I used to write BASIC code on my good old Commodore 64, but the Macintosh has been a bit impenetrable in terms of where to get started with programming.

I was recommended this book and am using it to work through with my son. It teaches python, a simple language, using your mac. It’s a beauty.

You can buy it here from Amazon .

If you have a friend with a PC chances are they are sending you documents that use fonts such as Calibri, Corbel and so on. Some of them are quite nice. Here is how to install them on your Macintosh for free.

First go to this page where you can download the Open XML Converter for Macintosh. This program allows you to open Office 2008 programs in older versions of Microsoft office. It also includes all the fonts for Office 2008.

So you can either run the installer and it will install itself, or if you are a bit uneasy about installing Microsoft products on your computer, right click on the installer and select show package contents. Open the folder called ‘Contents’ then ‘Packages’ then select ’show package contents’ of the file that is called OpenXML_all_fonts.
Open the folder called ‘Contents’ then double-click on ‘Archive.pax.gz’

This will create a directory of all the Microsoft fonts and you can install the ones you want simply by double clicking on them.

It will give you a graph like this of the various DNS speeds.

I found out that my DNS (internode) is much faster than google and OpenDNS, so I’ll stick with them.

1. Sign up with justin.tv at http://justin.tv. Your login name will be the web address of your webcast as in justin.tv/loginname

2. Download wirecast from here. You can unlock it for $449 (yes $449) or use it as a demo which has an advertisement for wirecast every minute or so.

3. Plug your digital camera into the mac firewire port and turn it on. Launch wirecast and you will see your camera in the video panel. Drag the image from your video camera from the bottom thumbnail into the main broadcast window to tell Wirecast that that is what you want to broadcast.

4. Go to the Broadcast menu and select ‘Broadcast settings’
Under Encoder Preset, Select ‘flash Low Bandwidth
(this will do a 320 x 240 stream that should stream OK up a 256K uplink.)
Under Destination, Select justin.tv
Enter your justin.tv username and password, press generate RTMP,
Press Save.

Press The broadcast icon in the top left corner, and it should stream, it takes about 30 seconds to get going before you will see it at justin.tv/yourlogin

FREE OPTIONS:
Wirecast costs lots of money.

You can use Quicktime broadcaster as a free alternative to Wirecast, and thanks to justin.tv there’s a page with all the settings for Quicktiem Broadcaster here. I tried Quicktime Broadcaster, and sometimes the stream was just a black page, other times it worked. Also the video quality was slightly less than wirecast. So if you need it to be very reliable I’d go with wirecast. QT Broadcaster seems to be fine once you’ve got it up and running. I found the problem came when I stopped then re-started the broadcast, so once it’s working, keep it going!

There is a setting to use from within the justin.tv webpage to upload video without the help of a third part piece of software like wirecast, but this gave very poor quality video.

I deleted the following 2 files from your Library/LaunchDaemons and it fixed the problem.

com.apple.RemoteDesktop.PrivilegeProxy.plist
com.apple.RFBRegisterMDNS_RemoteManagement.plist

To lodge my e-tax I have to run windows XP on my mac (using Virtual box) but needed to print it via a printer shared from my mac. I assume this will work sharing from any OS X mac to any Windows XP.
Here’s how to do it.

The Overview:

Basically you need to find two settings (Name: and Location:), they are here under printer setup in OSX:

and then you put them in here under windows XP:

It’s not exactly intuitive is it!!!

Here’s the more detailed instructions:

1. In OSX go to APPLE MENU and PREFERENCES and SHARING

2. Click the box that says Printer Sharing to turn on printer sharing.

3. Now go into printer preferences:

4. Click on the printer you want to share and click on ‘Open Print Queue’

5. Click on the little button that says ‘printer setup’

6. Here you find the magic settings – take not of the Name: and the Location:
HINT: you may wish to change them to something short and easy like I have if they are long. You can change them – it doesn’t matter what they are.

Now go into Windows XP.

1. Select Add a printer under Printers:

2. Select add a network printer:

3. The important bit – select ‘connect to this printer’ and type in slash slash location slash inkjet. (Ooh yes don’t you love windows!) like this:

It may ask for your password, but then the printer will appear!
This is windows though, even though the printer appeared, I had to reboot windows for it to actually but it did!

1. First enable the developer menu in safari. To do this QUIT SAFARI, open the terminal and type in the following and hit return:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
OR
Download Onyx and under ‘Parameters’ ‘Safari’ select the ‘Enable Debug Menu’ option.

2. Load your page in Safari, and under Develop select ‘Show Web Inspector’

3. This will open a new window down the bottom. Click the Resources Tab, then the Size Tab.

You will now see a graph of all the files on your webpage and how big they are. It will look something like this:

You can see in this example (wpcc.org.au) that the entire webpage is 1.028 MB – reasonably large, most of it images. The best way to reduce it would be to go back and find the original images on your computer and compress them to make them smaller. Lots of these images are quite small and yet are 70KB – they could be reduced to 10 or 20KB probably without muck loss of image quality.

