appleJAC Users Group

Get the World's First Look at Leopard

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is the once a year chance  for Apple developers to dive deep into a full range of the Mac OS X technologies.  This year, that includes preview coverage of Mac OS X Leopard. There are over 100 sessions and more than 35 labs spanning five technical tracks: Application Technologies, Graphics and Media, Development Tools, OS Foundations, Information Technologies. More than 175 sessions and labs are planned in all.

So what does that mean to you?

Generally, Apple makes product announcements during the conference that set the stage for the remaining part of the year.  Since Apple stopped the summer MacWorld Expo conference, this is it's opportunity to let us know the direction of the product line for the all important Christmas shopping season.  If rumors have it right, we will see the first showing of Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard  Also rumors say we may see introduction of the final PowerPC to Intel conversion, the PowerMac (Likely to be called the MacPro).

So keep your eyes open on the morning of August 7th for Possible Exciting Apple news.  It is likely to be an exciting ride.

Make Your Own vCard

 

I know, I know, you want to be all trendy and hip, so here's how to make your own vCard. (Note: the first step in being trendy and hip is to not use the word hip.) Here's how: set up your own personal card the way you want it, and then choose Card > Make This My Card. This will change the icon for your personal contact card to a silhouette of a person rather than a square photo icon, letting you know which card is "your card."

  If you've got a lot of contacts and want to get to your card fast, choose Card > Go To My Card.

If you want to send your card to somebody via email (to show you're trendy -- and that other thing), choose Card > Go To My Card and then File > Export vCard. Save your vCard file someplace convenient for quick access (mine is on my desktop), and send it as an attachment to any email message.

You can also drag and drop your card's silhouette icon right from Address Book onto Apple's Mail icon in the Dock; this opens a New Message window with your vCard attached.

from Scott Kelby's Mac OS X Killer Tips via MacWorld Magazine

Just Like Keycaps

Just discovered a way to find characters like we used to do using Keycaps. If you're running 10.3.x or later, you need to open System Preferences, select "International," and click the "Input Menu" tab, check "Character Palette" and/or "Keyboard Viewer," and check "Show input menu in menu bar." Then a little flag will appear in your menu bar. You can open the Keyboard Viewer from it and see characters and the associated keys. Hold down Option and other modifier keys to see what the selected font will make.  

from Lynn Rybarczyk at Hints and Tips

iPhoto: Rebuilding the iPhoto Library

iPhoto has an undocumented feature that allows you rebuild the currently selected iPhoto library. Sometimes rebuilding the library can make it readable if it seems to be unreadable, has multiple missing photos, or if there are other issues related to reading the iPhoto library structure.

iPhoto 4 or later allows you to rebuild the active iPhoto Library. This might be useful if the library has missing photos, appears to be unreadable, or exhibits other issues that seem related to the iPhoto library structure.

Warning: Because some data or photos may not be recovered during the rebuild, you should back up your existing iPhoto Library folder, which is located in your Pictures folder, before using the rebuild feature.

You will need free space on your startup disk (usually "Macintosh HD") equal to the size of the current iPhoto Library in order to perform the rebuild. Otherwise the rebuild will not complete.

To rebuild the iPhoto library:

1) Make a backup of the folder ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library in the Finder, and set it aside.
2) Quit iPhoto if it is open.
3) For iPhoto 4.0.3 or earlier: Hold down the Shift and Option keys on the keyboard.
For iPhoto 5.0 or later: Hold down the Command and Option keys on the keyboard.
4) Open iPhoto.
5) Keep the keys held down until you are prompted to rebuild the library.
6) Click Yes.

iPhoto will try to rebuild the iPhoto library. This can take several minutes, depending on its size.

