wake-on-lan
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Alexa can wake up more of your smart home devices
You can certainly use Amazon's Alexa to turn on some devices, but that support is frequently limited. What if a device is in a low-power state and won't respond to your hue and cry? Amazon now has a solution. It recently added a "wake-on-LAN" control method that can turn on sleeping connected gadgets in the home that otherwise won't respond to voice control. Device makers just need to craft Alexa skills that use the new control to have it turn on TVs and other hardware on the local network.
iNet Pro is a handy network utility for your iPhone
iNet is incredibly handy. I needed a list of the MAC addresses of all of the devices on my network. It's a fairly tedious process that requires a lot of copy and pasting and a lot of poking around in network settings. Then, I remembered I had iNet Pro on my iPhone. I fired it up, ran a scan, and then emailed myself a nicely-formatted report that listed all of the devices. Later, my satellite Internet went down. Every couple of minutes, I launched iNet and had it run "ping" against www.google.com to see if the connection was back up. I've used it to see if my wife's iPhone was on the network (a good way to see if she is awake) and to remember the static IP address of a network printer at my office. iNet Pro can run port scans (offering a custom set of ports to check or letting you run your own) and show you a list of Bonjour services that are available for each computer. If you have any computers set to use Wake On Lan, iNet can send the necessary signal. I haven't used that feature but Apple improved upon it in Snow Leopard and explains how to determine if your Mac supports Wake On Demand. There are several versions of iNet available. The basic iNet Network Scanner is $0.99 (all prices USD) and iNet Pro is $4.99. The website includes a handy guide to the iNet and iNet Pro Feature List (PDF), which explains the differences. You can upgrade from iNet to iNet Pro as a $3.99 in-app purchase, so if you aren't sure that you need everything the Pro version does, you can start small without worrying that you're going to cost yourself more by not buying the Pro version right away. The developer also offers iNet Wake On Lan (WOL) and iNet Portscan, each for $1.99. It's important to note, though, that iNet Pro contains both WOL and Portscan capabilities. If you really only need those particular features, you can save a couple of dollars by purchasing only what you need. However, the Pro version is still only $5.
LaCie's Network Space 2 will assimilate your data, resistance is futile
It's not as compellingly styled as the Starck Mobile Hard Drive, nor as ostentatious as the Golden Disk; in fact the Network Space 2 is visually identical to the earlier Network Space, featuring improvements where it counts: on the inside. The Network Space 2 can act as either an external drive over USB or as a NAS, with UPnP, DLNA, and iTunes compliance for media streaming -- but that's old hat. New is integrated torrent support for all of your non-copyrighted download needs and some enhanced eco-friendly tweaks, like the ability to power itself down at certain times of the day then wake-on-LAN when needed. Storage is still capped at 1TB and there's no RAID in here to protect your infos, but we're not expecting this one to stray too far from its predecessor's $160 mark when released before the end of the year. %Gallery-77270%
Snow Leopard extends Wake-on-LAN feature... if your config is right
It's been a stealth feature of modern Macs for years: the ability of a sleeping machine to respond to a 'magic packet' delivered over Ethernet and wake up on command, either triggered by a specialized app or by Apple Remote Desktop. Handy, especially for administrators who might need to access remote and sleeping workstations, but as the world has moved more toward wireless networking the Wake-On-LAN capability became gradually less relevant. Now, as Macworld explains, the ability to wake sleeping Macs remotely has been extended in two vital ways with Snow Leopard as a new feature called Wake on Demand. First, the new OS allows sleeping machines to hand off Bonjour broadcast tasks (advertising services like printer sharing, web sharing, iPhoto & iTunes libraries, etc.) to an Airport Extreme base station or Time Capsule, letting the machine's services appear always-on even if the actual Mac is asleep; the Mac will wake remotely when needed by a client. This alone will allow multi-Mac homes to sleep their machines more often, saving energy and aggravation. The second feature requires that you pair your recent-vintage Airport with a recent Mac model (all 2009 versions, and possibly some 2008 models as well): you can wake the machine over Wi-Fi, rather than just over Ethernet. If you go to System Profiler, to the Network section and the Airport data sheet -- look for a line that says "Wake on Wireless." If it's there, you've got the capability. Your mileage may vary but it's certainly fun to try waking up your machine remotely over the WLAN -- or, for fun, your spouse's machine, just to watch them jump.
