Leopard and Snow Leopard have the ability to edit pdf files, move pages around, and even merge pdf documents together. In OS X combining pdf documents is now easy and you don’t need a third party program to do it! Here is how to join two or more pdf files together into one.

1. Open the first pdf file in Preview.

2. Now select ‘Sidebar’ from the ‘View’ menu – this will make a thumbnail sidebar appear.

3. You can now drag the second pdf file into this sidebar window, and it will be added to your pdf document as an additional page.

NOTE: In Snow Leopard you need to drag the new pdf ON TOP OF the existing pdf’s thumbnails ( a little red box shows you that you are doing this).

This signals that you want to add it to the document. You can then move it to where you like.

If you drag it into the sidebar but not on top of an existing page it will appear as a red line instead of a box and the file will be added as a link, but not merged within the pdf document.

You can now save it!

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 ins/outs:’

Free tells you how much free memory you currently have, the higher the better, and
Page ins/outs tells you how many times your computer has had to slow down because it has run out of memory and needed to use the hard disk to ’switch’ some of it’s memory in our out of use. This really slows down your computer.

If the page in/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 in/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 ins/outs count will be 0/0. 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.

This produces a neat little A5 booklet from 4 A4 pages or it can even do an A6 booklet as follows:

You can download this neat little application from here.

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.