Did you know that if you hold down SHIFT-COMMAND-4 you can take a picture of any part of your screen? Press SHIFT-COMMAND-4 and your cursor will turn into a cross-hair. (Try it right now!) Click and drag over anything and you can take a picture. It’s how most of the small pictures on this website are made.

Useful for all kinds of things, for example:

Grab a screenshot of a keynote graph:

Grab a heading from pages:

Grab a receipt from a webpage:

The top of your screen:

Or any information you want to keep:

I use Shift-Apple-4 a few times every day!
Also, Shift-Apple-3 takes a shot of the entire screen – I use this much less.

Check them out here

http://bit.ly/7NB2KP

So your old laptop is a bit long in the tooth – working well but the hard disk space is all used up.
Here’s a few ways to get some extra space.

Remove all the extra language files to gain a few hundred MB.
1. Download Monolingual from here
2. Run it and it will remove all the language files you don’t need. It defaults to keeping english, gets rid of Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic etc. (Don’t use the other features of monolingual – just the language removal.)

Use Disk Inventory to see where your space is being taken.
1. Download Disk Inventory X from here.
2. Run it, go have a cup of coffee – it can take a while.
3. Look at the results, they will be a picture like this:

You can mouse over the colors to see which files they are on the hard drive, and then manually delete the folders to create free space. I found lots of thinks I did not need with this program, like old movies hiding away, folders full of microsoft junk, etc. Don’t delete anything if you don’t know what it is though.

Clear out your Library/Application Support folder
Have a look in your Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support folder and there may be some old folders from applications you have deleted but no longer use. You can delete them.

Clear out your Printers
Have a look in Macintosh HD/Library/Printers and delete any folders for printers you don’t need. For example my Epson library contains 1.4G yet I don’t have an Epson printer!

To see how much space a folder takes, go to Menu ‘View/Show View options’ then select the box that says ‘calculate all sizes’.

To make a backup of your computer that is useful if your computer crashes you need to:

1.   1. Buy an external firewire hard drive
2.   2. Format the hard drive
3.   3. Download some backup software
4.   4. Backup your Hard Drive
5.   5. Run the backup software often

Now let me explain those steps in more detail.

2. 1. Buy an external firewire hard drive You need a firewire drive because even though macintosh has USB, you cannot start your computer from a USB drive in an emergency, you can only start it up from a firewire drive.
   You need one at least as big as the hard drive on the computer you are intending to back up. Eg if you have an 200G hard drive on your imac, you should get at least an 200G for your backups. This way you will always fit your backup on the external drive.
4. 2. Format the hard drive
   Plug in your new hard drive. Run Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder). Select your new Hard Drive in the left pane, and in the Erase tab check it says ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ as below, type in the name you would like to call it (eg Backup) (here it says Untitled) and press Erase. It will now erase and format your external Hard Drive ready for use and call it Backup. 

   

   If you have a large external drive, and you want to store other things on it apart from the backup, such as movies and pictures, then it is best to ‘partition’ it into two sections, one for your system backup, and one for files. To do this select the disk in the left pane and click on the partition tab. Select ‘2 partitions’ and adjust to the size you want. Again, name them, make sure they are both Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and press Partition. In the example below I have partitioned my hard drive into two, one for the backups (80G) and one for the rest.

   

6. 3. Download some backup software
   Go to http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html and download the latest version of SuperSooper. It’s free to be able to do a basic backup, or you can pay if you want extra features such as incremental backup (it’s faster, but the end result is the same). Copy Superdooper to your macintosh applications folder.
8. 4. Backup your Hard Drive
   Select your Macintosh HD in the left menu, select your new firewire drive in the right one, select ‘backup – all files’. Press copy now, go and have a cup of coffee while you wait a long time for it to copy all your files, perhaps up to an hour or so. 

   

   It’s good to select ‘Repair permissions before copying in the options tab, see below. This makes sure your OS X is functioning well before you back it up, otherwise there can be some problems.

   

9. 5. Run the backup software often
   The most important thing about backing up is to do it regularly, I do it once a week. it’s good to do a backup before you install any new software – especially system modifications or large software, in case something goes wrong in the installation so you can go back to what it was when you backed up.

How do I use the backup in an emergency?

1. Go to System Preferences, select ‘Startup Disk’, select your external Backup, press Restart.
2. OR in a real emergency when you can’t boot onto your normal OS X…
3. Press Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup. This will bypass the primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume such as the external one.
4. You are now running from your backup, and you just repeat the sections called Format the hard drive and Backup your Hard Drive but treat your Backup as the main one and the main one as your backup. In other words, run Disk Utility and erase your Macintosh HD, then run Superdooper and backup from your Backup to Macintosh HD. When the backup is finished, select Machintosh HD, and restart. You will now be running from your main computer again.
5. You might want to print these instructions out, so they are handy in an emergency. It’s no use having the instructions on how to boot in an emergency on your computer – you won’t be able to read them. Don’t laugh, I’ve done it!

   Stay tuned for an update on how to use time-machine. 

• carbon copy cloner

See the entry on backups, this application allows you to make a bootable backup of your hard drive. Superdooper, a newer program, seems to be a more popular backup program and simpler to use, but it’s not free so I still use CCC.

• skype (voice over IP)

Skype allows you to speak to other skype users anywhere in the world for free over the internet. Simply download skype, create yourself a ’skype name’, this is your unique skype name, and you are away. You don’t need to pay any money unless you want to make a call to a normal phone number. If you have an imac or a powerbook or ibook you can use the built in microphone and speaker, but for better results use a headset microphone which will stop any ‘echo’ you may experience. Your friends need to have their computer on when you search for them in skype for the first time, or skype will not find them.

• textwrangler

A great little text editor, like textedit, but many features such as search and replace on multiple files without opening them, automatic formatting for html, compare two different text files and show the differences, open and edit text files over ftp, if you’re not sure why you’d need those features, stick with textedit!

• mac the ripper

Allows you to capture a DVD from your DVD drive, then view it in quicktime. Good if you just want to watch one chapter of a DVD, or if you want to watch a DVD in the car without running your laptop battery flat – it uses much less power to watch a DVD from the hard drive than from the DVD drive.

• quicksilver

Fantastic application, hard to explain how to use it and what it does, but I use it probably at least 20 times a day. It allows you to do many things at the press of a key, like a shortcut, but without you having to remember what key does what, because it guesses what you want to do by what you type in, and it learns, very clever. It takes a bit of learning, but the time you save after learning it is well worth it. http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver

• combine pdf’s

As it says, allows you to combine multiple pdf documents into a single pdf documents. For example, combine a single page pdf from pages with a pdf printed from a screenshot with a pdf from illustrator all into one document of three pages.

• Cocoa booklet

Cocoa Booklet takes a multi page pdf file (eg 16 pages long), and makes it into a booklet by moving all the pages into a different order so that when you print it double sided and staple it into a booklet, all the pages are in the right order – like Microsoft publisher does on the PC. You can reduce the size too, ie make an a5 booklet from a4 pages.

• Audio hijack

Allows you to record any sound from your computer (skype conversation, itunes song, streaming audio, movie soundtrack etc) to an mp3 file. THIS IS NO LONGER FREE.

• LAME engine for itunes

See separate entry under music, this imports your itunes songs at a better quality than the itunes encoder.

• Online Bible

A free piece of bible software, easily the most simple to use, now available for OS-X as a beta release. Does searches on words in english, or greek/hebrew. A good cross reference system. Allows you to paste bible text into any application (eg Pages) with a hotkey.

• Audacity

A full-featured audio recorder. It can record audio with a level indicator, then process the audio (speed it up, slow it down, raise or lower the pitch, compress, normalise etc) and then export to mp3 or other formats. Stick with the simpler ’soundstudio’ if you don’t need these features.

This one is quite an advanced tip.
If you right-click on a file you get a little menu, and if you select ‘open with’ you get a list of all the programs you can open a file with.
After a while of installing new versions of programs, this list can become quite long!
To reset it open up a Terminal window. (from Applications/Utilities) and paste the following line:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

press return wait about 20 seconds, and your open with menu will be fixed.

I think this only works on 10.4 and it may reset some other things to, like what applications open certain files.

With OSX apple has re-worked everything from the ground up, so there are a lot of old “features” lacking. For example, lots of features of the good old appleworks did not make it to iwork.

I think it’s not that Apple decided to take the features out of appleworks, but they have just written iwork from scratch and are slowly getting round to putting them in.Lots of times I think to myself ‘why does this not do this’ but then apple bring it out.
For example, Mail merge and formulas in spreadsheets just got added with the iwork 2006 release. We still don’t have a thesaurus, and there is no way to print a booklet from iworks yet.

There will be lots of things after having a PC with office and publisher where you will think “How can I do this?”, but you can’t. So mentally it’s better to think, “this is new, let’s learn from scratch” rather than thinking of “changing” from PC to mac.

Try to resist the disappointment of lack of features, and enjoy the simplicity and integration OS X offers.

Despite the similarities between OSX and XP/ME etc, they are quite different.

Even I took while a while to get used to iwork when I already had a mac.

Avoid the temptation of computer people to put things in your own choice of directories. OSX likes you to leave things where it puts them. Eg if you put all your photos in iphoto, they will be available to iwork, idvd, imovie etc. If you decide to put your photos in your own spot, they won’t. It’s very integrated, but likes you to put photos in iphoto, music in itunes folder, addresses in address book, calendar in ical etc. It’s best to just jump in boots and all and to it the OS X way.

Don’t be tempted to use office for email and a PIM like I did it for 6 months, you lose the simplicity of the OS X integration if you do this. Certainly don’t do things like partition a part of hard drive for all your data.

Basically don’t fight against OSX, run with it. Enjoy what it can do, try not to be frustrated by what it can’t do.