Smart Phone, Slow User
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.
read moreTaming the Lion: Changing App and Window Auto-Reopen Behavior
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.
read moreMoving Movies
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.
read moreTime (Machine) Warp
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.
read moreWorld’s Best Spell Checker?
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.
MacKeeper is not a keeper
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.
Going Postal
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.
read moreAppleworks vs Numbers Spreadsheet Functions
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.
read moreBeware the Fruit-Eating Lion
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.
read moreSound in the Round
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.
The Elephant in the Traveling Circus
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.
read moreCoping with Oregonophilia
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
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.
read moreiPhone Mail Sync Styncs
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.
read moreMacAlzheimers and the Magic Memory Pill
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.
read moreI’ve Scaled Mt. Everest (and it wasn’t easy)
I’ve scaled the printout of an image of it, that is. The reason it wasn’t easy is that there are a couple of annoying problems in the Print Dialog if you are trying to print something scaled to a certain size.
The first is that some applications simply will not allow you to scale the material to be printed there. No Scale option appears in Print Dialog. Pages, Numbers and TextEdit are examples of such applications. At least with Pages and Numbers you can scale the content within the application before printing it. With TextEdit, you are out of luck. Here’s how to pre-scale Pages and Numbers documents.
read moreWine, Whine, Wine
Wine
First I’ll get the Apple-related part of this post out of the way so I can get on with the whining.
Wine Ratings Guide
I’m a wine aficionado, somewhere towards the middle of the scale
and I find the iPhone app Wine Ratings Guide very helpful in shopping for wine, ordering wine in restaurants (there are suggested food pairings) and finding new wines to try.
read moreThe Medium is the Message
And the message is “Macs are way cooler than PCs”. Of course most AshMUGgers are already aware of this, but if you aren’t already convinced, pay attention to movies or TV programs. If a computer is shown, chances are it’s a Mac. In my highly unscientific survey one evening in front of the tube, Macs outnumbered PCs by 7 to 2.
read moreSave $ – Refurbished Macs from Apple
If you want to save some money on your next Mac, consider a certified refurbished unit from Apple. Discounts are typically around 15% but can be over 30% on some items. There is a selection of iMacs, MacBooks, iPods, iPads, Apple TVs, nearly every product that Apple makes except the iPhone, and most are the current model or the one immediately preceding it. These are units that have been returned under warranty and refurbished, both electronically and cosmetically. They are thoroughly tested, and in the case of battery-powered devices, they have a new battery installed. They come with the same one-year warranty as a new product, have the same eligibility for the AppleCare extended warranty and are shipped free.
read moreBento Database may finally “be there”.
Bento, the “inexpensive” and “user friendly” database app is now up to version 4. I recently downloaded a trial version to compare to my current V 3. The good news is that some long-standing bugs have finally been fixed, and two features that users have been requesting from the beginning are finally implemented: label printing (built-in Avery label templates) and the ability to do simple spreadsheet-like calculations on numerical data in the records.
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TidBITS: Apple News for the Rest of Us
- Find Your App, and Keep It Found May 18, 2012
- TextWrangler 4.0.1 May 17, 2012
- External Link: Adam Discusses Mac Security on the Tech Night Owl Live May 16, 2012
Daring Fireball
- Zeldman’s Web Design Manifesto 2012 May 18, 2012
- The Mule Radio iPhone App May 18, 2012
- The Talk Show May 18, 2012