Is your computer backed up? With 2T hard disks at around $100, there’s no excuse not to have your computer backed up. At the very least, you should have an external USB Hard Disk with some kind of backup on it. If you haven’t – do it now! This is the easiest way.

As for me – it’s the start of the New Year so I’ve re-evaluated my backup regime. I think it’s working well. Here’s what it is:

Backup 1 – Time Machine.

I have a 2TB external USB hard drive with an automatic time-machine backup. I can go back an ‘undelete’ or find any file I’ve deleted in the past year or so. If my main Hard Drive fails, my data is backed up hourly. How to setup time-machine.

Backup 2 – Manual Copy to USB Drive.

I have a 1.5TB  external USB hard drive that I backup manually with Carbon Copy Cloner each month (well, probably 3 monthly, but I aim for monthly). Backup 1 is not bootable. It’s useful to recover information off, but not to get things up and running in a hurry. My backup 2 is bootable so I can reboot and be running off it in a minute or so. How to make a bootable backup.

Backup 3 – Offsite Copy to USB Drive.

I have another version of my 1.5TB backup – an exact copy of backup 2, which I keep offsite at a friends place.  I swap it every 6 months or so , so that if my computer gets stolen I at least have an off-site copy of all my files that’s reasonably recent. When I go to my friend’s place I occasionally take the new drive and pickup the old one.

Extra Precautions.

I also run my computer’s main Hard Disk in a Pegasus RAID array. This is a bit fanatical for the home user, but worth it if your work is stored on your computer. Basically the data is stored on more than one drive. If one of my hard drives fail, my computer will just keep going, and tell me to replace the faulty drive. When I replace the faulty drive it will repair itself.

What about you?

I’ll say it again, at the very least, you should have an external USB Hard Disk with some kind of backup on it – either a Time-Machine backup OR a manual backup of your entire computer. If you haven’t… do it now!  This is the easiest way.

If your hard drive fails – it’s too late! I cannot count the number of times people have come to me with a broken hard drive asking if I can get data off it, and they didn’t have a backup.  Think of all the data on your computer: photos, word processing documents, music, etc.  If you lost it all, would it be worth $100 to get it back? If so then get it backed up now!

If you’ve ever been given a pdf file that you want to edit, or a pdf form that you need to complete and return electronically, you’ll realise it’s not obvious how to edit a pdf file. The good news is that the OSX built in pdf reader app – ‘preview’ – can edit pdf files. You can’t move around or change what’s already in the pdf document, but you can add text and graphics. Here’s how. 
If you double click on any pdf file in OSX it will open in an application called preview. You can read the pdf and scroll around etc.

Go up to the View menu and select the menu item called ‘Show Annotations Toolbar. This will give you a toolbar along the bottom of your preview window to help you edit the pdf file.

After you select  the ‘View: Show Annotations Toolbar’ menu you will see a toolbar across the bottom of the preview window that looks like this:

These buttons will allow you to edit the pdf file. The left three buttons make an arrow, a circle or a rectangle. The fourth button along allows you to add text to the pdf.

If you click on the text box button – the 4th button across,  you can then go up to your document and add in a text box like this:

If you click on the text button you can add a text box to the pdf document like this.

This is a very easy way to fill in pdf files that are forms.

If you highlight the newly added text you can change the font by pressing Apple-T and the font window will appear.

You can’t delete  what’s already in a document, but you can draw a rectangle over it to hide it and type something new over the top.

You can cover over existing text using a rectangle with a white border like this.

You’ll notice you can’t change the rectangle color from being black, but you can put a very fat white border around it so it looks like a white rectangle!

If you want to totally change the images and text on an existing pdf file you will need an application like Adobe Illustrator that can actually edit the content of pdf files, but if you only want to make small changes the built in preview app will do the job!

Once you are receiving spam it’s hard if not impossible to stop it coming to you, all you can do is ignore it (block it). But there are ways to reduce the amount of spam you get before it starts coming in.

It’s best to keep your email address off the internet, (eg off any web pages) as there are web crawlers searching every website for email addresses to put on lists and sell to spammers.

Once your email is out there and on someone’s spam list there’s no way to stop it spreading, so you will probably get an ever increasing amount of spam.

I would suggest if you have a spam problem:

1. Change your email addresses.

2. If you must have a ‘contact email’ on a webpage then get two email addresss, one that you keep very private that you give to your friends and family, and then public webpage one one that you can have forwarded to your private one, but try to change the web page one every year or so when it collects spam. (eg info@dpc.org.au, dpc@dpc.org.au, contactus@dpc.org.au etc.)

3. Get your ISP to turn on spam filtering. (This is better than the email filtering within apple mail because all the spam emails are blocked BEFORE they are downloaded to your computer.) There are various levels of spam filtering, some very aggressive and will block most spam, but also the occasional real email. Ask you ISP about spam filtering.

4. Gmail has the best spam filtering I have found.

Not only does this save space, it can also stop the files getting messed up on the email journey they are about to embark upon. If you compress a folder, the folder and all the files appear when it is ‘unzipped’. This is built into Macintosh OSX. Here is how to do it.

