Mac Mania

FaceBook plugin for iPhoto

2007-04-12T10:42:00.000-05:00

Being a recent convert to FaceBook (hmm, lots of people there I know - even though I graduated many years ago...), I searched around for affiliate sites and tools. And I found the FaceBook plugin, surprisingly enough, at the FaceBook developer's site itself.

A pretty slick plugin, it even helps set up the photo for FaceBook while it uploads. It includes album selection, captions, and tagging. I like.

Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts for Windows/PC users

2007-01-29T13:00:00.000-05:00

As an oldtime PC user who spent a lot of time at a command prompt, I understand how hard it can be to break old keyboarding habits. Like it or not, many of the keyboard shortcuts from the Unix, Linux and PC world do not translate directly into the Mac world. Especially with special Mac keys like the command key, or the Enter key that appears to the right of the spacebar on iBook keyboards. For those who don't know, the command key (pictured above) is a special modifier key that is specific to Apple keyboards, and works the same way as a Shift or Control key to create special keystrokes. You can read more about it's genesis here at Wikipedia.

Here are some helpful keyboard shortcuts to get you started:

cmd + TAB = cycle through apps (Q = quits app)
cmd + M or double-click Title Bar = minimize
cmd + H = hide window
cmd + delete = move to trash (delete key where backspace would be)
cmd + click = same as right clicking mouse
cmd + I = get info
cmd + alt + ESC = force quit apps

cmd + C = copy
cmd + V = paste
cmd + X = cut
cmd + A = select all
cmd + Z = undo
cmd + Z + shift = redo
cmd + Q = close app
cmd + W = close window
cmd + left arrow = beginning of line
cmd + right arrow = end of line

Using Finder
cmd + N = new Finder window
select file, press ENTER = to rename file
cmd + down arrow = launches highlighted app
cmd + shift + A = apps
cmd + shift + U = utilities

Using Expose
F9 = tile all windows across desktop
F10 = tile all windows in current app
F11 = show desktop

Using Screen Capturing
(No Print Screen key as in Windows)
cmd + shift + 3 = captures whole screen
cmd + shift + 4 = captures selected region
cmd + shift + 4, spacebar = captures window with camera icon
Saves to desktop

On Bootup
Hold C key to startup from CD-ROM (change password)
Hold T key to startup in Target Disk Mode
Hold N key to startup in Net

How to replace a broken Mac iBook G4 screen

2007-01-24T16:05:00.000-05:00

Once a laptop screen breaks, you either fix it or attempt to use it as a desktop by hooking it up to a desktop monitor. Or sell it - at a significantly reduced price. Instead, try following
these instructions at Instructables to take your iBook apart and replace the screen. The link demonstrates how to take apart a G4 iBook, but the author also claims that most laptops are just as easy.

Now the hardest part is to search the 'Net to find a replacement LCD screen. Occassionally eBay will have what you are looking for, but there are several other sites.

You may also want to check out the iFixit site, which also has parts and guides for iBooks, PowerBooks and iPods.

Apple iTV

2007-01-24T13:50:00.000-05:00

I cannot wait to get one of these.

"Apple TV Coming to Your Living Room
Movies, TV Shows, Music & Photos on Your Big Screen TV
MACWORLD SAN FRANCISCO—January 9, 2007—Apple® today premiered Apple TV™, an easy to use and fun way to wirelessly play all your favorite iTunes® content from your Mac® or PC on your widescreen TV, including movies, TV shows, music, photos and podcasts. Using Apple TV’s stunning new interface, anyone can quickly browse and view their entire collection of digital media from across the room using the simple and intuitive Apple Remote. Apple TV easily connects to almost all modern widescreen televisions, and will be shipping in February for just $299.

“Apple TV is like a DVD player for the 21st century—you connect it to your entertainment system just like a DVD player, but it plays digital content you get from the Internet rather than DVDs you get from a physical store,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Apple TV plays the same iTunes content that users enjoy on their computers and iPods, so now they can even watch part of a movie in their living room, and watch the rest later on their iPod.”

Apple TV has a 40GB hard drive to store up to 50 hours of video, 9,000 songs, 25,000 photos or a combination of each and is capable of delivering high-definition 720p output.* Apple TV is easy to connect to a broad range of widescreen TVs and home theater systems and comes standard with HDMI, component video, analog and optical audio ports. Using high-speed AirPort® 802.11** wireless networking, Apple TV can auto-sync content from one computer or stream content from up to five additional computers right to your TV without any wires.

