appleJAC Users Group

This month is an All Q&A Meeting

Mark your Calendars! appleJAC Users Group in Jefferson City is hosting a Question and Answer meeting at 7:00pm on May 1 at Immaculate Conception School, Kennedy Hall.

This is a golden opportunity to get your nagging questions answered on Macintosh, iPhone, iPad, or anything Apple-related. This group, that meets monthly, has a wealth of knowledge relating to all things Apple. If it was made by Apple, or connects to an Apple device, we will do our best to answer your questions.

Feel free to bring you computer, phone or tablet along and get those questions you have answered.  Since many people will have questions, you will likely learn about many things you were afraid to ask about. You can ask questions from the floor or write them down and submit them. There are no dumb questions!

You don’t have to be a member to attend, so mark May 1 on your calender and plan to learn more about your Mac, iPhone to iPad.

 

Where are our members?

appleJAC Macintosh Users Group now has over 80 members, mostly in central Missouri (and one in Chicago). A frequently asked question is "where do they all live?".

A new feature has been added to the left-hand sidebar that is updated monthly (below the Swap Shop). When you click on that link, you will see a map with all locations shown (see sample at right). Names pop-up if you click on a location, but addresses and other information is not provided here.

Isn't it fun to see that you are in such good company?

iPhoto: How to burn a CD or DVD with pictures for a Windows-based computer

Ever wanted to send some photos to a friend except they were unfortunate enough to use Windows.  Apple has a great article on how to take photos in iPhoto and export them out to a CD or DVD that a Windows user can read and use.

Read the article on Apple's support website here.

User Question: Which Hard Drive to I choose for backing up my Mac

By George Kopp

Q: With all the choices, which Hard Drive do I choose for backing up my Macintosh with Time Machine?

A: I wish there was a simple answer, but unfortunately there isn’t one.  Choosing a backup drive involves a number of factors that need to be take into account.  Many of these factors depend on the type of machine you have and the size of your original harddisk.  In this article, I am going to look at a number of decision points and attempt to provide some assistance in making that selection.

Internal vs External

Raw drives are drive mechanisms that are sold without a case,   These drives are intended to be installed inside the computer box.  For Mac users, this decision point is simple.  Unless you own a MacPro, there is no room inside any Mac case for an additional internal drive.  External is tha answer.

If you own a Mac Pro, internal drives make good sense.  Internal drives are slightly cheaper and will backup faster since they connect directly to the machine bus.  These drives need to be SATA drives (also called Serial ATA).  They attach to preinstalled sleds in the MacPro very easily.  The only reason for an external drive on a MacPro is to allow for off site storage (ie… take the external drive to another location) or if you have filled all 4 available drive bays inside the MacPro.

Brand

These day, there are many brands of drive available at your local Staples or Best Buy.  The brand of the drive actually has little to do with the quality of the unit.  The actual harddisk mechanism inside the box is likely made by 1 of 3 manufacturers and telling the difference between them is not really important.  It really all boils down to case design, interfaces and price.

Don’t be fooled by vendors that want you to spend more money for either a “Mac” version of a drive or for a “premium” model.  The drive mechanism is likely the same part.  Mac formatted drives are just that, pre formatted for a mac.  That is no big deal because you can easily reformat a PC formatted drive on the Mac.  In fact, thime machine recognizes a new drive plugged in and asks to reformat it if it is a PC model.  Don’t pay extra for this formatting alone.

Also don’t pay extra for backup software.  Time Machine, which is a builtin feature of MacOS 10.5 Leopard is better than any of these backup solutions that ship with new drives.  Only consider backup software if you are using 10.4 or older and in my opininon, your money is better spent upgrading to Leopard to do your backups if your machine will handle it.

All that said, I do have a favorite brand.  Western Digital makes fair priced external drives that work very well.  There are a number of models available and best of all, you can get them locally at the Best Buy of Staples store.  When I recommend a drive, I choose a Western Digital.

Desktop vs Portable drive

Either a desktop or portable drive will work fine.  Portable drives are usually smaller, have less capacity, and cost more.  If you are using a desktop Mac, purchase a desktop drive.  There is little reason to spend the extra for the portable one.  If however you are using a laptop, you may want to still purchase a desktop drive.

Desktop drives are usually made from a more available, more reliable and larger mechanism.  These drives usually use a 3 ½” drive mechanism.  These drives are available in larger sizes and at less cost.  Portable drives use a 2 ½” mechanism just like those used in laptops.  These are smaller, have less capacity, use less power, but cost more.

