Untiled

In the last year, I have spent a good deal of time in an online community that has the audacious goal to “provide experts with the tools they need to make The Internet a better place.” The stack exchange network hosts over 85 sites, each with it’s own unique feel. The site I frequent is, no surprise, the one focused on Apple products and software. Let me share with you some of the questions that are not necessarily getting lots of votes, but I learned something (or several things) from each and refer to them over even the Apple documentation for the features and/or problems they address:

- Finder Sidebar ordering in Lion
- Is there a way to suppress badge counts and the dock icon bounce for Terminal.app in Lion?
- How do I remove a user via single user mode in 10.7?

- Can a 60W MagSafe power adapter work interchangeably on a Macbook Pro that “requires” an 85W adapter?

- Is it possible to force the next boot to be a recovery mode boot with a bluetooth keyboard?

More interestingly, these five questions have been referenced over 20,000 times. Even the very low voted, self asked, self answered question has had nearly one thousand views. I don’t have any idea how many views the official Apple discussion boards receive, but what makes Stack Exchange special is that I have the tools to track favorites and the community votes up the best questions and even more importantly the best answers.

Here are another batch of questions where there really isn’t even a good answer. Some may be impossible, but I like that the site is patient to allow an answer to come many months or perhaps years later.

- Automatically setting custom routes with the internal VPN (IPSec/L2TP) client

- Command line control of the built in camera

- Preferred Location for cgi executables in Lion Server

- How can I use Terminal to monitor a network interfaces total traffic in Mb

- Can a Mac’s airport card run 802.11 N, G, B or A only? (this one is my all time favorite unanswered question - please help if you can!)

Lastly, I’m just going to list a final few questions that are all around awesome. I hope you find some of these links worthwhile and do know that with the contest running, you poking around here can help me do my part in promoting the site. I feel strongly that some great people are on the site and invite you to come join us (as long as your employer doesn’t frown upon extracurricular work on certain technical topics - y’all just keep helping people out and enjoy your time off when you’re not on the clock.)

- How does iMessage know that the recipient is an iOS 5 device?

- Harmonic noise introduced when using an iPhone dock extension cable connected to a mic peripheral

- How do I un-trust or remove blacklisted root CAs from mobile Safari on my iPhone or iPad?

- How to figure out what app is sending/receiving huge amounts of data on an iPhone?

- What tiny thing in Lion makes you smile or has caught you off guard? (keep smiling, Lion)

As you can see, some are incredibly technical, some just fun and some a great reference. The best part of these sites is that even a totally new person can come up and ask or answer a question. Yes, the system isn’t perfect, but I’m excited to see where it goes in the next year.

Thanks for reading, thanks for clicking and I hope your next Apple related question will be on “Ask Different”

Posted via email from bmike’s posterous | Comment »