Smart Phone, Slow User

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Apr 16, 2012

Last week I had another one of those Duhreka! moments; a combination of Eureka!, I found it, and Duh!, it should have been obvious, you moron.

Myrl had gone back to Texas for a week on a family matter, and she left me a list of phone numbers where she could be reached. I started creating a group of temporary Address Book entries for the hotels and other places that weren’t already in my Contacts, when I realized there was a much simpler way.

Taming the Lion: Changing App and Window Auto-Reopen Behavior

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Mar 20, 2012

Lion’s default behavior of reopening all apps and windows that were open when you shut down is often very handy. For instance if you have to restart because of a problem, log out temporarily for privacy purposes, or anytime you want to pick up right where you left off after shutting down.

Sometimes, though, I have a dozen apps and dozens of windows open and I don’t want to wait for what seems like hours until everything is reopened when restarting, especially on my older, slower MacBook Air. Here are some solutions, other than manually closing each app before restarting.

Moving Movies

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Mar 15, 2012

Some of the most moving movies I can recall include Schindler’s List, Il Postino, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Sophie’s Choice, The Deer Hunter, Doctor Zhivago, Babette’s Feast, The Pianist, Forrest Gump, The Pawnbroker, Children of a Lesser God, Cinema Paradiso, Amadeus, Das Boot, Chariots of Fire, Door to Door, Sweet Land, Rabbit-Proof Fence, and The World’s Fastest Indian.

You might check these out if you haven’t seen some of them, but that’s not my main purpose, which is to talk about stuff at least tangentially related to Apple. If you are familiar with my quirky sense of humor you may have guessed that the title is a double entendre. (Not the usual risqué one, though.) What I really want to talk about is moving a movie rental in iTunes to a different computer, iPad, iPod, or iPhone.

Time (Machine) Warp

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Mar 11, 2012

Time machine provides a great automatic backup for your entire computer, from which you can recover and restore individual files, folders, or even your entire hard drive. Once in while, though, Time Machine seems to slip through some sort of time warp and come out the other side leaving the current backup in the past and starting a whole new backup.

Mostly this occurs when you change hard drives, get a new computer or update OS X to a new version, but very occasionally it just happens.

Style versus Substance

Posted by Doug Gentry on Dec 7, 2011

When web sites first starting popping up in the 1990s, they were mostly text, with some formatting and styling. Truth be known, many of those first websites were pretty ugly (my own among them.) We could choose colors, or make text bold, add a picture, and even (shudder) make words blink. To style our pages we applied formatting instructions to the HTML tags.

For example, if I wanted a sentence to be bold or red I could do this:

<p><b>This part is bold.</b></p>

or

<p><font color="red">This is red</font></p>

The basic approach was to lay out our web page and then apply some styles or formats to it – much like a painter might draw a picture.

World’s Best Spell Checker?

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Dec 3, 2011

Once in a while while I am typing a document in Pages, TextEdit, etc. the spell checker flags a word, but can’t come up with a suggested spelling. Often it is a technical term that is not in its dictionary, and I’m not sure of the spelling either. But I’ve found a much better “spell checker”. Google
Just copy and paste the word into Google’s search box, and you will get a polite message saying something like “Searching for correctword, search for misspelledword instead?” I am amazed at how often Google guesses the correct spelling, even from badly mangled words. It must have an astounding database of common and uncommon misspellings and/or an amazing algorithm for choosing the best result.

Shhh! It’s a Secret.

Posted by Doug Gentry on Nov 19, 2011

We’ve been conditioned to worry about the security of our personal information while surfing the web. Perhaps the most important and effective security practice is to be prudent and sparing when sharing important information.

As web site users and web site owners/developers there are some steps we can take to help safeguard information. Today’s post focuses on the secure, encrypted communication offered by some web sites.

