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.