One important consideration is that a Desktop drive will need to be plugged into electricity while a portable drive usually is self powered from the USB or the Firewire bus.  This is nice for travel since you don’t have to plug it in to power, just the computer.

If you own a laptop, but use it quite a bit in one place, a desktop drive is likely a better solution.  If you want a backup drive that can travel with you, choose a portable drive for that application.  

Size

My recommendation is to think of the future and purchase a drive as large as you can afford.  You will be amazed at how data accumulates and how fast you fill the drive you have.  Raw drive mechanisms are available as large as 2Tb today.  External desktop drives are available that large also but the real sweet spot here today is the 1Tb drive.  Portable drives are available as large as 500Gb with their sweet spot being at the 300Gb level.

Time machine is very smart.  It will use all the space you give it and continue to keep copies of data from the past.  The general thing to remember is always select a drive twice the size of the internal drive you want to backup if you can.  This way you have plenty of space for multiple backups in time machine.  This gives you the most flexibility.

Interface (ports)

Drive makers, including Western Digital make many models.  One of the many considerations for drive pricing is the type of interface ports the drive has.  Some of the common interfaces you’ll see are:

USB – all drives these days include USB 2.0.  For many of the lower price drives, that may be the only interface they include.

Firewire – In past years, I would have always recommended that you use Firewire.  There are many technical reasons for this but in general Firewire is always faster to backup than USB.  Firewire has two variants, 400 and 800.  Firewire 400 ports add a slight cost the drives.  Most drives with Firewire 800 ports are considered premium.  Theoretically, firewire 800 is twice as fast as Firewire 400 but practically, the difference is less than 20%.  Firewire 800 ports work as Firewire 400 ports also, you just need a 800 to 400 cable.

These days, Apple seems a little unsure of Firewires future.  New hardware has gone to Firewire 800 over 400, reduced the number of ports to a single port, and deemphasized it’s use.  Some Macs like the new Macbooks and Macbook Air do not have Firewire at all.

eSATA – External SATA.  SATA is the native interface od all of todays drives.  The External version of this is called eSATA.  This port is expected to be used in future Macs but no Mac today can use it.

Ethernet – This port allows a drive to work connected directly to an Ethernet network.  It is technically called Network Accessible Storage or NAS.  This is what apple does in the time capsule (a great but more expensive backup unit).  Having this port allows a drive to hang on a network rather than be connected to a machine.  But, it is important to note, these drives are not compatible with Time Machine unless you use the Apple Time Capsule.  If you need some extra traditional storage that you may want to share, this is a good option but for Time Machine, it is not a consideration.

So what do you get?  My recommendation here is to get a drive that has Firewire 400 and USB.  If cost is a major issue, USB only drives are fine but if you have a Firewire port on your computer, backups are faster with Firewire.

Price

Drive prices have dropped a lot lately.  Price should be one of the last things to think about.  My recommendation is to purchase drives near the sweet pricing spots I described above.  These are the ones in the Sunday circulars. Again, I recommend you purchase a drive as large as you can afford. Up to the sweet spot.  Larger drives above the sweet spot size will cost a lot more and are usually not a good choice unless you have a great deal to backup.  These larger drives will become tomorrow’s sweet spot but if you need a drive today, don’t spend the extra money.

What will it cost?  Today, in February 2009, an 1 Tb USB external drive costs between $109 and $199 depending on features and sales.

Conclusions

All this is probably much more than you want to know about backup drives.  These conclusions will be my opinions of what you should get in a nutshell:

•    Consider as a first choice a Western Digital drive
•    Get a desktop Model unless you need to backup your laptop on the road
•    Size the drive a twice the size of your internal drive minimum
•    Get a drive with a Firewire Port if the cost is not too much more and your Mac supports it
•    Watch the weekly circulars.  Drives are always on sale.

 

Creating a Slide Show for Windows Users

Q: I need help with is a slide show.  I have a batch of genealogy photos I want to put on a DVD so that other people to whom I give the DVD, Windows users included, will be able to see the slides, with them controlling the slides, that is, clicking to go to the next one.  Music would be nice.  I also want to put captions on each of the slides.

A: I have a couple of options for you.  One is low tech and the other is state of the art.

First Option

Create the presentation in whatever you are comfortable in.  Powerpoint, Keynote, iPhoto,.... whatever makes sense to you.  Then Print the document to a PDF file.  Acrobat is universal and plays exactly the same on Macs or PCs.  Version 7 or higher even lets you "play" the document as a presentation.  Low tech, but effective.