Some Background from the Web User’s Perspective

When we go to a typical web site, like ashmug.com, we are sending a simple message out through the Internet asking to display the ASHMUG web site. The ASHMUG web server sends us back the pictures and text and instructions that construct the page. If there is a simple form on one of the pages, like the form on the Contact Us page, any information we type into that form gets sent back to the server in the same way.

MacKeeper is not a keeper

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Sep 16, 2011

The promise of a total maintenance, anti-virus and backup solution for your Mac in a single app sounds very appealing, but you don’t want or need this app. If you have been lured in by the aggressive, intrusive web ad campaign and have installed MacKeeper, my advice is to uninstall it ASAP. If you are tempted to buy it, don’t.

Cookie Monster

Posted by Doug Gentry on Sep 14, 2011

Go ahead, admit it -  you remember the song… “C is for Cookie, that’s good enough for me.” One of my favorite Sesame Street characters as our children were growing up.

In another use of cookies, a friend exclaimed recently that she had been browsing the Amazon site for some items and later got an email from Amazon suggesting some similar products. Roughly quoting her, “That’s creepy. I felt like I was being stalked.” How did Amazon do this? Through the use of one or more browser cookies, and customer information from logging in. A browser cookie is a little snippet of code that is stored with or near your web browser, usually with a name, a value to go with that name, and an expiration date. Let’s see how this might happen and then turn the tables and ask whether or when cookies might be appropriate on a web site that you produce.

Going Postal

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Aug 20, 2011

The AshMUG-Talk discussion list is one of the best ways to get help with your Mac. You don’t have to wait to talk to someone at the next meeting. However, a recurring complaint from list members is that subscribing to the AshMUG-Talk discussion list adds a lot of email to an already overloaded In Box. There are some easy solutions.

Appleworks vs Numbers Spreadsheet Functions

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Aug 9, 2011

In my last post about converting AppleWorks documents, I mentioned that I hadn’t found a comparison of AW and Numbers spreadsheet functions and how they differed. Well, I decided to take on the task myself. It turned out to be one of those been there, done that, and won’t ever do it again projects, but it will help me convert the rest of my collection of AW spreadsheets, and a few other CompuNerds may also find it useful.

Bricks and Mortar – HTML

Posted by Doug Gentry on Aug 7, 2011

HTML

Web pages have a basic, bricks and mortar, foundation. It’s called HTML – short for HyperText Markup Language.

So, here’s a trivia/history question for fellow Mac enthusiasts. Do you remember an early Mac application called HyperCard? This was pre-Internet, and had some features of web pages as we know them now. The principle feature was that you could link a word or phrase on a card and the user could click on that link and be taken to another card. The only problem was that you had to use the computer where the HyperCard application was running. No one had figured out how to make it run over a network (unless our Alan Oppenheimer had gotten ahead of everyone else when working with AppleTalk.) I actually created a simple marketing game/simulation in HyperCard, and used it for marketing training for Kaiser Permanente reps in the late 1980s. (but I digress….)

Beware the Fruit-Eating Lion

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Aug 6, 2011

If you are about to switch to OS 7 Lion, you probably are aware that the old PowerPC applications will no longer run. One of the most important is Quicken 2007 or earlier. There has been lots of discussion about this on the web, and a quick Google search will bring up many suggestions for dealing with this problem.

Another problem for those of us who have been with the Mac since before about 2007 is AppleWorks. This was a great word processor, database, drawing, painting and spreadsheet application which will also no longer run under Lion (it even had some problems with Snow Leopard). Here are some tips for converting AppleWorks documents you want to keep. Do it before updating to Lion, because you will need to use AppleWorks for some of the conversions, and it will take some time.

Sound in the Round

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Aug 5, 2011

We have a very pleasant patio on the banks of Ashland creek about 80 feet from the house, and I’ve often thought I would like to have music down there. I have some wired speakers on the back deck through which I can play iTunes music, but if I cranked these up so they could be heard down by the creek I’m sure I would hear about it from the neighbors.