The seamless integration of Apple TV and iTunes lets users choose from over 250 feature-length movies and 350 TV shows in near DVD quality; four million songs, 5,000 music videos, 100,000 podcasts and 20,000 audiobooks. Users can enjoy their favorite music on a home entertainment system and view slideshows of their photo albums on a widescreen TV. Apple TV makes it easy for users to explore their entire media collection with an easy to use and intuitive new interface. With the Apple Remote, consumers can easily browse through their favorite movies, TV shows, music and photos from up to 30 feet away."
- Apple press release January 9, 2007

Read more about it here:

How Apple's iTV Media Strategy Works (at Roughly Drafted)

Hands on with the Apple iTV Prototype (at engadget)

Apple's iTV: Promise and Peril (at alpha blog cnet.com)

In the meantime, I have been playing with MythTV. Imagine doing all the same stuff with Linux, on Intel hw, and using free software. Read about it here.

How to backup a Mac online cheaply

2007-01-19T06:31:00.001-05:00

Shortcut to the answer: JungleDisk.
Now read on.

I spent quite a bit of time over the holidays looking for a secure and inexpensive method to back up my data. I have several machines to consider: a family iMac, my wife's G3 iBook used to help manage her clients, my work G4 iBook, and my personal G3 iBook. It is not that I necessarily have a lot of data to backup - in fact, I probably have less hard drive space than your typical gamer with a dream machine.

There are several options available to backup a Mac, the most prevalent in the unconnected world being an External Drive. I originally set out to backup only relevant information to a couple of external drives that I keep just for that purpose. Pretty simple concept; run out and buy a couple of external cases, and stick some high capacity drives in. Over USB 2.0 or Firewire it can back up a typical Mac harddrive on a stock machine in a reasonable amount of time (read less than a few hours).

There are a couple of disadvantages for me in this scenario. First, I can only fit 3 full backups on the drives I have, which is still pretty good considering that it is fairly cheap and re-useable. Secondly, it is inconvenient for me to run my drives over to a location that is both secure (meaning no one will tamper with or steal them) and that I have access to whenever I want. So I keep them in our house. Which is bad. Because if the house burns down with my computer, so does the data that I am trying to save.

Enter the world of online storage.

The other alternative, which unless you have been hiding under a pile of old floppy disks you probably are aware of, is Apple's .Mac service. I don't have much to say here about it. I am a subscriber, I have used it in the past, and I am not impressed. The fact that it authenticates my machine over the net in clear text scares me. Who knows what else is going on behind that curtain?

In fact, who knows what is going on anywhere on the net?

Which is also why this entire exercise is not as simple as it may appear at first glance.

So I decided that I would make a decision regarding online storage by comparing costs as well as security. And I was quite surprised with the result.

There are very few online storage services that provide tools for the Mac. Here is a brief list:

* .Mac, $99.95 per year for the first GB, up to 4GB for an additional $99.95 per year. No encryption or ssl. Mac tools provided.
* iBackup.com, $99.50 per year 5GB, up to 300GB for $2999.50. No encryption. SSL to site with provided Mac tools.
* xdrive.com, 5GB Free, Special tools provided, designed as online storage for photos and music. Not true backup storage.
* box.net 1GB Free, 5GB $55 per year. No encryption or ssl. No native Mac tools, a hack to use it with Mac Finder is here.

You can read more about some of the generic services that are out there at TechCrunch. You can also find some interesting hacks out there, including how to hack your machine and the Apple Backup utility to work on your own server instead of .Mac.

The JungleDisk offering
* Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15¢ per gigabyte per month
* No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
* Your data is fully encrypted at all times
* Secure authentication
* Mac tools
* Data is transferred in background on your machine, so you can continue to use your machine and connection
* Data is cached on your machine to protect against interruption
* Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
* Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux

Yes. 15¢ per GB per month. Oh, and there is a transfer charge for bandwidth too. It is 20¢ per GB per month. So the cost to send and store one GB on the Amazon servers is a whopping 35¢.

This sounds almost too good to be true, so I tried it. For a couple of months. And spent about $4.00. And it actually works.

Not to be outdone, I also wanted to guarantee the security of my data. Yes, JungleDisk encrypts everything. I could just use Backup. But I wanted more. So I picked up Synk Pro, which is a fantastic backup utility that can also do encrypted backups.