Second Option

Prepare the slides as an iPhoto Slideshow.  Select the images, add music, and then import this into iDVD and make a DVD of it.  The DVD gives the added benefit of being able to add music and make it look very professional.  It also allow it to be played on any DVD player, even without a computer.  If you want t make it even fancier, go from iPhoto to iMovie first and add captions, transitions, and music there, then take it to iDVD to burn it.

Member Question on Keyboard Shortcuts

Q: Is there any key on the macbook keyboard that performs this function of deleting material to the right of the cursor?

A: if you use the Function (fn) and "delete" key combination, you get a Right Delete.

Q: Is there any place that would have such keyboard information?

A: for a great program DoubleCommand to reassign your "Enter" key to Right Delete, try this link.

in fact, there are almost 10,000 cool tips and hints at Macosxhints which are searchable with keywords.

Thanks to appleJAC Board Member Tom Piper for the answers.

Edit an Album at a time in iTunes

Q: When I copy and put in by hand the album art in iTunes, is there any way to do it for an entire album?  I am currently putting the album art, that is not available at iTunes store, in one cut at a time.

A: In iTunes, select all the songs in the album you want to add art for.  Press Command-I (for get info.)  iTunes will ask if you really want to edit all of these together, click Yes.  Now you will see a panel that lets you make a change to all the songs information at the same time.  Just click the box next to the Album Cover box, past in the cover and press OK.

Question on Mounting a Drive

Q: I inadvertently put one of my backup drives off line.  I tried to find a way to put it on line again but ended up just restarting.  Is there some other easier way, without rebooting that I'm missing?

A: Go to Disk Utility, select the offline drive and press the Mount button.

Question on Photos for a Screen Saver

Q: In system preferences, when I work on the desktop photo, if I select something from the albums above the line I can use the option to change it every 30 minutes, although then the photos seem distorted to me.  But if I choose one of the random iPhoto albums that are below the line, it won't let me use the automatic change every 30 minutes feature.  Why?  Any reason that the photos would be distorted?

First off, if you have selected fit to screen, it is going to stretch the photo to fill the screen.  If the relative ratio of width to height is different from 16:9., one side gets stretched too much.

In iPhoto, you cannot make them change over time.  But if you go to iPhoto and export the same photos to a folder, place the folder in the pictures folder of your user, and select it, it will let it change.  This is because it doesn't really access iPhoto if you choose one of the photos from there. It copies it out.   Choosing a group that changes would require iPhoto to export them all and it will not do that automatically.  That is why you need to help it a little.

Accessing my iDisk on .Mac

Q:  Can I give windows users access to the public forder on my iDisk?

A:  Sure, all it takes is the right URL for any web browser.  The general link is as follows:

"http://homepage.mac.com/member_name/.Public/filename"

just use your member name to replace the member_name portion and use the name of the file you want them to see to replace filename.  Files and folders that are in folders on your iDisk other than the Sites folder must have the top-level folder name, preceded by a period, and appended to the URL prefix.

The only the following folders can be accessed are:

• Music
• Movies
• Pictures
• Public
• Sites

But remember, if you give someone access to a folder other than Public, they need to have your password so the best option is to put the files you want to share in the Public folder.

Locked Files

Q: While doing my backup this am got a message that a certain file could not be backed up because a jpg file on it was "locked." What does that mean?  Could access the file with no trouble.  How do I change that?

A: If you do a get info on the file, you should be able to uncheck the locked check box.

Delete my Mail Attachments

Q: How can I delete attachments without deleting the messages themselves?

A: Select the messages in question, then go to Message>Remove attachments. This will create a duplicate copy of the message without attachments. The original message, including attachments, will be marked for deletion or moved to the trash mailbox, depending on your settings. Once you purge your messages or empty your trash, the attachments are not recoverable.

Where's my Mail?

Q: I use an IMAP mail server. Where are my Apple Mail attachments stored?

A: They are stored on the mail server and also cached on your computer with messages in your Inbox (INBOX.imapmbox). This is different from Eudora, which stores attachments in your Attachments folder, separate from the messages. Apple Mail’s Inbox is stored in your home directory, in this location: Library>Mail>IMAPusername @yourmailserver>INBOX.imapmbox (where username is your username and yourmailserver is your mail server’s hostname, such as po14.mit.edu).

If you’ve created subfolders on the IMAP mail server, their .imapmbox files can be found in the INBOX folder, in the same location as your INBOX.imapmbox file.

What is an RSS Feed?

Q: What is an RSS Feed?

A: RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

In Savari, when you see the RSS icon in the link bar of the browser, press the icon and see the RSS feed for the site.  Then you can save the feed as a bookmark to get back to it quickly.