There are lots of wireless speaker systems on the market, but most are pretty expensive and many also need 110V power. While browsing on Amazon a while back, I came across this odd speaker (Avtek NXG Wireless Indoor/Outdoor Speaker System) that looks like a cross between a Shop-Vac and a stubby rocket. Classic American Kitsch school of design, complete with blue LED “ambience lighting” which thankfully doesn’t pulse with the music. The speaker is only about a foot high, and the speaker and/or the transmitting unit can be powered either by 110V or by batteries, making it extremely portable. At less than $50, I couldn’t resist.

Home Sweet Home

Posted by Doug Gentry on Aug 1, 2011

So, I’m sitting on a dock in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York state, with my laptop and a semi-reliable wireless connection from a cabin up the hill. I type in ashmug.com in Firefox, and in seconds our nifty web site appears on my computer screen. If we think about it, that’s a pretty extraordinary accomplishment – an instruction sent from one corner of the country that ultimately finds its way to another corner and back again. For our inaugural post on web and related topics, let’s explore the whole idea of Internet addresses and domains. We’ll use ASHMUG.com as an example.

The Elephant in the Traveling Circus

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Jul 11, 2011

Most of the stuff in the digital traveling circus that accompanies us on trips is quite small. Maybe not Flea Circus size, but pretty portable; a MacBook Air, iPhone, iPod and iPad2. The exception is the circus elephant, the printer.

So why keep the elephant in the act? Well, for carrying around information, and especially for sharing it, the printed page is great. You can get a lot of information on a 0.013 oz sheet of paper. It’s eminently portable and the battery life is stupendous.

Coping with Oregonophilia

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Jun 12, 2011

I know what some of you are thinking, and it’s not that kind of disease. It’s also not an inordinate fondness for a particular Mediterranean herb. That’s Oreganophila.

I was first afflicted upon moving from the frozen tundra of Upper Michigan to go to grad school at OSU in Corvallis in the early 1960s. Within a short time I fell in love with Oregon. The mountains, forests, deserts, coast, wildlife and people. Even the politicians: socially liberal and enlightened, fiscally conservative. A species which is apparently now extinct. I intended to spend the rest of my life here, but took a short career path detour of 30 years through south Texas. Retirement brought me back.

Defiled in Cupertino

Posted by Peter DeGroot on Jun 10, 2011

No, this isn’t the title of some steamy romance novel set in silicon valley.

What I am talking about is the notion of literally De-Filing the Mac operating system. Doing away with the File System, the familiar folders and sub folders and Finder that are the users window into the Hierarchical File System that Apple developed and introduced with the Mac.

iPhone Mail Sync Styncs

Posted by Peter DeGroot on May 29, 2011

I know this is Heresy. They are probably getting the pitchforks and torches out in Cupertino as we speak, but I’m going to turn my curmudgeonly focus on two annoying iDevice (iPhone, iPad, Ipod Touch) Mail Sync problems.

First problem. Sent messages not synced. We are in the midst of a real estate transaction. I had sent an email to the mortgage broker with our homeowner’s insurance information from my iPhone. The next day, at my iMac, I received an email request from the title company for the same information. OK, I’ll just go to the Sent folder, find the previous message and re-send it to the title company. Except that it’s not there. The only place it is is in the Sent folder in the .Mac account on the iPhone, which isn’t synced back to any other devices. I had to go hunt down my iPhone and re-send it from there.

MacAlzheimers and the Magic Memory Pill

Posted by Peter DeGroot on May 20, 2011

On Tuesday one of my LaCie external hard drives died. I noticed there were fewer hard drive icons on my desktop (I have 4 external drives and a total of 7 partitions among them) but for the life of me, I couldn’t even remember what the two missing partitions were called, much less what data were on them. I know I have all the important stuff backed up, but it bugged me that I didn’t have the faintest idea of what was gone and what I needed to restore from my backups when I replaced the hard drive.

After repairing and rebooting my personal CPU (Cranial Processing Unit) using the tried and true Take-A-Nap app, I finally remembered what the partitions were and what was on them.