The safest way to save a movie from a Macintosh computer that you want to transfer to a PC is to save it as an AVI file. The problem is (as pointed out in the comments below!) is that the latest version of Quicktime cannot save AVI’s. To save an AVI file you’ll need to use Quicktime 7, AND you’ll need to upgrade it to quicktime pro which you can do here for US$30.

The older Windows movie maker (the one that came with Windows XP and Vista) only imports .asf, .avi and .wmv files. So if you want to export movies from your Mac that someone in the PC world is to be able to read, and better yet, edit, it will need to be in one of these three formats. QuickTime can export an AVI movie, but not the other two formats.

For newer PC’s, the latest Windows Live movie maker (included with Windows 7) can read QuickTime movies which is great. It cannot however save AVI files! (Only WMV). I assume this means that Microsoft is phasing out AVI files?

Anyway, for the present time AVI seems to be the best way to transfer files to a PC. It doesn’t where the file was created, iMovie, iDVD, digital camera footage or whatever. This is irrelevant. If you export it as AVI then a Windows computer can read it.

To export a QuickTime movie as an AVI movie:

1. In QuickTime 7 Pro select File > Export.

2. On the Export: list select AVI

Lastly, click the save button and it will save your movie as an AVI file that any PC computer can read.

(A bookmarklet is a small piece of code that looks like a bookmark but is more than a bookmark!)

Click on this link, and while keeping the mouse button down, drag it to your Safari toolbar (rename it something easy like spellcheck).

You can find the original bookmarklet here.

How to use:
Click the new “spellcheck” link on your toolbar. A little symbol with a tick will appear at each textbox – click it to do a spellcheck.

It was all very easy when you had one iPod and one computer. But what do you do when you have an iPhone, 4 iPods, and three computers in the same household? Can you sync multiple computers to one iPod or vice versa?

There are various third-party applications to allow an iPod to sync with two different computers or to sink the library of two different computers together, but I’m going to talk about how to do it the Apple way…

If you have one computer, you can synchronise any number of iPhone’s or iPods to that computer. Just plug them in and when prompted say yes, I’d like to sync this ipod to this computer. If you select your iPod in iTunes, and select the Music tab, and then under settings select the “Entire music library” option, all the songs on your computer will be available on all your iPod or iPhones. Also, any songs that you purchase from iTunes on your iPhone will be synced back to your computer, and then passed on to the other iPod or iPhones. If for some reason this does not work, if you control click (left button click) on your iPhone in iTunes and then you will find a special menu item to manually transfer the purchased items across.

In other words syncing between multiple iPods and iPhones to a single computer works really well.

Going from one iPod/iPhone to multiple computers is more of a problem. If you have the “Entire music library” sync option checked, you can only sync your iPod or iPhone to one computer. This seems to be Apple’s way of stopping you pirating songs from one computer to another one.

So the Apple way of doing things is to choose which computer each iPhone or iPod will be synced with and just sync it to that one computer.

If you have two computers in your house, and you want to share your music between them, you simply have to go to your iTunes preferences and turn on library sharing as follows (this is with Snow Leopard) :

This will share all the music from one computer to any other computers on the same network – but both computers need to be turned on WITH ITUNES OPEN! This can be a bit of a downer if one computer is happens to be out in your study and it is your main one, so Apple have an option for you to transfer purchases from one computer to the other.

On your second computer, go into iTunes, turn on sharing, and your iTunes library should appear on your second computer like this:

There will be now two new buttons on the bottom right hand side of your iTunes library that control the copying of songs from your first computer to your second computer. The buttons look like this:

You can manually import songs by selecting the song and clicking on import, or you can automatically import purchased songs by clicking the settings button and selecting them:

Once you have this syncing working, you don’t need to have your first computer on to access the songs that were purchased on it. Of course you will have to make a decision as to whether you want all the songs from your first computer transferred across to your second one and taking up valuable hard drive space, or whether you want to manually transfer just some of the songs across.

SUMMARY: You can sync multiple iPods and iPhones to one computer and all the purchased songs will transfer across automatically. You can share libraries between different Macintosh computers. What you can’t do is synchronise one iPod or iPhone to different computers. If you don’t have snow leopard, you can do everything mentioned above except for the sinking of iTunes purchases between computers. The import and settings button were only added to iTunes in snow leopard.

The old theme looked like this.

Telstra are a bit behind the times – their latest offerings of wireless modems don’t work under Snow leopard.
Thankfully it’s only the installer that doesn’t work so here’s how to get the wireless router version of their 3G modem working with Snow Leopard.

You need a web connection (seperate from your new wireless modem) to do this and a bigpond wireless modem.

You cannot put your new big pond username and password into the wireless modem until you have registered that particular wireless modem with your big pond username. The installation CD gets around this but because it doesn’t work in snow leopard, with snow leopard you will need an already existing Internet account to connect to the big pond site and set up your new modem ready for use. Here is how to do it.