Question on Hard Drive Enclosurers

Q:I plan to buy a hard disk enclosure along with a hard disk to attach to a laptop and I have a few questions.

1. Do I need a an IDE cable to connect the disk to the enclosure? Neither the disk I plan to get (Seagate Barracuda) nor any of the enclosures I have checked out mentioned anything about shipping with one or whether one is required.

A: Every one I have ever worked with comes with the internal cable

2. Should the jumper settings on the hard drive be set to slave?

A:  No, they all work much the same.  The jumper on the drive needs to be set to Master.

3. Is it possible to boot from these external enclosures? (The laptop contains both USB and FireWire ports)

A: It's great to be a Mac user here.  Firewire will work to boot any mac with a firewire port.  If you have a newer mac. a very new mac, it will even boot to the USB2 port.

Members ask about Sharing a Printer

Q: I have a single printer and two Macs.  Can I use it on both without unplugging it?

A: Sharing printers in Mac OS 10.2 or later is relatively simple.

1. From the Apple menu, select System Preferences.
2. Click on the Sharing icon.
3. In the Sharing window, click on the "Services" tab.
4. Click on the "Printer Sharing" checkbox to select it.

Printer sharing should start automatically and any printer appearing in your Printer Center printer list is now available to every computer on your local area network.

In Mac OS 10.3, the procedure is similar to the one used for 10.2 except that it's possible to exclude printers that are not connected directly to your computer. In Mac OS 10.2-10.2.8, users could share printers directly connected to their computer plus printers which they were connected to on their LAN. Users accessing shared printers on another user's computer would often find that the LAN printers would appear in their printer list several times, which was confusing. Mac OS 10.3 allows users to share only the printers attached via USB.

In Mac OS 10.4 the printer sharing setup is different than in earlier versions of the Mac OS. Go to the Apple menu, select System Preferences and then click on the Printer & Fax icon. In the window which appears there will be 3 tabs, the rightmost one being the Sharing tab. Click on Sharing tab to reveal a list of the printers currently configured for use by the computer. Check the Share these printers with other computers checkbox and then check the boxes to the left of the printers which are to be shared by other users.

One real benifit of doing this is that is still gives you access to the printer utilities made by the manufacturer.  If you choose to share a printer through your airport, you loose that ability.

Thanks to Mark Snell for the question idea.

How to use the sound input port?

Q: I'm damned if I can find ANYTHING to stick in the in-put jack on the Mac Book that will record. I'm still futzing around...using a USB headset for skype calls...but I can't figure out what hell that jack is FOR.

A: On a MacBook, the default input device is the built-in mic.  If you want to use the port on the machine, all you have to do is go to System Preferences:Sound, select the Input tab, and select the Line in as the active input port.  That should make it work.

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"....

Learn More about Airport Networks...

One of the presentations at the July appleJAC meeting was about setting up Airport networks.  In the presentation, setting up a single basestation and multiple base stations was discussed.  In addition, Extending your network with an Airport Express was discussed.

Apple's AirPort uses the 802.11g wireless standard to deliver data rates — up to 54 Mbps. It supports both Macs equipped with an AirPort Extreme Card and Wi-Fi-compliant 802.11g Windows PCs, as well as Macs with the older AirPort Card and 802.11b Windows PCs. Using Airport, everyone in your family can surf the web wire-free because AirPort provides simultaneous wireless Internet access via your DSL or cable modem for between to 10 and 50 computers depending on the Airport you select.

As promiced, the slides from the presentation have been made available on the appleJAC website.  Near the end of the presentation, one of the slides includes links to more information about setting up airport networks.

These included:

Apple's publication Designing Airport Networks

Apples Airport Support Page

If you have further Questions on Airport Networking, be sure to add them into a comment to this post.

Looking up old Articles on the Site

Q: How do I look up old articles on the website?

A: Let's say you are looking for an article about one of our members, Tom Piper. There are a couple of ways to go about finding it. Easiest is to look in the Month it was created. June in this case. On the right side of the site, near the bottom, there is a topic called Archives where you can bring up a month at a time.

Another way is by Category. On the right side of the site, near the bottom, are the categories. In this case "Members" is the category.

Once you find the article, click Permalink just under it. That goes to the physical link to the article. That's the one that never changes. You can bookmark it or send it in an email to others. It will always remain the same.

Don't forget, the webmaster welcomes comments. Under each article, you can click on comments and add your thoughts. Feel free to expand on the topic or just tell me I am all wet whit the post.