TekkieBob - All Things Tech!

There are reports all over the Internet about a new Mac Mini to be possibly released at MacWorld.  TUAW is reporting that a new version of the Mini will include an optical drive that can be swapped for a second hard drive.  The housing will look much like the Time Capsule with a "lip" for consealing the optical dive slot and cooling. Whether true or not, I would like to see a few features in a new Mac Mini. More RAM (Of course.) NVIDIA chipset. FW port for external HD My main use for a Mini would be for media.  A Mini on my network using Front Row would be great for movies and TV.  (Sorry, Apple TV.)

Posted in the Apple forums was a question from a user who owns one Mac but has a login for himself and another for his wife.  He wanted to know how to transfer some songs from one library to the other.  Sharing the library was not a viable option for them, so this is what was suggested: Go to your HD in finder. look for the Users folder. There you will find a folder called Shared. Make a new folder there called music or whatever you wish to call it. Now, navigate to your Music folder, open the iTunes folder and there you will see folders with your music, TV shows etc.. COPY the files you wish to the shared folder you made above. Now, log in to you wife's account and open iTunes. Select File>Add to library. Navigate to the shared folder you made (Typically Macintosh HD>Users>Shared>new folder iTunes will add the music! Then to save hard drive space, delete the contents of your shared folder. He reported that this worked just fine, and it may work for you t...

There may be times when you find a website while using Safari and would like to see it in Opera or Firefox. (Developers like to do this to see how pages render on different browsers.) A quick, simple, and easy way to do this is simply to drag the URL from the address bar to the browser on your dock and Viola! The webpage will open in the other browser.  This also works with bookmarks too.  Just open your bookmarks folder and drag the book mark to the other browser.

Do you use Safari as your default web browser? If so, you will like this little tip. Any feed you subscribe to on Safari can be ported to Mail. Click File>Add RSS Feeds and from there get the ones you see in the dialog box from Safari. Of course, you could skip this step by simply choosing Mail as your default RSS feed reader. In Safari, open Preferences and then select RSS tab. Select Mail as your default reader. Now every little orange feed square will open in Mail and your favorite blogs will be up-to-date always!

Many bloggers are using Wordpress for their blogs. Wordpress offers many features for the experienced to the novice. Pre-made style sheets or themes, widgets and plug-in's. If you have a domain and web hosting account, you can download to your server for free. There have been security issues reported, however so be sure it is the platform for you. What do you use? Typepad, Wordpress or perhaps b2evolution? Sent from my iPhone Miphonesuff

Autofill is handy with Mail, but what if Mail keeps putting your buddy's old email address that he doesn't use anymore?  Instead of scrolling down to the right one, it may be time for some simple housekeeping. To clean out old addresses from Mail's autofill do this: Click Window>Previous Recipients.  Then look through the list and delete what you don't need.  If you delete an address that is in your Address Book, no worries, it just removes it from Mail's Previous Recipient list, not Address Book.  Whew!

In a previous post , I discussed the frustration my wife had trying to print address labels with her Mac. She tried using Address Book , Pages and just about anything else she could think of to no avail. Avery DesignPro for Mac was the answer! Here we will explore the basics of the application to help get you started. For full information, see the documentation that is supplied in the help files. The Application As can be seen from the screen shot, there are several options available to you at start-up. At the top are options for different kinds of labels. (Address, shipping, DVD/CD, etc..) You can choose a prepared template or make your own. Search to find the Avery label stock that you have. If you want to print a full page of labels with the same address (for example, your return address) be sure to select All Same On. (See above) It may be easier just to type in by hand for single addresses. When you are ready, print the labels and save your work for next time! If ...

A cluttered desktop.  Thanks to the powerful way Mac OS X manages memory, it is easy to have several applications open at one time. Posting to your blog, listening to iTunes, burning a picture DVD, monitoring your feed reader, etc... Your desktop can become VERY cluttered indeed! How can you keep track of all those programs?  Well, aside from seeing them on you dock, Mac OS X Leopard has two features that allow you see each window open and select the one you wish.  You can even have several desktops further organizing your workflow. Exposé When you want to see hidden windows on your desktop, quick keystroke or even a mouse movement will separate them so you can see them all. As you can see above, three applications can be viewed at once.  Simply click on the one you wish to switch to!  (Of course you can Command-Tab to swich applications, but this allows you to select a different window.)   Spaces Even further in an effort to keep your work organ...

Here's a tip that can help you in many ways. Screenshots. This means that you can take 'pictures' of your computer screen or any part of it. Taking shots of your screen can be very useful. For example, suppose you are trying to help a friend with his Mac. You could take a picture and send it in an email to help him visualize how he can accomplish his task. How to do it. You could use Grab in the Utilities folder, or you could use keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts are quick and easy. Say you want a shot of your entire screen, simply press (all together) Shift-Command(⌘)-3 and Leopard will make a picture file on your desktop that you can modify or send in an email. Like this: The screen shot will be a small file on your desktop like this: You can rename and move the file as you wish, of course too. Another shortcut is ⌘-Shift-4 which will allow you to take a picture of only a portion of your screen. (That is how I captured the picture of the file on the right.) ⌘-Shift-...

Time Machine for Mac OS X Leopard is a feature of the operating system that can save a user so much heartache! Recently, I had the unthinkable happen - a physical hard-drive crash! Ordinarily this would have been the most devastating thing to happen. However, thanks to a recent Time Machine backup on my Time Capsule , I was able to restore my Documents, Applications and settings on my new drive. It was as though nothing happened at all. For those unfamiliar, Time Machine is a feature built into OS X 10.5 that automatically backs up your Mac to an external hard drive every hour. It keeps hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for 30 days, and weekly backups until the disk is full and then deletes the oldest. Has Time Machine for Leopard saved you? Tell me about it!

Mac OSX Tips: Safari 4 beta scores 100/100 on acid3 mactip has a great article reviewing Safari 4 and the Acid3 test. You will recall that we covered Acid3 here in the More Mac blog.

With so many RSS feeds out there in cyber-space, it can be difficult to follow all the blogs and websites that interest you. A news reader (technically, a "feed aggregator") can help you sort it all out. A news reader can "check" the web site's feed to see if there is new content to display. But which news reader is right for you? Basically, there are two types of feed reader: Browser based and stand alone. Browser Based Readers A browser based reader is and Internet web site which allows you to subscribe to and read newsfeeds using your favorite Internet browser. Examples of these are: Google Reader News Gator My Yahoo Bloglines Some of the advantages of these types are (typically) the feeds are not downloaded to your computer, (except perhaps your browser's cache) and therefore do not take up space on your hard drive. Secondly, your activity (read feeds, subscribing, etc.) carries over from device to device. For example, if you mark feeds as read on...

Quicklook - look at file content without opening a program. New with Mac OS X Leopard is a program called Quicklook. This time saving utility enables a user to view the contents of a file without having to open the program used to edit it. For example, say you have a PDF document and want to quickly review its contents. Normally one would have to open Preview in order to see it. Now with Quicklook, one can simply touch the spacebar and the file 'opens' on screen instantly. You can scroll, view in full screen and even move on to the next file without having to open any other program. Accessing Quicklook is easy. In any finder window simply higlight the file and touch the spacebar. Alternatively, just click on the Quicklook icon. (It looks like an eye) Quicklook will open image files, text, PDF, spreadsheets, documents and even movies! Below is a quick video showing Quicklook in action. There are plugins available that allow Quicklook to work with folders and other suppor...

iCal - Keep it all together! Welcome to this fourth installment of our series on productivity . iCal is a calendar program that manages: To-do lists Schedules Events Reminders The video below shows a very basic introduction to iCal and it's features. For an in-depth look at iCal's features, click on "Help" within iCal. Remember, iCal integrates with Address Book, Spotlight and Mail. You can also subscribe to calendars published by others too! Enjoy!

Welcome to this 3rd installment of the Mac Productivity Series. Mail for Mac OS X Mail is a very robust e-mail client. Mail integrates with your Address Book, iChat, iCal, and even Finder smoothly and seamlessly. Some Major features: Smart Mailboxes - These dynamic folders can be configured just about anyway you like. For example, suppose you want to keep track of all email you get from Aunt Dora, but only what she has sent in the past 30 days that you have not yet responded to. Set up a smart mailbox like so: (Picture Smart Mailbox) Now all mail from dear ol' Auntie Dora that you have not had time to reply to is conveniently located in it's own mailbox. This will change automatically as the messages change. Any new messages your dear aunt in your inbox will also show up in this folder. If you reply, that message will no longer be there. If the message is more than 30 days ago, it will disappear from this folder. (The messages will still be in your inbox or where eve...

Address Book. Most Windows users are used to using something like Windows Address Book or Outlook to keep track of contacts. For Mac users, Address Book does this and a whole lot more! Who do you know? Address Book is designed to keep your contacts organized YOUR way. Your business contacts. Your family. Your friends. Keeping them together is a snap with Address Book for Mac. So many people today have several phone numbers, E-mail addresses and even physical addresses. (ie: Home, Work) Address Book allows you to record almost anything about people that you know. You can enter addresses, phone numbers, anniversary dates, E-mail addresses and even the dog's name if you want! Looking at the picture here, you can see that you can add anything you wish to remember about a contact. (All of this is searchable, by the way, in Address Book) You can also import contacts . Using the vCard format or even text formats you can import contacts. Simply click File>Import and you will ...

Alex has commented to the previous post that Spotlight is integrated with Calculator. Here is a screen shot showing how to use it: In this instance 58 x 8 = 464 (using the asterisk as the multiplier symbol) Great tip, Alex!

In this first installment of our 5 part series , we will be discussing Spotlight. Spotlight for Macintosh is designed to help you find ANYTHING in your Mac. Think of it as Google for your computer. How does it work? Spotlight searches your Mac in the background and continually updates an 'index' of any changes or new files it finds. This index can then be used to instantly, as you type, search your Mac for whatever your search terms are. For a technical discussion, please read Wikipedia's article . How can it help me? Spotlight is integrated into Mac OS X and can be used from your desktop, any finder window and using keyboard shortcuts. Look at the top right of your Menu Bar and you will see an icon that looks like a magnifying glass. Click on it and a small search field will come up. Type in any word or phrase. Your Mac will instantly display a list of files and folders sorted by type that match your criteria. Note the picture here. Here the term "Hello"...

Mac OS X Productivity Apple has packed so many features into OS X Leopard that, for many, learning each one and becoming proficient at its use seems an impossible task! Over the course of the next few days, I will present a series of "how-to" posts featuring five Mac OS X Applications that really aid in productivity. They are: Spotlight - if it's in your Mac, you'll find it here! Address Book - People, people, people! Mail - From keeping in touch to keeping it together! iCal - Where am I supposed to be today? Quicklook - See what is in that file now! What you'll learn Each article will feature real-life usage and ideas that are practical. You will learn through screenshots, text and video tutorials how each of these applications can help you organize your work and your life. Of course, we'll try to have fun at the same time! After all, that's why you bought your Mac, right? Stay tuned...

Oh, boy! Camino did NOT do well on Acid3! Here is the version installed on my Mac: 53/100 is the worst score yet in my testing. OK, enough of the Acid3 testing. What is the point? Many web site designers are adopting JavaScript, CSS and other so-called Web 2.0 standards in development of websites. The Acid3 test shows how well a browser performs with these standards. Wikipedia has an excellent article explaining this test as well as test results using various web browsers.

Here is the Opera test.  Performed the best so far.  Interesting.  Any thoughts anyone?

I did an Acid3 test with a few browsers and these are the results I got.  For those unfamiliar, as I understand it, Acid3 is a test to see how compliant a browser is with current standards with the W3C . Browser # 1: Chrome by Google.  Running under Windows Vista Home on my Mac in VMWare. 79/100 Not bad for a new browser.  I'll be curious to see what the Mac version will do when it comes out. Browser #2: Firefox v.3.0.1 Mac OS X 10.5.4 71/100 Not as good as Chrome, but I have a PILE of extensions on Firefox. Browser #3: Safari 3.1.2 Mac OS X 10.5.4 75/100 Better than Firefox but still lower than Chrome. My take is overall they seem to perform about the same but I'll stick with Safari for now.  I use Firefox for much of my web browsing, but Safari is fast becoming a close second. Someday, maybe I'll test Opera too. Cheers!

Oh, boy.  Was my wife frustrated.  She wanted to simply print a sheet of address labels with her Mac.  No templates anywhere it seemed. So I went on a quest. Here is what she wanted to do: Simply print an entire sheet of labels using the same address. Should be a piece of cake, right? WRONG!  Address book does have many templates for printing labels, true, but only one at a time. A good label printing template should do the following: (IMHO) Print any number of different address labels any number of copies. Have the ability to "skip" over used labels so the labels left from previous jobs are not wasted. Be relatively easy to use. In my search for an answer, I came across this blog entry on Tech-Recipes.com that seemed to be the answer. But on further investigation it was a dead end. Why, then, does Address Book leave this feature out.  Ask Mr. Jobs I guess.  There is nothing at all on the Apple forums about the subject that I could find.  Although many were asking! So, what ...

Well, I downloaded Google Chrome, the new browser from Google.  Currently it is only available for M$ Windows XP/Vista, but they are planning Mac and Linux versions soon. Seems to be an OK browser for the 5 minutes I spent with it.  I installed it in Windows Vista running under VMWare on my Mac. Observations: Small download - less than a Megabyte Straightforward GUI - very simple layout Seemed to render pages fairly quickly Pages seemed to render OK.  I did not run the Acid 3 test yet. More when I get a chance to play with it.  I'll also try to post a screencast when I do. Cheers!

Helpful Hints By Giddles!: Hair that shines From my wife's blog...

WOW! That's all I can say for ScreenFlow. Although the product is $99.00 every penny spent is worth it. Everyone who uses a Mac and likes to help other Mac users should investigate the possibility of using this program. One can download a trial version in order to try it out. What does it do? Well, for starters, simply recording EVERYTHING on your screen to show your Mom how to add a new email address to Address Book, or even simply record yourself with your Eyesight camera telling how to use iCal to organize your life. Here are some features I found useful: Screen recording. Video recording. Audio recording. One can record any of the above simultaneously or individually and then combine the result.  The possibilities are endless.  For example, I have many Deaf friends and have found that most video tutorials contain audio commentary.  What I have been able to do with ScreenFlow is record the screen actions and then overlay myself signing the instructions using ASL (American ...

Note: This post has moved to my new blog... MiPhone .  Please check it out and subscribe. A cool iPhone app called Face Melter is really fun to use. The application is available on the App Store through iTunes.

Well, I figure now is as good a time as any to start blogging.  I'm using this to 'test the waters' and see if this can be a good way for me to post things about using my Mac and whatever else I find interesting. So, here we go! My webpage: www.ibizgrow.com