1. In system preferences/network/airport  turn on Airport.
2. Connect to your new wireless modem airpirt network using the airport password (WPA) on the small buainesss card that came with the modem. The little wireless bars in the top right of your menu bar should go back to show that you are connected.

3. Open safari and type in 10.0.0.138 where you would type in the web address.  Press return. This will take you to the wireless router page, it should ask you for a username and password. When prompted type admin as the username and admin as the password.

4. On the menus at the top of the page go to diagnostics/ Next G

5. You need to find the imei number and the imsi number. Copy both of these numbers and paste them into text editor or something because you will need them later.

6. Now you need to go to a computer that is connected to the internet and type in this address into the web browser. If you only have one computer, at this point you will need to disconnect from the big pond wireless router and reconnect your old modem and get onto the Internet. When you are connected to the Internet, or using a different computer, go to the following address:

https://register.bigpond.com/hsdpa.do?imei= xxxxxxxx&imsi=yyyyyyyy

(where I have put XXXXX and YYYYY you need to substitute the numbers from step 5 above instead of xxxxxxxx and yyyyyyyy)

What this is doing is manually registering your next G modem with Telstra.

7. You will now appear at a big pond signup page and it will automatically take you through the process to sign up, asking you for an e-mail address, personal details and so on.

8. After you have finished signing up you need to go back into the wireless modem and put your new settings (Username and password) in.

To do this, it’s the same as steps 1 to 3 above, go to 10.0.0.138 and then to next G settings.
Click disconnect, after it disconnects you will be allowed to edit the user name and password.

Enter the username (username@bigpond.com) and the password you used during the online signup process.
CLick Connect – it should not be working

If you have problems:

Ring activations:
137663 2   will tell of the progress of your signup
Or ring tech support 133933 with any problems.

Hopefully Telstra will have this issue resolved soon!

1. Open iTunes.
2. Go to the ’store’ page.
3. If you are signed in, sign out of itunes store (Click sign out on the menu above the top right of the iTunes store window in iTunes)
4. Select the country.
5. Go to app store.
6. Buy any FREE ipod application.
7. Click on create new account.
8. Under payment method select none as follows:

That’s it.
You can continue the signup process and you will have an account without a Credit Card linked to it.

SUMMARY:To get an iTunes account without a credit card you need to be logged out on my tunes, purchase a free iPhone app, and select none under payment options.

In this article I explained how to download a youtube video with safari, but it does not work form some websites, eg vimeo. There’s a neat little app from here called videobox that you can download that will download flash video from any website and convert it from flv to to mp4 for you. Another option is cosmopod.

Firstly you need to get the URL of the video.

1. Launch Videobox.

1. In Safari, while the video is playing, go to the safari activity window.

2. Look for the line that has a large file that is still downloading this is your video. In the example below it is the line that has 21.3 of 30.8MB. Double click on this line and the video will open all by itself in a new window.

3. Click on the little icon that looks like an earth in the safari address window next to the URL and drag it into Videobox.

That’s it, press the little download button in Videobox and it will download your video for you and convert it to mp4.

UPDATE:

Videobox costs $15

Cosmopod does a similar thing, only $12.50, plus it has a button in Safari to make it easier. In fact, according to this comment from Bryson, Cosmopod might be the better of the two.

If you are a student or a minister, and just after the basic language tools for Greek and English, (and Hebrew thrown in for free) so you can search, parse words, look up lexicons etc, here’s my buying advice:

1.   Buy the Scholar’s Intro package for  $149. (On special December for $119 – see below). This includes the Greek, Hebrew and  your choice of one English Bible (Eg NIV, NASB ESV)

2.  Add a Greek LEXICON: either Liddell & Scott $45  or Louw & Nida $30

3. If you are into Hebrew add a Hebrew Lexicon: BDB Complete $55

4. Optionally add LXX greek text: LXX1 $80  (I find this very useful searching for a NT greek word in LXX)

A cheap good version just to read, do searches in, and paste into your wordprocessing documents is Online Bible.  It’s free but to get the NIV, NASB etc it will set you back US$80 to get the CD.

Here is a good overview of verse pasting software for mac.

I use bluehost.com to host the macintoshhowto.com site and I run wordpress to run the site. Here’s how to set up wordpress on bluehost!

1. You need to sign up for a web hostign package. I use bluehost.com for all my sites. They are great. When you signup you can register one free domain name so make sure you have a domain name ready to go.

2. To install wordpress go to the c-panel and find the simple-scripts installer.

3. Click on wordpress:

There are some options you’ll need to fill in:

4. That’s it – login to your wordpress admin panel and make a post. Install a theme, set up some widgets and off you go!