Here is how I have it all working now: JungleDisk provides a disk in my Finder that I can write to that maps to Amazon. Think iDisk. And Synk Pro collects and encrypts my data, and writes it to JungleDisk. JungleDisk manages all the online security, transferring, caching, etc.

I have tested backing up from all of my machines, and also restoring. Flawless. Cheap.

And life is good.

How I use my Treo as a GPS

2007-01-16T19:36:00.000-05:00

TomTom is not the pipers son... he is even better.

Skip to the end: Best GPS setup for Palm Treo? TomTom.

The first time I saw this solution was in Munich 2004 in a taxi. The driver had setup TomTom and had his Palm Treo in a cradle off to one side. He seemed to know his way around, so I think he was using it to locate hard to find addresses. I have no idea where he had secreted the Bluetooth GPS receiver. The Treo display was showing him the route as he drove from the drivers perspective, instead of the typical overhead GPS moving map display that was so prevalent at the time in competitive products. And it did not miss a beat. Even on traffic circles. Even on complex junctions. Even on alleyways.

There were so many different and varied things that I saw on that trip, that I quickly forgot the GPS taxi. Until I found myself lost on the outskirts of Chicago. And the rental car did not have Neverlost, which is what I used to try to get when on the road for business. Enough about that story.

Anyways, once I completed my trip and was back at the hotel I went to work researching handheld GPS. I am a licensed private pilot, so I have had a little more than a passing exposure to what is on the market. I even keep a handheld aviation GPS in my backpack when I am flying a plane in the event that I get lost and the avionics are not helping me. I spent some time on the 'net and took a look at typical units from Garmin and Magellan, both of which have some very compelling offerings. Then I remembered my cab ride in Europe. It took another good 1/2 hr. online to find what I was looking for. The TomTom GPS was widely available in Europe, but everywhere I looked in North America I could not find it. A friend suggested I look it up at Fry's (a computer store in the US that is predominantly in California but has additional stores opening up across the country). Fortunately, there was a store nearby. And I got the last unit they had, which was an already opened demo unit.

I think I paid $50 off the sticker of $199US. And went to work installing software. It was quite simple, and the setup even provided a conduit that I could use with The Missing Sync. The only delay was locating the serial number for the software, which has to be entered in order to unlock the maps. It was on a card in a box at the top of the package labelled "IMPORTANT - OPEN ME FIRST". Not the first time I have had to RTFM.

The product I ended up buying was the TomTom Navigator 5, which included a bunch of CDs and a Bluetooth GPS unit. The GPS is a little larger than a Zippo lighter. It is very light, and has a very quick acquisition time, ie. time to lock up the sats. Basically, when you turn on the GPS it gets to work locating sats while it waits for a BlueTooth client. On the Palm Treo, once the software is installed, it will search out available BlueTooth GPS' in the area and pair with it.

And the software just plain rocks. On launch you are presented with the typical warning and legal warning about GPS use while driving, then the best map you will see on a Palm. Keep in mind, this is not Google Maps (more on that in a later article), this is real time moving map from your out-the-window perspective in full colour. And if you don't like the colours, you can edit them, or select from templates including the frequently selected "Nighttime". Did I mention that it also talks? You can select from a collection of female and male voices who will give you directions as you travel, or you can turn the sound off.

To help you understand the robustness of the solution, I will describe the 1st of the 3 screens on the Main Menu:

1) Navigate to...

Quite simple to figure this one out. You select from your Home location, a list of Favourites, an Address, a Recent Destination, a Point of Interest, a Zip Code, a Point on the Map, a Center of Town, the GPS position, or a Point of Interest in a City. All of them drill down differently until you locate your destination.

2) Find Alternative. If you don't like your route, you can Calculate Alternative, Avoid Roadblock, Travel via a waypoint, Recalculate the Original Route, Avoid part of the Route, or Minimize Traffic Delays. This last option is only active if you have enabled the next feature.

3) TomTom Traffic. Yes, the TomTom folks keep track of traffic in major centers. And as you are driving, you can set up your Palm Treo to query the TomTom traffic service to find out what traffic is like on your route. This requires that you set up an account with TomTom (nothing is ever truly free in this world), and make sure you have a payment option configured.

4) Add Favourite. This will remember where you are in case you want to come back again.

5) Change Preferences. So many options it will boggle the mind.

That is just the first of 3 screens. This software is so packed with features that I am not sure exactly how many I have had the chance to become proficient in.