1. Here is the folder we want to zip.

2. Right Click on the folder, and a menu will appear, select Compress (if you have Leopard) or Create Archive (if you have Tiger or older) .

3. It will make a zip file that you can then drag into apple mail or onto a thumbdrive to give to someone else. All you have to do is double click on the zip file it and it will ‘uncompress’ and you will have the original file or folder appear!

Combining pdf documents on an Apple computer is easy. Leopard and Snow Leopard (the latest versions of Macintosh OSX that come on your computer) have the ability to move pdf pages within a pdf file around and even merge two different pdf documents together. It’s built right in to OS X for free –  you don’t need a third party program to do it!

To join two or more pdf files together using Preview (the standard pdf viewer in OS X) simply open the pdf file in preview, open the thumbnail view (Shift-⌘-D), and then drag a second pdf file ON TOP OF an existing page thumbnail. (It must be on top of the thumbnail, see the pictures below). The two documents will merge into one. Then save the new combined file. Read on for step-by-step instructions.

SUMMARY: To combine two seperate PDF files into one document you need to drag the new pdf ON TOP OF an existing  thumbnail and it will merge the two together. If you drag it into the sidebar but not on top of an existing page the new file will be added as an external link – not merged into the original pdf document. See these two pictures below to visualise the difference.

Drag the new pdf file under the existing one and it will insert a thumbnail that links to the second pdf but they are not merged.

Drag the new pdf file on top of the existing one and it will merge into it - creating one pdf.

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The blue line that appears underneath the original pdf lets you know the files are NOT being combined. Move the pdf on top of the other pdf so that the blue line disappears.

Here’s how to do it step by step.

1. Firstly, open one of the pdf files in Preview. Preview is the default application that a pdf will open into so if you just double click on the pdf file it will open in Preview.

2. Now go to the menu at the top of the screen called ‘View’ and click on ‘Sidebar’ (or  ‘Show Sidebar’ if you have Snow Leopard). Alternatively, press Shift-Command-D to show the thumbnails. This will make a sidebar appear on the right side of the window with thumbnails of all the pdf pages in it. (See these pictures below).

In Leopard select 'Sidebar'

In Snow Leopard and newer versions of Preview select 'Sidebar' then 'Show Sidebar'

3. You can now drag the second pdf file (from a folder or from your desktop) into this sidebar window, and it will be added to your pdf document as an additional page.

Drag the new pdf from the desktop onto an existing thumbnail.

To merge the two files you need to drag the new pdf ON TOP OF an existing  thumbnail. If you drag it into the sidebar but not on top of an existing page the new file will be added as an external link – not merged into the original pdf document. See these two pictures below.

Drag the new pdf file under the existing one and it will open but not merge.

Drag the new pdf file on top of the existing one and it will merge.

In some older versions of Preview, if you drag the second file on top of an existing page in the sidebar, it will appear as a red box to show you it will be merged, or as a red line to show you it will not be merged.  In the latest version of preview, the red box does not appear, but the same principle applies – drag it on top of the existing thumbnail to merge the two documents.

You can now save it – use ‘save as’ to save a new document with the merged fles, or you can use use ‘save’ to save over the existing document, adding the new pages to it.

No – you can’t reduce  the file size of the new PDF document –  you can’t get everything for free! To do this you Adobe Acrobat Professional.

Like this article ? Click here to for how to make a pdf booklet. Also here for how to reduce the file size of a pdf.

I thought I ‘d kick off the year with a little series for new mac users, help out those people who got a Mac for Christmas! Lesson # 1 – The Apple key (also called the command key or key) is used for keyboard Shortcuts.Shortcuts

A keyboard shortcut is when you press a key to do something that you could do another way, but the shortcuts is quicker, hence the name shortcut! The Apple key is the key that tells the computer – ‘Hey, I want to do a shortcut!’

Here are some examples, give them a try now so you can see how they work:

Apple P = Print – use this from within most programs – Pages, Mail, iPhoto etc – to print to the printer.

Apple S = Save your document

Apple F = Find something

Apple C = copy, V is paste, X is cut.

Apple Q = Quit the program you are in.

Apple W = Close the window you are in, but keep the program running.

Apple Z = undo. This will undo your latest typing in most programs.

Some very cool shortcuts:

Apple TAB = move between open applications.

Apple SHIFT 4 = (hold down the three keys at once) take a photo of part of the screen!

As well as these ‘universal’ Apple shortcuts there are some shortcuts that are specific to programs. The best way to find them is to look at the menus at the top of the screen. For example, in Safari, look at the ‘File’ Menu:

The shortcuts are listed after the menu item.

So in Safari:

Apple + N will open a New window

Apple + T will open a new browsing Tab and so on.

If you’ve moved from a PC, the Apple key is a little like the control key, except that Apple Key is only used for Keyboard shortcuts.