Use these guidelines:

Select the option(s) for thumbnails if only the thumbnails are malfunctioning (grey or blank).
Select the option to Rebuild the iPhoto Library database if iPhoto unexpectedly quits when launched, or does not get past loading photos.
Select the option to recover orphaned photos if photos appear to be missing from the iPhoto library.
If there was an issue with album data or with the iPhoto Library file itself, then some of the albums may appear blank after rebuilding the library. Look in the main Library in the source list of the iPhoto -- the photos are likely still there. If so, drag the photos to their corresponding albums to re-add them.

Still didn't help.... Continue reading

How do I get rid of my real old Computer?

I can't count on both hands the number of times people have asked me in the last few months what to do with an old computer that is either hopelessly out of date or broken and of no value.

I finally have something to tell them.  I just learned of a place called Mid-Mo. Recycling.  Located at 6104 Brown Station Rd., Columbia, Mo., they seem to be the only local place to get rid of these dinosaurs.  The information I have seen say that the following materials are accepted: Computer monitors, CPUs, printers, televisions, fax machines, telephone switching systems, and mainframe computers from individuals and businesses.

You can contact them at (573) 474-3997 or by email at recycle@socket.net.

I learned about this on the KRCG evening news of all places.

August appleJAC Digest is Ready!

Attention appleJAC members:

The August issue of the appleJAC Digest is ready for you to download. 

Click in the link to the left side of this page under appleJAC Links titled This Month's aJ Digest (Members Only)

Also, don't forget to check out the list of vendor offers from the month located in the same place.

The next meeting is scheduled for August 1st at 6pm and will be held at North Jefferson City Park. This is the annual appleJAC Picnic. We furnish the meat, you bring a dish, we all share the fun.

Remember the appleJAC picnic is a family event.  Bring the family, we will make sure we are not too geek like.

Is Someone using my Email Address?

Q: A friend of mine told me that she was getting Spam emails from me and that someone might be using my email address.

A: This sounds like a serious case of virus infection. Not necessarily in yours or your friends computer but someone else who just happens to have your e-mail address, as well as your friends, in the typical mail application address list. These virii/worms/whatever often tend to mine the infected computer for things that look like e-mail addresses and then sends mail to these people while at the same time spoofing the return address as another name on the list. This e-mail would also carry a copy of the worm/virus, that if opened, would infect the next victim's computer. Using the hypothesis that one name on the list might be familiar to another name on the list increases the chance it would get opened.

What to do about it? There isn't much you can do. One of your friends has an infected Windows machine. I don't think this stuff propagates through the Mac platform. Which friend? Hard to say. If one of your e-mail acquaintances happens to complain of a suddenly slow computer, they might be the one.

Thanks to appleJAC Digest Editor Bruce Heerboth for the great answer.  This is another reason that "Friends don't let friends use Windows"....

Shouldn't all Remotes be RF?

Many people with Apples newer machines find themselves with an Apple Remote that works great with Front Row.  But what if you use your machine in a location where you cannot point directly at the IR sensor?   

IR (Infrared) Remotes require the line of site and often have a range of less than 10 feet.  RF (Radio Frequency) remotes can see through walls and have a much longer range.

The RF Remote for Front Row from Keyspan, is a sleek and powerful RF remote control designed specifically for use with Apple's Front Row multimedia software. It provides more range, convenience and flexibility than infrared remotes.

The RF Remote for Front Row provides a range of 60 feet or more (two to three times the distance of infrared remotes).  Unlike an infrared remote, this RF remote does not require line of sight to the receiver. This allows you to manage Front Row from more areas within the room or even from other areas of your house.   Since the RF signal works through walls and furniture, you have more flexibility in locating the Macintosh that will be used to run Front Row. For example, you can place a Mac mini inside an entertainment center cabinet or within an AV closet and still easily control Front Row with the remote.

This is an excellent method to control and older Mac that you have enabled Front Row to run on also.  The remote retails for $39 but is widely available for under $30.

Modern Genealogy software for your Mac

MacFamilyTree offers all you would expect from an advanced genealogy application. MacFamilyTree will not only have you creating a crisp and clean overview of all your relations in a swift and stylish manner, but impressive graphics will make you want to put your pedigree on display even more. Extensive printing selections are also offered, as well as the option to publish your family tree on the Internet or burn it directly on CD. MacFamilyTree is entirely based on the Gedcom Standard for the international exchange of genealogical data. All program features make full use of the state-of-the-art graphic capabilities of Mac OS X.

Here is another Mac Only application that is Universal.  There is a free demo available at the companies web site.

A print-copy-scan Powerhouse

In the market for a new printer?  Here is a nice model from Canon that includes scanning and copying at a low cost.

With the versatile PIXMA MP500 Photo All-In-One on your desktop, you'll ask yourself how you ever got along without it. This amazing machine delivers an impressive resolution of up to 9600 x 2400 color for remarkable detail and clarity. Further, the ContrastPLUS 5-color ink system - four dye-based inks and a pigment-based black ink - produces true-life photos with a wide color palette, along with laser-quality text. You won't have to wait long to see your results; a beautiful photo lab quality 4"x 6" borderless photo takes approximately 51 seconds.

The dual paper path allows you to keep photo paper stored in one tray and plain paper in the other - so you can print photos or documents without having to switch paper. You can even print 2 sided reports, saving paper.  With the large 2.5" color LCD viewer you can evaluate your images in beautiful color, then enhance them before printing! Just insert your compatible memory card into a built-in card slot and begin viewing.

The Canon ChromaLife100 system combines the PIXMA MP500 Photo All-In-One's FINE print head technology and newly developed inks with select Canon photo papers, with results rivaling that of many conventional photos. And with the new smart LED ink tanks, your LED lamp flashes when ink is running low, and flashes even faster when nearing empty.

All of this for under $180.  That's a great buy. I particularry like the Canon devices like this one that have seperate ink tanks for each color.

Make your own Business Cards

Whatever your profession or interests, you communicate with people. Do they come back to you after the first meeting? Did you notice that business cards have the ability to bring the memories about the people you met and how that happened?

I'll bet you have some Business Cards don't you?  Now there is an application for you to make your own cards.  Business Card Composer is the complete solution for creating and printing excellent business cards, calling cards and badges.

When can a program like Business Card Composer help you:

• For a trade show you can create custom business cards to reflect special events and promotions (or just put on your booth number).
• Your phone or e-mail changed, and you can't wait until your company makes new cards for you.
• You need to create small runs of cards for temporary staff.
• You have several jobs and want to have a separate card for each.
• You want to create a nice card with your phone and e-mail to give to the people you meet.

Best of all, it is drop dead easy to use.  It includes all the standard card templates too.  Their website has a nice full featured demo.

Let Automator do it for you

Don’t let dragging and dropping become a drag. If you’re always doing the same things, stop right now — and let Automator take over the tedium. Your very own robot loves to say “I can do that.”

You can easily automate tasks such as renaming a large group of files, resizing dozens of images to fit an iPhoto slideshow or creating iCal birthday events using Address Book contacts, then repeat those tasks again and again. Simple and easy-to-understand application Actions are the building blocks, so you don’t have to write any code. Each Action has all of the options and settings you need. You don’t have to work hard to figure out how to make it work.

You can even incorporate Tiger’s new Spotlight search into Workflows to identify items automatically. Simply drag the Finder Action into your Workflow, click “Run” and powerful Spotlight search technology takes over to find files, disks, folders or items that match whatever criteria you choose.

Apple was written many of these for you.  Just go to Apple's Automator Actions site and download some that interest you.

The definitive iLife reference, completely updated for iLife '06

The Macintosh iLife '06 is the latest edition of the top-selling book on iLife. It's a beautiful, full-color book containing 400 pages of tutorials, tips, and techniques for iTunes, iPod, iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb.

  The book devotes a separate section to each facet of iLife: iTunes and iPod for listening to music; iPhoto for photography; iMovie HD for video editing; iDVD for creating DVD-Video discs; GarageBand for making your own music and podcasts; and iWeb for creating Web sites.       

Each section is a series of two-page spreads, and each spread is a self-contained reference that covers one topic. Each spread has its own design, with sidebars, glossaries, and illustrations supplementing the main text.

Best yet, it is quite inexpensive. You can buy from Amazon for just $22.04

Quick iDVD Tip

In iDVD 6, your slideshows are no longer limited to 99 images. You can now have up to 9,801 images in a slideshow. If you add a slideshow to your iDVD project with more than 99 images and an audio track, you may notice that the audio drops out very briefly after the 99th slide on your burned DVD.

That's alot of pictures.  In fact, that may be reason enough to get iLive 06.

You can convert a Boot Camp drive to a Parallels Volume

Yes, you read correctly. It works but it is a painful process.

This tip was pointed out by Jason Piper...

The challenges are as follows:
1. Backup your Boot Camp partition and convert it into a VM .hdd file.
2. Repair your Windows install so that it can work under the significant hardware change

The process is as follows:
1. Boot on Windows and clone your drive (I used the evaluation version of Snapshop
1.1. You will need lots of disk space for this. In my case I had to save the snapshop files on my mac partition (through MacDrive)
1.2. This snapshot file will have to be made available to a Parallels VM so put is somewhere you can share it through Parallels Shared Folders.
2. Create a new virtual machine in Parallels and install Windows on it. Once it boots, install Snapshop.
2.1 Configure "Shared Folders" to make your snapshop files available to your new VM.
3. Create a new HD for your newly created virtual machine. Make sure it is as big (or bigger) than your Boot Camp partition.
4. Configure the new drive within Windows. For XP, instructions are available here: http://blog.kevindonahue.com/archive...tall_addit.php
5. Once your new virtual drive is available, open Snapshop and restore your Boot Camp cloned drived onto your 2nd hard drive.
6. Create a new Parallels VM that will use your virtual HD that now contains your restored Boot Camp partition.
7. You are not out of the wood yet... If you try to boot the new VM, it won't work. You need to boot from your Windows install CD and and enter the repair console to repair your Boot.ini file. Instructions on how to do this are here (follow method 2): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314477/
8. After doing this, my install still didn't boot (even safe mode didn't work - boot freezed after loading the Mup.sys driver) so I had to boot (again) from the windows install CD, select setup and repair my windows install as per the following instructions: http://www.theeldergeek.com/replace_motherboard.htm
9. Reboot (again) your new VM, install Parallels tools
10. Now if you want to get rid of the Windows selection screen at boot time, you will need to edit your boot.ini file to remove the entry that links to your boot camp partition. Instructions on how to do this are here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022/EN-US/. In my case, all I had to do was to delete the last line.
11. Now you probably open the Add/Remove programs control panel and remove the Mac drivers needed for Boot Camp.

After going through all of this, you will have to reinstall all the windows updates you installed in Boot Camp (the Repair process reverts to the original Windows version) but you should have all your data, applications and settings intact. In my case, everything worked.

Even more details at MacOSHints.

Trouble with your iPod.... Reset it.

Learn how to reset or restart iPod following a freeze. Here's a tip, check out this helpful movie.

Important: If your iPod is frozen or won't turn on, it may be because iPod is paused or the Hold switch is in the locked position. If so, a lock symbol appears on the screen. Slide the Hold switch to the unlocked position and check the screen.

If you are using your iPod as a hard drive (disk mode), it is normal for "do not disconnect" to remain on the screen until you are ready to eject the iPod in iTunes or from the Mac OS. To avoid having the iPod freeze learn how to eject and disconnect iPod from your computer.
If your iPod is frozen or won't turn on, the steps to reset it vary by model. You can easily tell which iPod model you have if you're not sure.

To reset an iPod with a Click Wheel, including:
    •    Fifth Generation iPod (also known as iPod with video)
    •    iPod nano
    •    iPod with color display (iPod photo)
    •    iPod (Click Wheel)
    •    iPod mini
    •    iPod mini (Second Generation)

    1.    Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Slide it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
    2.    Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.

