If you’ve smashed your iPhone and you need a quick reliable place to repair it,  I recommend fixpod. They have the simplest system I’ve seen, you just select your phone model, click on the problem, it gives you a price. You book in your  phone for repair,  and they guarantee to repair it within 24 hours!  You can either drop it in in person, or post it in.  If you want some more views on fixpod check out this forum where there are lots of happy users! Here’s where to find them.

In this article I reviewed the Logitech wireless presenter. It is in my opinion the best remote control to use with Keynote. That particular Logitech remote has been replaced by the new Logitech R400 which is just as good.   The only problem with it (as with the old model) is that it has 2 small buttons, one which completely exits out of your keynote presentation!  The last thing you want is to press the wrong button and be taken out of your keynote back to the desktop.

With the old model you needed to unsolder the switch beneath the buttons to disable them but with the new model they can simply be disabled with a knife. This article describes how to disable the extra 2 buttons.  It really is a simple procedure and doesn’t even require any soldering!

What you need:

- A logitec wireless presenter R400

- A small phillips head screwdriver

- A small knife with a sharp point.

Step 1. Remove the battery cover, remove the sticker that covers the screws underneath the batteries, and undo the 2 screws.

Step 2. Prise off the back cover with a screwdriver or knife.

Step 3. The buttons are a small dome shaped piece of metal held on with a clear plastic contact. Carefully cut the clear sticky tape covering around the bottom 2 buttons with a knife.

Step 4. Now you can simply remove the dome shaped part of the button, it is only held on by the tape.

Step 5. Here is what it looks like with the button removed. Do this for both the bottom 2 buttons and then reassemble the remote.

If you also want to disable the laser pointer you can do the same with the top button, the fifth button.

 

When you reassemble the  remote control it will look identical from the outside,  but when you press the smaller 2 buttons at the bottom they will no longer click and they will no longer do anything.

So now you have a very reliable Keynote remote control that will just move the presentation one slide forward or backwards with no way to accidently exit from the presentation!

When you are researching buying a mac there are a few things to consider, one of them is speed. There is a great site by primate labs which collates speed tests according to model and ranks them. This was useful for me when I was thinking of upgrading my Mac pro to a new Mac mini, only to find that my four-year-old  Mac pro was faster! Check out how fast the new mac-pro’s are  - insane – I wish I could justify buying one!

Another very valuable site is everymac.com which compares each Macintosh model with the models that came before and after. It helps you see any subtle differences between models. The ‘what are the differences’ section  at the bottom of each model is particularly informative.

Finally, there’s the official Apple specifications page which can also come in useful,  although I prefer everymac.com.

If you want to see how long a particular model has been in circulation check out the mac buyer’s guide run by MacRumors.  This gives you an indication of  whether there might be an upgrade soon.

Once you have decided which mac to buy, don’t’ forget that you can get refurbished macintosh computers from Apple.

Black in not the blackest black, there are different blacks, and you need to understand them if you want to get the best out of your printer. Here’s how to choose which ‘black’ to use and why!

In most Apple Applications (Pages etc)  you can click on the little coloured circle in the toolbar to bring up the Apple colour picker. To get black  is simple –  you just set the colour to black. If you go to the RGB colour picker you’ll see it’s 0,0,0 which means no Red, no Green, no Blue. Black looks like this on the apple colour picker:

Black in the RGB colour picker

RGB is the colour picker for a display where colours are mixed from Red Green and Blue.

CMYK is the color picker for a printer which uses a mix of Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black inks. (K stand for black!)

Try this. Select ‘Black’ in the RGB colour picker as above (0,0,0). Now change ‘RGB Sliders’ to ‘CMYK Sliders’.  You will notice something interesting…

Black on a colour printer uses all the inks!

You might think that black you would just use 100% black ink, but this is not the case.  The Apple black uses lots of cyan, magenta  and yellow as well as black. This is because on a page the blackest black you can get is not 100% black. A mixture of CMYK looks blacker than 100% black. There are arguments about which is the exactly the blackest black, and it’s not 100,100,100,100!  Some say it 75,68,67,9o, others say 40,0,0,100. Apple goes with 74,71,64,87.

What has all this got to do with me?

Commercial Printing: the richest black

If you are sending something to be printed by a commercial printer, for example a business card, then you want the blackest black, so don’t select 100% black for your text colour. For the darkest black possible select the default black from the Apple colour picker and it will give you the blacker CMYK mix.

If however you are printing lots of black text you probably want something different…

Saving Toner: 100% black

If you are printing text on your own printer then you probably don’t want Apple black because Apple black uses 74% Cyan, 71% Magenta, 64% Yellow and 90% Black – that’s a lot of ink!   You probably want to use plain 100% black.

To use 100% black for your black text you need to select your text and then go into the Apple colour picker and choose 100% black like this:

Using 100% black and 0% CMY for text will save you lots of toner!

This will use just black toner as if you had a black and white printer and it will save your colour toner.

Now if you are just printing a b/w text document, you can choose ‘Greyscale’ mode in your print settings to make sure it is only using black ink. But if your document has some colour in it, which means you can’t use greyscale mode, then be sure that the black is 100% black.

To make 100% black the default black in new pages documents, see this post.

To save you always having to move the sliders to get 100% black you can select 100% black and then make your own ‘black’ colour swatch by dragging from the black square to the color swatch area down the bottom of the colour picker.

Ok the instructions that come with the Garmin forerunner are completely wrong, the CD is useless (it has the manual but no software) and the Garmin support website is not much help either. There are all sorts of discussions on the Garmin site for Mac users about ‘it does work with Lion’, ‘it doesn’t work with Lion’ and so on. At one point it even had me downloading a PC .exe file!

The answer is that it  does work very well with OSX but there are two separate pieces of software that need to be installed.

1. The first piece of software is a Safari/Firefox/Chrome Plugin that lets your browser talk to your Garmin. You can download it from garmin.com under ‘Support’ menu then ‘Software’ then ‘Software for Mac OS’ then ‘Garmin Communicator Plugin‘.

When it’s downloaded you can test it on this test page: http://www8.garmin.com/products/communicator/test/

2. The second piece of software is a USB driver that talks to the Antenna. Again, you get it from ’Support’ menu then ‘Software’ then ‘Software for Mac OS’ then ‘Garmin ANT Agent’. When it’s downloaded you can ‘pair’ with your Garmin device as per the instructions.

Finally if you want you can go to the mac app store and download the Garmin fitness software for free.

If you have ever designed a colour document on your computer and then printed it out on your inkjet or laser printer you may have noticed that the colours come out slightly different.  This is partly to do with the fact that  printing with ink on a piece of paper is a different process to creating colour on a computer monitor,  but it is possible to calibrate your monitor so that the colours match up as closely as they can.  This article gives you some tips on basic monitor colour calibration.

The colour on your Printer

Every printer uses slightly different inks and so the same ink combinations print out slightly different hues  on different printers.  Built into every Apple Computer is a technology called ColorSync which tries to address this problem.  ColorSync tries to match the colour on the screen with the colour that is printed on your printer so that if you choose a particular shade of green on your computer monitor, that same shade of green will be printed on the printer. It’s not failsafe, but it helps.

Apple computers come loaded with printer drivers for most printers, and these printer drivers contain the information that the computer needs to know how the printer will print certain colours.   Most printers will have a different colour profile for each type of paper you are printing on, so as long as you select the right type of paper (e.g. Gloss Photo, plain etc)  your Macintosh will know the colour that is being printed by the printer, and will try to match it to the screen.

The colour on your Monitor.

Different monitors display the same colours slightly differently. In most cases your OS X computer  will automatically detect the monitor  that is connected to it and use the correct colour profile for that monitor to try to match what you see to the colour that will print.  You can adjust the profile of monitor yourself and this article explains how.  What you see on your monitor is affected by your contrast and brightness settings, the age of your screen, the light in the room you’re working in, so it’s worth calibrating your monitor manually anyway.

Here’s  how to calibrate  your monitor using the built-in Apple calibration tool.

1.  Go to the Apple menu and open the System Preferences,  and click on “Displays”

2. Click on the ‘Color’  tab  and you will see a list of ‘profiles’  with one of them highlighted in grey. In my case ‘Cinema Display’ is  highlighted because I have an Apple Cinema Display.

Click on the color tab of the displays preference pane.

3. To manually calibrate your monitor, select ‘Calibrate’.  Don’t worry about losing your existing settings because at the end of the process you will be asked for a new name to save the new settings under. A calibration assistant will appear, choose ‘Expert Mode’ and then Continue.

There are 5 or 6 steps to the process, it will take you through them one by one, asking you to compare colours and move sliders. Sometimes it can help to squint.

Step 4 in the setup is called “Target Gamma”. Just go with the recommended 2.2.

Step 5 is Select Target White point. You will notice it dramatically changes what you see on the screen! It is trying to emulate the difference between looking at  a piece of paper under different lighting conditions. A piece of ‘white’ paper will be yellow or blue depending on the surrounding light conditions. White Point is setting the colour of your ‘white’. I suggest holding a white piece of paper up next to your monitor and matching the monitor white point to that. This way your monitor white point will be the natural whit point of your room. It may be that your room has an un-natural blue light and you’d prefer a more natural white point, it’s personal preference, but it will change the way you perceive colours on your monitor. I like to make a few different profiles with different white points and then I can easily switch between them. The standard white-point setting is 6500.

Step 7 is give it a name and then you are set.

I have my general monitor calibration setting. It’s set up for mainly internet work.

I also have one I use for professional printing jobs that I’ve tried to match to the printer I use.

Sending something off to get printed.

There are some colours that you can create on a monitor  that are impossible to print on a normal inkjet printer! For example certain oranges, fluorescent colours etc. The way the get these printed, for example on a logo, is that you specify the colour you want from a sample sheet of colours the printer gives to you. The printer then uses that coloured ink, rather than the normal CYMK ink. This is called spot colour. If you are doing a one colour logo or a T-Shirt you may want to choose a spot colour.

If you want to be certain of a particular CYMK colour you are printing you can get a pantone colour sheet from your printing company, it looks something like this:

Each colour entry tells you the CYMK values for that colour.

For example, here’s a sample orange colour from the printing company.

This means that if on your macintosh computer, you go to the colour picker in any program, and choose the CYMK sliders, you can set C to 0, M to 68, Y to 100 and K (black) to 0, and choose this exact colour.

Now that you have put in the exact colour by numbers, it doesn’t matter what it looks like on your screen or home inkjet printer. When you send it away and it gets printer by the printing company that sent you the chart, it will be EXACTLY that colour that you saw in their sample chart.

If you have a pantone colour chart from a printer (they are free -you just need to ask for one) you can put some of the colours into a color-filled box in a program like Pages and see how close your monitor (or home printer) is to the actual printed colours. This will give you an idea as to how well your monitor (or printer) is calibrated.

In the end, when doing Desktop Publishing, the main thing to remember is never trust your monitor, especially when choosing colours or editing photos, always check the colour of the printed out version.

This is not for the beginner, it’s quite technical, but here’s how to do it.

Now you could upgrade your entire hard drive but with a 480G SSD drive costing $1579.99, it’s not a cheap option!  But you can upgrade just to a smaller boot drive (a 64G drive costs $119) to run OSX and your applications. This means your system files and applications are on the new SSD drive, but your user data (iphoto, itunes etc) stay on your old Hard Disk.

SSD Boot Drive using a different drive for my user folder - less than half the 64G SSD is used!

An SDD drive looks the same shape as a traditional drive, making it easier to install, but it uses memory instead of a hard disk so it is much, much faster. If your computer is a bit old and slow this may be a better solution than upgrading your whole computer because often it’s not the processor speed that slows things down but the hard drive.

Here’s how to set up an SSD drive to run your OSX and applications off, and keep using your existing hard drive for your user files.

1. Work out how big a boot drive you need.

Everything except your user data will go on the boot drive. To work out how much space you need, do this:

(a) Find your total disk usage. Click on your hard drive and press Apple-I, check how much space is used. For me it’s 587 Gig:

(b) Find your user folder usage. Select your user folder (the onew with a house as an icon – this is where all your documents, music, movies, photos etc are stores) and press Apple-I, it may take a while to calculate it.) If you have more than one user, you’ll need to do it for each folder and add them up. I only have one user and for me it was 550GB:

Subtract (b) from (a) to give you the amount needed for your boot drive.

587GB – 550GB = 37GB.  I need 37GB for all my apps and system software. A 40GB drive would just to it, so I went for a 64GB drive.  I ordered a 64GB M4 SSD from Crucial in the USA  for US$119.

2. Connect the Hard Drive to your mac.

For a mac pro it simply connects into the spare optical bay slot – no adapters needed, a 30 second operation – see how here.
Difficulty: easy – 30 seconds.

For a new aluminium mac mini it can replace one of the internal drives.
Difficulty: moderate – 1/2 hr.

When I replaced the internal SSD drive in my mac mini I needed to pull out the fan and motherboard to get the new SSD drive in! You can get the old hard disk out without pulling out the motherboard but the SSD drives are actually ever so slightly thicker and more uniform in shape so the motherboard needs to come out to manoeuvre the SSD drive in place.

For a macbook or macbook pro you’ll need replace the internal optical drive with your old Hard Drive (OWC who also sell SSD drives provide a kit to do this here) then to put the SSD drive where your old Hard Drive was. The other more expensive option is to order a large SSD drive and replace your old hard drive with it.
Difficulty: hard – 1-2 hours.

iMac: Forget it! Your simplest option is to put the SDD drive in an enclosure and leave it plugged in all the time.

3. Format the SSD Drive using disk utility.

After your SDD drive is plugged in you’ll need to power on your computer and use Disk Utility to format it – Mac OS Extended (Journaled):

4. Copy everything except your user directory onto the new boot drive.

Now you need to copy your system folder and applications onto your SSD drive. You can’t do this by hand – there are hidden files that need to be copied, so use Carbon Copy Cloner. Using Carbon Copy Cloner, select your boot drive as the target Disk and then select Incremental backup:

Now select your main hard drive as the source disk, but then deselect your main user directory so that you don’t copy across all your user data (it won’t fit!)

Click Clone and your boot disk will be created on the SSD disk.

5. Reboot from the new SSD boot drive.

Under System Preferences click Startup Drive select the SSD Drive, then restart! (wow – notice how fast it is!)

Since it is now looking for your user data on the new drive, it won’t find anything and so your desktop and dock will be the default ones and all your files will be missing. Don’t panic – in the next step we will get your old files back.

6. Select your old User folder.

Go to System Preferences, then Accounts, (in Lion this is now called ‘Users and Groups’) then ‘Click the lock to make changes’ and control-click the main user account and click Advanced Options.

In the advanced options tab choose your old user directory, which is back on your original hard drive.

Your computer will tell you that you need to restart, and when you restart you will be running off your new boot drive,with your user directory on your old hard disk.

So how fast is it? Here’s a demo of how quickly applications launch from my new SSD drive…

In this post I talked about the audio quality of the various iPods, and mentioned a mod for 4th and 5th Generation iPods that gives them excellent audio quality rivalling that of a $1500 CD player. Well, here is how to do the mod on a 4th gen color iPod photo – Apple model number A1099.

The 4th Gen iPods have a Wolfson WM8975 audio chip in them.

The pinout is something like this (this is a pinout of the WM8971).

ROUT1 and LOUT1 go to the headphone connector, via some capacitors etc, while ROUT2 and LOUT2 go to the dock connector (line out). There are resistors, capacitors and inductors of low quality on the signal path, but the Wolfson IC itself is a top of the range audio chip. The mod involves running a wire directly from LOUT2 and ROUT2, via some Black Gate capacitors, to the headphone jack, which will now become a high quality  line out. You could run it out the dock connector instead but I decided to go out the headphone jack – it loooked easier!

You’ll need a 4th gen ipod photo and a pair of Black Gate NX Hi-Q 6.3V 22uF or 47uF capacitors – they are rare and expensive. You can find them occasionally on ebay. They are no longer made but suppliers sell them off in pairs from time to time. My pair of 47uF caps cost me $16 pounds and I had to import them from the UK! Here’s a list of alternative caps you could try.

This is the ipod photo 4th Gen, it’s the color version of the 4th Gen ipod. Specs here:

Here’s my ipod open and Black Gates ready to go…

Step 1. Solder and heat shrink some small leads onto the black gate capacitors…

Step 1. Solder leads onto the black gate capacitors. I used wire wrap wire - strong but thin.

These are the resistors we will remove - they are tiny - about 1/4 the size of a grain of sugar. (This picture is magnified)

Step 3 - Solder one wire from each capacitor to the output of the DAC chip. (Click on image to enlarge)

Step 4. The other wire from the capacitor needs to be soldered to the headphone jack. The inductors closest to the headphone jack are removed.

Step 5 - shove it all back in and try not to break the wires! I had to remove the plastic sleeve around the dock connector to fit the capacitors in. The capacitors sit each side of the dock connector (bottom left).

Some tips:

I used a headphone lead to hold the socket while I soldered.

I used a 500W floodlight to help me see - the soldering is fine.

Actual size of resistors! I wouldn't attempt this mod unless you have had Surface Mount experience before...

Links:

This forum is a ripper – no step by step guide on the  4th gen ipod photo though!

This site has a summary of all imods.

Red wine do a mod for $250. It’s not that expensive considering the risk involved and fine soldering needed!

Mod finished – took about 1hr work plus 2hr research plus 1hr to write it up!

Bedtime and I’ll do some tests tomorrow!

One thing I like about buying an Apple product is the “ah” moment when you open the box and get it out for the first time.   That moment of admiring the design and  congratulating yourself that you’ve spent your money well.   Last week I had an even better moment that involved returning a Macintosh that I was unhappy with.  Here is my experience with Apple. A few weeks ago my mac pro  made a funny noise as it was booting up,  and with the realisation that it was two years out of warranty, I panicked at the thought of what would happen if it failed. On impulse I bought a factory refurbished 27 inch iMac from the online Apple Store.  It arrived the next day, and after unpacking it and placing it on my desk rather than having an “ah”  moment I had a moment of dread.  The computer was huge, it dominated my desk, it obscured  my view out the window, it was just too big!

I found myself browsing the Apple store website to read their returns policy and to my surprise, you can return any product to Apple within 14 days if you are unhappy with it for any reason!

Obviously Apple do not want anyone to have a Macintosh computer and not be happy with it.

All I had to do was open my official Apple receipt e-mail and click on the order details, and then click on returns.

I was given this menu of the various reasons I might have for returning my product:

Have you  ever seen such a generous returns policy? “Decided to buy elsewhere!”

“Chose a new product!” or ”Changed my mind!”

I selected ‘changed my mind’  and hit submit and was informed that the next day Apple would send a TNT  courier  to pick up the computer from my house,  and I would be refunded the full purchase price of the computer less the courier fee.  The courier fee? $20!

He is the return  invoice:

This means Apple have paid for the new computer to be delivered to my house, there are refunding me the full price of the computer, all I have to do is pay a very reasonable return cost.

It gets better. On Apple’s returns to site it says that due to  Christmas the return window has been extended and so rather than the normal 14 days, any computer purchased between now and Christmas can be returned up to the 14th January!

The bottom line: Apple don’t want anyone to have an Apple computer and not be happy with it.

Another reason why I love Apple.

All Apple computers ship with 1 year international warranty. You can extend this to a 3 year applecare warranty anytime in the first year – before your original warranty runs out. If you are not sure if you macintosh is still under warranty, Apple keep a central record of all macs and you can check out if your computer is still under warranty by entering your mac serial number here. If you are buying a second hand mac this is a good way to check the warranty on it as well.

You can get your serial number by going to the Apple menu, About This Mac, More Info, and then you can copy the serial number from there and paste it into the Apple site.

Here’s an example of what it looks like: