Time does fly. It’s hard to believe that we’re saying goodbye to yet another year. 2012 saw its fair share of interesting events from major hurricanes, popular videos and a big miss on that “end of the world” thing. Thankfully, we’re all still here so I can properly wrap up the year on Blogging Calwell (and yes, I did forget to do it last year). Change was in the air too; we went through a major domain and platform shift from Blogger to WordPress as well as a move to reduce the overall noise on this blog. We do hope you like how things are evolving as the work continues.

The 10 most popular posts of 2012

It’s hard to tell what this say about your needs, good reader. You clearly have a hunger for Apple related articles with a healthy interest in Windows and Microsoft software. Interestingly too, reviews are popular. Even if the topic of review is not necessarily newly released product, you’re interested in our thoughts on it. I’m hearing you loud and clear at Blogging Calwell and are working hard to get our hands on new stuff I can review.

1. The EASY way to move your Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac license between computers – This process came about when transferring data between two Macbook Air machines early in the year. I knew I wanted to find a way to layout all the specifics in an easy-to-follow way, and what you see is the result. By far the most popular article this year.

2. Windows 8: Connecting to a domain – When access to a beta was possible with Windows 8, one of the first things I wanted to see was  how it handled domain connections and authentication. I knew this was going to be interesting – what with promises of cloud integration – that I wanted to go over the process and describe it in some detail.

3. Upgrade an already jailbroken iOS device from 5.01 to 5.1.1 – In the short window of time that offered the release of a new iOS jailbreak and most users running version 5.0.1 of the product – I could tell that there weren’t allot of details about how to actually upgrade your iPhone or iPad. Sensing the gap, I thought you might like to see my experiences, and it seemed that you did.

4. Windows 8: File History is the new, new Volume Shadow Copy – While working on Windows 8 in March, I came across an interesting omission. The lack of Shadow Copy functions was odd since it is one of Microsoft’s bigger innovations in Windows. As looked closer, File History had become what the remnants of Shadow Copy was, and I had to write about it.

5. iPhone 5 on WIND Mobile – is it time? – With WIND recently saying that the iPhone “isn’t a factor” for them, it’s a disappointment to still be a customer, and have no option for the iPhone. WIND would seem to have some of the infrastructure to support this, but has done little to try. I went over what seemed possible at the time.

6. Recover deleted files from a QNAP NAS – Culled directly from a customer experience. I thought it would be useful to go over the process and show you how it worked in my case. File recovery is always tricky, and more so when talking about a NAS. What seemed fairly imposing in the start wasn’t all that bad.

7. BitCasa: A review – This is a post that was on hold for some time. Given that I was able to test the product, but was embargoed until a full release was available, I had to wait for what seemed like forever. I was excited to get my thoughts out there on this new and very interesting cloud storage service.

8. Review: Huawei E583C Mobile 3G Router – For a short time, I decided to test an iPhone using only data access. While testing that phone, I exclusively used this Huawei hotspot wherever WiFi wasn’t available.

9. THAT great tool: Double Commander – a file manager for Mac OSX – back in June, I was seriously frustrated looking for a suitable Total Commander counterpart on OS X. While a tool of that power is simply not available outside of running a virtual machine, I did find the tool Double Commander a very capable one and wanted to show you. The series of “THAT great tool” posts continues to expand.

10. Review: Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E530 – The sheer volume of Lenovo laptops that have flooded the local market made me want to write about our experiences with them. We’ll be doing more of these, so stay tuned.

And, with that, another year is about to end. I hope you have a wonderful and joyful holiday season and a great and prosperous New Year. Thank you for reading in 2012 and I’ll see you in 2013.