If you are having difficulty resetting your iPod, set it on a flat surface. Make sure the finger pressing the Select button is not touching any part of the click wheel. Also make sure that you are pressing the Menu button toward the outside of the click wheel, and not near the center.

If the above steps did not work, try connecting iPod to a power adapter and plug the power adapter into an electrical outlet, or connect iPod to your computer. Make sure the computer is turned on and isn't set to go to sleep.

Want to see the date in the menubar?

This is a great one from MacOSX Hints web site:

Start by opening the International Preferences panel, and clicking the Formats tab.

In the Dates section, click Customize. Click the Show pop-up and select your choice of Short, Medium, etc. Now place the elements you want in the small "work area," by dragging and dropping them from the Date Elements section. Once placed, you can click on some elements to see other options (Wednesday or Wed, for instance). Once you've built the date string you want, click once in the work area, and hit Command-A then Command-C to select the string and copy it. Now click Cancel to close the window without making any changes.

In the Times section, click Customize, and set the Show pop-up to Medium. In the small work area below the pop-up, place the curser where you want the date elements to start, and click to position the cursor. Now hit Command-V to paste the elements you just copied. You can further add characters and spaces to customize the look. If you want to remove an element (i.e. the year), click on it and use the Delete key. Click OK, and you'll see the results in the menubar.

Ever need to look up a word in the Dictionary?

In Tiger you’ll have full access to both the New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd Edition) and the Oxford American Writers Thesaurus (1st Edition).

Using them to find a definition or synonym is as easy as typing in the search field. If a single definition matches your word, you are taken immediately to that word. If multiple words match, you are shown a list of candidates.

You can navigate through lists of definitions using forward and backward arrows and there are additional controls that let you increase or decrease font size.

The dictionary window includes a variety of useful features:
• Sections that can be collapsed or expanded.
• Definitions listed in order of common use.
• Illustrations included with many entries.
• Phrases showing the word in popular contexts.
• Derivatives and origins.

You can get to the Dictionary three ways: directly from your Applications folder, through an easy-access Dashboard widget, or by a super-convenient panel you call call up directly from Mac OS X applications.

Is Safari running slow or acting funny?

Many people don't realize the junk that gets written to disk when you are browsing the web with Safari.  Sometimes, when Safari acts up, it is a good idea to clean that junk up.  While I consider this a rather extreme thing to do, it nearly always cleans uo Safari problems.  A simple and usually quite effective thing to do is to restore Safari to like-new performance by resetting Safari.  This will clear Safari's cache and other gunk:

Choose "Reset Safari" from the Safari menu and click "Reset."

Apple describes it in one of their help documents.

Note. Resetting Safari clears the history, empties the cache, clears the Downloads window, and removes all cookies. It also removes any saved user names and passwords or other AutoFill data and clears Google search entries. I'm also told that resetting Safari alters your keychain and
bookmarks. For this reason you may want to make copies of the files: ~/Library/Cookies/,
~/Library/Keychains/, and ~/Library/Safari/ so that those can be restored after
resetting Safari.

This isn't something to do very often, but if Safari is troublesome, it will likely fix it.

Got an iPod... Now you can Scrub

With iPod 1.1 software or later you can scroll backwards or forwards to any point in a song while it is playing. This feature is sometimes called "scrubbing."

From the Now Playing screen, press the Center button. A diamond symbol indicates the point in the song that is selected.   Use the scroll wheel to go to any point in the song. The diamond symbol moves as you scroll, and the elapsed time and time remaining indicators change.

The song continues playing from the point where you stopped scrolling. You may also press the Center button to continue playing.  This feature is useful if you want to go to a particular part of a song or recording, such as an audiobook.

Tip: You can also press and hold the Fast-forward or Rewind buttons instead of scrolling to go to any point in the song.

Note: Scrubbing is only available from the Now Playing screen.

Get the latest software update for the iPod from Apple's web site or through the software update process.