The Apple still has a Control Key, a Shift Key, and an Option key – but none of these do shortcuts. They are all used to MODIFY the behaviour of something. For example, the shift key modifies letters by making them uppercase. The control key modifies the mouse click to make it a left-click. (Try clicking the mouse while you hold down the control key – give it a go now)

It may be the case that you sometimes need to use another key for a shortcut – see the Safari example above where the SHIFT Key (represented by the Up Arrow) modifies a shortcut. So Apple S = ‘Save’ but SHIFT Apple S = ‘Save As’

In Summary the Apple key is the key that is used for keyboard shortcuts.

Shift, Option and Control are used to change what something does.

Did you know that more free space your Hard Drive has the faster it will operate?

Did you know that it should never be over 90% full?

How can you tell if getting a bigger hard drive will help your computer run faster?

Here’s how to see how full your macintosh computer hard disk is and what to do about it.

1. Go to your utilities folder. (Click on your desktop anywhere so that the finder is active.
   Hold down apple-shift-U, this will open your ‘utilities folder.)
2. Open ‘Activity Monitor’
3. Press Apple-1 so that the main window of Utility Monitor is open.
4. Click on the ‘Disk Usage’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little pie graph of how much memory you are currently using.

The little graph on the side shows how much of your disk space is free.

Green is good. Blue is used up.

So in this example I have used a little over one third of my hard drive space.

The more free space you have, the faster your computer will run, although you probably won’t notice the difference until your hard drive starts to get reasonably full. As a rough rule, try to keep at least 10% of your hard drive free.

If your Hard Drive fills right up, you may get an error like ‘your startup disk is full.’ in this case you really do need to do something right away – your computer will be limping along if your drive is totally full.

If your hard drive is too full, you can get an external one, and put some of your big files, like movies, onto it, or you can delete some things that you don’t need, or here is an article on how to tweak a little extra space from your existing Hard Disk.

You’ll then be given a screen that displays your processor speed and how much RAM is installed.

My friend Dave has just moved across to mac and he tells me that in Microsoft publisher you can use a booklet template to make a booklet. By booklet I mean A4 pages folded in half to make an A5 booklet that you staple in the middle. To do this all the pages need to be re-ordered, for example, page 8 goes near page 1, page 2 near page 7 and so on. Publisher did this automatically.

With Pages in OS X there is no such built in option to do this automatically, but there is a great little program called ‘create booklet’ that will do it for you when you go to print the document.

You need to download a little program called ‘Create Booklet’ to do it. You can download it directly from here or go to the webpage here.

After you’ve downloaded it, Click on the ‘install- Create Booket PDF Service’
This will install an extra menu item in your printer menu to be able to print booklets.

After you’ve done this, go into Pages and select print, like you are going to normally print a document. But instead of pressing print (in the bottom right corner of the window) select the ‘PDF’ button in the bottom left, and click on ‘Create Booklet’

Your document will automatically be made into a booklet. It will open in a new window, and you can either ‘save’ it as a PDF file (to email to someone or print out later) or you can print it as a booklet to your printer.

Just remember that when you are designing a booklet, it will be printed smaller than usual. The A4 page you see on your screen will be printed on 1/2 an A4 page when you make a booklet, so make all the text a bit bigger than usual. Eg use a 16 point font instead of 12.

Note: There was an application called ‘Cocoa Booklet’ that used to do this but it doesn’t work in Snow Leopard, this is the new way of doing it.

Note: If you want to publish a book, and need a more professional binding solution try this program (it’s not free).

All these fonts are stored in a ‘font’ folder inside your ‘library’ folder. The thing is, you actually have two library folders. One is here, on your main Hard Drive:

You can find it just by hard drive icon.

The other one is here:

It is in your users folder. You find it by clicking on your hard drive icon, then ‘Users’ then your username, and then you should see it in amongst your music, movies folders and so on.

Inside both of these ‘Library’ folders will be another folder called fonts, and inside the font folder will be all the fonts on your computer. The first fonts folder contains the fonts available to any user on your computer. The second one in your user directory contains just the fonts that are available to your user.

If you want to copy one of these fonts to a different computer you can just copy it like any other file. You can drag the font to a thumbdrive, e-mail it to yourself at a different computer, or copy it across the network to your laptop. On the new computer you simply need to double-click the font and you will get a little window showing you a preview of what the font looks like. There will be either a button saying ‘ install’ which will install the front onto that computer if you click on it, or there will be a little grey message saying ‘ installed’ which means that that font is already installed on that computer.

If you are copying a font be sure to copy all the different font files. For example in the following example the Arial font has quite a few files, one for the bold one for the italic and so on. It’s best to copy them all.

If you have trouble finding where a font is, there is a neat little application in your applications folder called ‘Font Book’ If you run it it will give you a list of all the fonts on your computer. If you control-click on any of the font names, there will be an option to reveal the font in the Finder, which will take you to the location of the font file automatically!

Most of the time the fonts will just work and you won’t need to worry about them, but every now and then you might go to open one of your documents on a different computer and the font will be missing. This is how to copy the font across.

If you want a document that you can open on any computer at all, and you don’t need to worry about whether that computer has the font or not, save your document as a PDF file. PDF files include the font in the file so they will work on any computer even if it doesn’t have the right font!