As a comparison:
Apple.com uses about 600K, notice it’s reasonably graphic rich and yet only 250Kb of images.
macintoshhowto.com uses 963Kb – a bit big.
google.com uses 177Kb – very slim!

If you click on ‘time’ instead of size you can see a graph of how long the various parts take to load on your computer.

MobileMe doesn’t achieve this. iCal shared calendars via itunes doesn’t achieve this. After much experimenting I found the best way is through Google calendar.

Google calendar allows editing and viewing from iCal on your mac and from your iPhone, plus you can let anyone else edit your calendar if you want them to. So Google calendar becomes the hub. Here’s how it all works:

STEP 1. GET A GOOGLE CALENDAR ACCOUNT.
You can set up a new calendar in Google at http://google.com/calendar

STEP 2. SYNC ICAL WITH GOOGLE.
Google has released a program called calaboration that will automatically put all the settings for your Google calendar into iCal. Download and run calaboration. It looks like this, you just select the calendars you want to add into your iCal account.

STEP 3. SYNC IPHONE WITH GOOGLE

If you have iphone version 3 you can just use the built in CalDAV to access your Google Calendar. Go to Settings then Mail, Contacts, Calendars then Add Account then Other then Add CalDAV Account.
You’ll see a page like this:

Enter the settings for your google account here and that’s it!

NOTE – More than 1 Calendar.
If you have more than one Google Calendar you’d like to sync, you need to copy the URL of the calendar from ical across to your iphone. To do this, AFTER you have used callaboration to put the google settings into ical, go into ical, preferences, Accounts, Server Settings – it looks like this.

You need to type that URL into the ‘Advanced Settings’ – ‘Account URL’ of the Calendar on your iphone. It’s quite a long text so the easiest way is to copy it from ical into mail, mail it to your iphone, copy it out of mail and paste it in.

NOTE 2: Old iphone software.
If you have iphone software version 2 you’ll need to use Nuevasync. You set it up in your iPhone as a Microsoft Exchange server that points to Nuevasync. You can sync directly from google to iphone but all the calendars come across as one calendar. 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.

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.

What models are afffected?

You might be wondering if your ibook is affected. Here is my guess, if your ibook has built in airport extreme, (which is the case for all ibooks after October 19, 2004) you should be OK!

The original 2003 ibook G4’s (800/933/1Ghz) have the fault. This is the model I have. The “Early 2004″ (1Ghz) models up until Oct 2004 probably have the same motherboard.

The good news, the 60G (1.2Ghz) “Early 2004″ model and all the “Late 2004″ model ibooks (1.2Ghz/1.33Ghz) and Mid 2005 (1.33 and 1.42Ghz) have built in airport extreme, which means a different motherboard.
SUMMARY: Suspected models are M9164LL/A M9388LL/A M9165LL/A M9426LL/A M9418LL/A

IT APPEARS FROM THE COMMENTS THAT THE ABOVE INFORMATION IS WRONG. It appears even models with the new motherboards are affected.

I have started a survey here click to see it of the affected models.

What is the fault?

The Danish Consumer Complaints Board did some investigations and confirmed the fault. There is a really good report in the form of a pdf document with close up pictures of the fault here:

www.forbrug.dk/fileadmin/Filer/PDF/ENGF959-orig.pdf

Here is a photo from the paper. You can see the thin black line below the lead which is a crack in the solder.

My ibook is indeed just as the article describes it. The little chip gets hot, and if I press my finger on the chip, it works! Take my finger off, it stops working!
I rang Apple Australia and they don’t acknowledge that the problem exists. They have officially ‘never heard of it’.

The repair:

You need to grab a fine tipped soldering iron and heat up the top few pins of the chip one by one to resolder it to the logic board. Press the chip down while you apply a very clean and fine soldering iron tip to each pin.

This is a very complicated ‘how to’ a bit outside the scope of this site but may be interesting to some. Don’t attempt this one unless you have had lots of soldering experience!
Here are some pictures:

The G4 ibook with the bottom case off. The offending chip is circled.

Here is a closeup of where I have soldered the legs of the chip. You can see the base of the top pins are shinier from the new soldering. I soldered the top 3 or 4 pins on each side, but it’s only the top 2 pins that the fault occurs with as they are the main power pins. I applied a little more solder to the joint as well, that’s why it looks a bit lumpy.
Here’s an alternate crude DIY repair method:

http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/design-fault-in-apples-ibook-g4/

another DIY solution is here:

http://coreyarnold.org/ibook/?p=20

There’s some good discussion on the apple pages here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1369476

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5968305

In this article I described the fix for the G4 motherboard fault, but it seems from the comments that more models are affected than what I described there.

SYMPTOMS:

• After being on for a few minutes, your ibook gets a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes.
• You can’t do anything at all except power down the computer by holding the power button.
• You restart and it doesn’t boot up.
• You squeeze the bottom of the computer tightly together just to the left of the trackpad, and it boots up.
• It tends to boot up when it is cold, but then stops working when it warms up.

Still unsure? Read more about the symptoms here and here.

Here are the results of a survey regarding the affected models: