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I'm going to use two lists for my Christmas gift guide folks - a sensible, practical, reasonable, affordable one, and a crazy, blue-sky dream one.


SENSIBLE:

Best gifts for kids - Tinkerbrick - the iPod touch case that works with Lego. For $33 you can encase an iPod touch as part of any lego-creation - my favourite is this X-wing fighter . Just wish they'd make versions for other iOS devices also.
- Runner up after 12 months ...

Smartphones, and particularly late model iPhones, are remarkable little devices. They play our music, enable us to surf the net from virtually anywhere, we can watch feature length movies, Facebook, Twitter, emails, heck, I'm even typing this article on my iPhone 5 using an Apple BlueTooth keyboard. And while PCs and even notebook computers are frequently getting replaced by smaller, smarter, thinner iPhones and iPads, there's another product category that is suffering terribly under the burden of smartphone popularity: compact cameras. ...

A few good pieces of news this morning, but before we get to that: it looks as though Australian iPad minis with LTE have finally started shipping from Apple. A few people in the forums are seeing delivery dates of December 3rd. Meanwhile, still no sign of iTunes 11 — but on with the news!
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I'm a fan of all things beautiful and practical so my choices tend to stem down this line.

First off, what Christmas guide would be complete without the latest Mac gear and therefore the iPad Mini is always going to be on some lists. The more affordable cost of only $369 makes it a no brainer for anyone who doesn't already have an iPad.

Next ...

Bloomberg reports Richard Williamson was fired from Apple this morning by Eddy Cue. Williamson had managerial oversight of the iOS 6 Maps team, and we all know how well that turned out. But more interestingly, this saga reveals two things: why didn't this firing happen earlier, such as when Forstall ...

The following is a list of both things I have and can recommend, and also some things I'd like to have (some of which are just dreaming of course, but what the hell). Hope they give you some good ideas for both your shopping list and your own wish list! Items are listed are in order of cheapest to most expensive, and each heading links to some of the cheapest prices I've found for each item ... but I'd still recommend shopping around!

Merry Christmas MacTalk! ...

Qantas are the second Australian airline to bring support for Passbook boarding passes. Users can follow the normal mobile check in process, and at the end they'll be given the option to add their boarding pass to Passbook — colour coded to match your Qantas frequent flyer status.

A piece ...

Disclaimer: Let me make it clear up front that you should by no means attempt this without the consent and/or assistance of your in house IT Department. Neither myself nor MacTalk will be held responsible for you going it alone and getting yourself into trouble with IT

If you're like me, you love your MacBook Air/Pro dearly, you use it every single day at home and you wish desperately that you could use it at work as well...but there are a bunch of Windows only applications and a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) or Managed Operating Environment (MOE) that your employer requires you to use.

Sure you could manually ...

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