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Connecting your laptop to the internet through your iPhone is called tethering. It’s useful if you are out with your macbook and you don’t have access to the web. You can surf the web on your laptop using your phone as a wireless modem. It was made possible with iPhone Software Version 3. Here’s how to turn it on.
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You’ve made a webpage, but people are complaining that it’s too slow to load.
It may be that they have a slow computer, or it may be that your webpage has too many large files in it, and it should be made smaller. Safari can tell you how many files it needs to load, and how big they are. Here’s how. Continue Reading…
I want a calendar that I can edit on my iphone, or on my home computer, or have one of my co-workers edit on their computer, and they all sync up. mobileme and ical shared calendars doesn’t let you edit each others calendars, only subscribe to them. After much experimenting I found the best way to sync your calendars with the iphone and other ical based co-workers is through Google calendar as follows:
Basically you:
1. Set up a new calendar in google, then use calaboration (a little application from google) to get the settings into ical.
2. Sync your calendar to the iphone using Nuevasync. You set it up in iphone as a Microsoft Exchange server that points to Nuevasync. You can sync directly form google to iphone but all the calendars come across as one calendar. Neuvasync keeps the individual calendars with their own colors.
3. To choose which colors the calendars are on the iphone, you need to enable them one at a time from neuvasync, checking the iphone calendar each time, and they will import into the iphone in order of the following colors: red (first calendar) , orange (2nd) , blue, green then purple. eg the first calendar you enable will be red, and so on.
G4 ibook motherboard fault.
Apparently there is a problem with some G4 ibooks. It can appear after a year or so in some machines. After being on for a few minutes, they get a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes. This article describes the problem and how to fix it.
This hint is not strictly Macintosh, but it’s so good I have to write it up. Did you know you can get what they call a Continuous inking system (CIS) for most big name inkjet printers? It continually feeds the ink into the printer so you don’t have to change the cartridges! You can see the big containers of ink in the photo above – they sit next to the printer.
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If you’ve got an Aluminium Powerbook, they are a great machine, my personal favourite laptop, but after a few years the hinge can get a little loose. Thankfully this is not like the old Titanium powerbooks where the hinge was broken, it is just a matter of a few screws that need to be tightened! Here’s how to do it.
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I’ve been having a problem with mail – I can’t do a search on ‘entire message’. It is greyed out. There are all kinds of ‘fixes’ available on the internet, but most of them didn’t work. Finally I fixed it and here’s a summary of the most useful advice, try it in this order:
1. Have a look in ~/Library/Spotlight and make sure there are no plugins that might be causing problems. For example, I had an old Mailtags Plugin that was 2 years old, so I deleted it.
2. Make sure you haven’t excluded your mail folder in the spotlight privacy tab (spotlight preferences)
3. Reset the entire spotlight database by opening a terminal window and typing
sudo mdutil -E -i on /Volumes/*
(It will ask for your password)
4. Open Mail and click on Mailboxes:Rebuild.
That resets spotlight and mailboxes, which I think just about covers all options.
I’ve been playing round with getting good quality compressed speech.
Here’s what I’ve found.
1. SMALLEST FILE SIZE ACCEPTABLE QUALITY.
For very small file size (4MB for 20 minutes) and acceptable quality,
use the LAME encoder (the the separate article on Itunes songs to find out about the LAME encoder) with the following arguments in the ‘Encoding options’ Box:
-V 9 –vbr-new -mm -h -q 0
2. An even better option than above but slightly more complicated is:
Firstly convert the file to 22khz sample rate and mono, (eg in Audacity)
then use the following LAME settings:
-V 8 –vbr-new -h -q 0
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