Some other folks think it is pretty good too - you can read reviews from BusinessWeek, treocentral and Cnet on the TomTom site. Most of the information you will find on TomTom is actually on the European sites, as the company started in the Netherlands.

There are some issues that I found too. There seems to be an issue with the controlling the volume of the voice commands, as they are always too loud and can not be lowered to a quiet volume. Sound is either loud, louder or off for me. Also, I have had a few issues with the Palm Treo resetting when a phone call comes in or it loses GPS signal, which I have been told is a Palm OS issue and is not related to the TomTom software itself.

All in all, an outstanding GPS solution!

Help, my Sync is Missing

2007-01-14T11:55:00.000-05:00

If you ever want to synchronize your Palm with your Mac, whether it be your Mac Mail or Address Book, or even Entourage, you absolutely MUST give this product a try: The Missing Sync.

I have tried using the built in Palm tools to manage my schedule and contacts, which worked great until I wanted to integrate it with the tools we use at my work. Like many organizations today, at work we use MS Exchange. And while there are a few ways that I COULD use Exchange using the tools that come with Mac OS X, and some other freeware out there, the real choice to get things done in a professional environment is MS Entourage 2004 for Mac (UPDATE: 2008 has been announced due to release in late 2007).

And while syncronization can work with iSync, if you want to really unlock the power of your Palm device (mine is a Treo 650), you need Missing Sync. It includes the ability to sync the following for me:

1) Air Canada schedule, by downloading the latest schedule over the net and uploading it to the application installed on my Treo. Yes, other airlines have similar tools that also include working conduits for this.

2) Full Backup, meaning a backup of EVERYTHING on my Palm Treo.

3) Entourage Conduit, which is fantastic - supports multiple identities and syncs Address, Calendar, Tasks, Notes. It includes filtering by category, and you can also choose between using the home or work address of contacts. Another nifty feature: you can choose to overwrite from handheld to desktop, desktop to handheld, full sync, or nothing. Very handy in the event of a system failure on either end.

4) Install, which of course is nothing unusual for a Palm sync tool. Missing Sync includes the ability to target the Palm memory or Palm data card.

5) AvantGo. You need an account at AvantGo, and data will be collected by Missing Sync off of your portal by logging in with your credentials and downloading any updates.

6) iTunes. Full playlist sync. And you can tell it where on the Palm to store the music.

7) Contacts can be sync'd with Address Book, and you can filter by group.

8) Events can be sync'd with iCal, and you can filter by group.

9) Folder Sync. Yes, that says folders. You can sync the contents of a folder on your Mac to a location on your Palm, and specify which direction and whether to write it to the card or not.

10) Memo Pad syncs to Palm Memo.

11) Photos. You can sync to iPhoto, in which case the conduit will automatically create rolls and albums for you. And if that is too much, you can sync to just a plain old folder on your Mac. I know, how boring. It includes the ability to scale images, and also to control which items to sync.

12) Time Copy, which will update your handheld clock for you.

I also have an electronic wallet app that includes a conduit, and I frequently use Tom Tom for GPS navigation, which also includes a conduit. At this point I had to buy a bigger data card for my Treo! No wonder it was rated 4.5 mice by Macworld magazine.

Wow. What a list. And this is the basic stuff. There is a boatload of other conduits that are available as well, most of which are listed at the developer site. It was $39.95 to license.

You may be wondering at the title of this article. Here are some shortcomings I have noticed:

A) With the Entourage conduit you can sync mac to handheld, handheld to Mac, or both ways. With the supplied Mark/Space conduit for Address Book and Calendar, you cannot sync handheld to Mac. No idea why not.

B) Sync Rollback. Ain't got none. There is the usual Sync Log, but no transactional rollback. This might be too much to ask for, but I thought I would ask for it.

C) Entourage conduit conflicts. Unfortunately, it is not possible to sync your Palm contacts to Entourage and Address Book at the same time. I believe this is a limitation of the Palm sync architecture, but I thought I would ask for it. I actually accomplish this today by using iSync to sync on my Mac between Entourage and Address Book/iCal separately.

Other than these points, I think this is a fantastic product. In case you are wondering, no this is not a paid review, and yes, it has worked flawlessly for over a year for me.

My conversion to the world of Apple

2007-01-13T06:26:00.000-05:00

Here is a brief introduction to how I got started on the Mac: Michael Lang's Blog: My conversion to the world of Apple