :)

Talking and Surfing Same Time Yet? The Verizon iPhone 5s and 5c

Most of us have taken a peak at the exterior and reviewed major specs for Apple’s two latest phones. If you are a Verizon Wireless customer there is one technical detail you may have missed. The new Apple phones are still not supporting SVLTE and SVDO. What’s SVLTE and SVDO? Here’s some details on these two protocols / technical standards:

Simultaneous Voice and LTE (Long Term Evolution)

Referred to as SVLTE, allows a mobile phone to use both voice and data networks at the same time – specifically when the voice network is CDMA 1xRTT (what Verizon uses) and the data network is LTE (what providers are calling 4G. By not using SVLTE, Verizon’s 4G data network is not available while on a voice call.

Simultaneous Voice and Data Only

Referred to as SVDO, this is the older standard for 3G networks. If you have an iPhone 4 or older, you have a 3G phone. Later iPhone (5 and on) have both a 4G and 3G radio and the device will fall back to 3G-mode when not in 4G coverage areas.  Similar to SVLTE, when the voice network is CDMA 1xRTT and the data network is CDMA 3G (also referred to as CDMA 1xEV-DO) the data network is not available while on a voice call.

Is this significant? Yes and No. The lack of SVLTE should not matter once VoLTE (Voice over LTE) launches on a large scale, allowing both voice and data to operate seamlessly on one Verizon Wireless 4G network.

What’s really interesting is Verizon Wireless has required their handset manufacturers to support both of these technical standards – that is - all manufactures except Apple.

DOJ Rejects Transparency Request by Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn

Last week the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the primary federal criminal investigation and enforcement agency in the U.S., rejected a request made by Microsoft, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn to be allowed to share more details on what data the companies are providing to the U.S. government. The rejection was made in the name of national security and filed with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (FISCA).

The DOJ's petition to FISCA claims:

The companies’ contemplated disclosures risk significant harm to national security by revealing the nature and scope of the government’s intelligence collection on a company-by-company basis throughout the country. 

Such information would be invaluable to our adversaries, who could thereby derive a clear picture of where the government’s surveillance efforts are directed and how its surveillance activities change over time. If our adversaries know which platforms the government does not surveil, they can communicate over those platforms when, for example, planning a terrorist attack or the theft of state secrets.

FISCA now needs to rule on this.

There is more - other tech people (Twitter, Apple, Tumblr, Yahoo, etc) are getting involved with 72 companies and non-profit organizations signing a letter on September 20, 2013 to the U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committee chairs supporting two surveillance bills (S. 1452 and H.R. 3035) currently moving though the Senate and the House of Representatives. Here's the full titles of those bills:

S.1452 - To permit periodic public reporting by electronic communications providers and remote computer service providers of certain estimates pertaining to requests or demands by Federal agencies under the provisions of certain surveillance laws where disclosure of such estimates is, or may be, otherwise prohibited by law. 

H.R. 3035 - To permit periodic public reporting by electronic communications providers and remote computer service providers of certain estimates pertaining to requests or demands by Federal agencies under the provisions of certain surveillance laws where disclosure of such estimates is, or may be, otherwise prohibited by law.

Google Hummingbird - the Beginning of Latent Search

Most of us have had a chance to experiment with Siri on an iPhone or some of the Voice Assistants on an Android mobile device. You may not have experimented with something Google rolled over the past few weeks code named Humingbird though. It's a major new core algorithm for Google that allows users to use conversational speech for searching. I'm amazed at how under the radar this has been. Different terms are being tossed around for this including "latent", "conversational" and "abstract" - here's a quick 2 minute video I recorded demonstrating how it works.


We're so used to searching on keywords it's second nature. Larry Kim from Wordstream refers to keyword searches as "Caveman English".  Hummingbird is probably the biggest change in Google's search technology since 2001. It's similar to Facebook's Graph Search, allowing users to use more abstract or latent language when searching - the same kinds of things we do when having a conversation with another person.

It's also something Google has to do to stay competitive. Both Facebook and Siri use Microsoft's Bing for searching with Apple just switching from Google to Bing with iOS7. Current estimates put Google's search market share at around 70% with many referring to the company as a search business that also does experiments.

If Apple gets Siri fixed up and Facebook also fixes up Graph Search, Google could pretty rapidly lose search market share. Facebook has to be a huge concern right now - recent comScore reports that analyze Americans’ surfing patterns found people are spending more time on Facebook than Google. If Facebook can get their search act together (it's pretty bad right now) lookout.

Right now, Google's Voice Search sure feels pretty natural to me - grab the latest version of the Chrome browser and give it a try.