I’ve recently had some ask the question, ‘How do I know how much memory my Macintosh has?’ It’s very easy to find out how much memory your mac has – just go to the apple menu (top left of your screen) and select About this Mac.

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!

To join two or more pdf files together using Preview – the standard pdf viewer in OS X – simply open a pdf in preview and then drag a second pdf file ON TOP OF an existing thumbnail, and the two documents will merge. Read on for step by step instructions.

SUMMARY: 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.

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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). This will make a sidebar appear on the right side of the window with thumbnails of the pages in it..

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 of the merged fles, or you can use use ‘save’ to save over the existing document adding the new pages to it.

Like this article ? Click here to for how to make a pdf booklet.

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 .

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 ‘System Memory’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little pie graph of how much memory you are currently using.

 
There are two important items to take note of ‘Free:’ and ‘Page outs:’

Free tells you how much free memory you currently have, the higher the better, and
Page outs tells you how many times your computer has had to slow down because it has run out of memory and needed to move some of it’s memory back to the hard disk temporarily to free up some space. (This would be the equivalent of your brain being too full so you have to write your thoughts down on paper to free up your headspace!) This really slows down your computer.

If the page out count is increasing as you watch it, this is not good, it means your computer has run out of free memory, and so temporarily is using the hard disk as memory. The faster the page out count is increasing, the worse the problem – your computer is struggling along and not performing as well as it could. You need more memory.

If you have had lots of free memory since the last time you restarted your machine, the Page outs count will be 0. This means your computer had enough memory and has not run out. You dont’ need more memory.

It may be that your Pagein/outs count is high, something like 50431/10850, but steady and this and not increasing. What this means is that some time in the past when you opened a lot of programs, you ran out of memory, but now you have enough. Reboot, check the Pagein/outs count again. It should be 0/0. If it is not 0/0, have a look at it while you open a program or two and see how fast it increases, the faster, the worse your system performance will be.

Here is a screen shot of my computer. My page in/out count is quite high – 66825/697, but I still have 189 MB free, and the page in/out count is not increasing at the moment. This means that sometime since the last reboot, my computer ran out of memory, but currently it is OK. If I reboot the page in/out count will return to 0/0, and stay there unless I go crazy opening lots of programs. I don’t’ need more memory.

To quote from apple:
Moving data from physical memory to disk is called paging out (or swapping out); moving data from disk to physical memory is called paging in (or swapping in)… Extended periods of paging activity reduce performance significantly; such activity is sometimes called disk thrashing.

One more note: Under Leopard rather than giving a ‘count’ of page in/outs, it gives a size in MB of the amount of RAM that has been pages in or out – the numbers are smaller but the same principals apply.

I just ordered some prints and it said they will be delivered in 2-8 days.

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!

Spam does get annoying, and 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.

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 really, 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 new 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 generally much better than your own email program email filtering.) 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. Move your email over to gmail.