The new iWeb 09 has the ability to publish your website to an ftp server. Here is how to use this feature so that you don’t need a .mac account to host your iWeb site.  If you have iWeb 08 or earlier, read here.

Firstly, you will need to purchase a web hosting account. This will usually come for free from your ISP with your normal internet access package.

You will need to find out some technical details from you ISP or web provider before you progress. Don’t be scared off by the funny names. They are actually quite simple. These are the details of where your webpage will be stored.

You will need 4 things.

FIRSTLY, the address of the ‘ftp server’ for where you want to put your website. If your website is ‘dubbo.org’ then it will be something like ftp.dubbo.org. (It may be something more obscure like ftp.your_name.members.your_isp.net)

SECONDLY you will have a username and password with it that you will need. Your username may be your email address or it may be something different.

FINALLY will also have what we call a ‘directory’ which is simply the place your files will be stored on the website and it will be something like this: ‘/public_html’. If you don’t know what this is, ring and ask your ISP.

You will need to know all these 4 things before you proceed. It’s no use guessing them. If you don’t know them you need to ring ask your web provider who you are paying for your web hosting what these details are. In summary you need (1) ftp server address, (2) username, (3) password and (4) remote directory (or remote folder).

3. Make and edit your website in iweb. In iweb select your site, and Under ‘Site Publishing Settings select ‘FTP Server’. The first box of settings are not important – they are for your information only.

This second box of settings is the important one:

These are  the settings we talked about above from your ISP.

Fill them all in and press Test Connection.

If it works you are set to go – when you publish your site it will now publish to your website rather than to iWeb.

I was an early adopter of speech recognition. Despite being a long time Apple user user, in 1999 I purchased my first PC just to run Dragon Naturally Speaking. I would dictate to the PC and then copy the dictated files over to my Mac on a thumb drive! Dragon Naturally Speaking was by far the best dictation software but it was not available for the Appel platform.

Not too long later, Viavoice arrived on the Macintosh. It was not as good as Dragon but did the job. I  used IBM ViaVoice for the next 6 years, with a brief but disappointing trial of iListen in the middle of that time.

So I’ve been waiting for almost 10 years for Dragon NaturallySpeaking to arrive on the Macintosh!  And finally it’s here –  Macspeech Dictate.

‘At the core of MacSpeech Dictate is the world-renowned speech recognition engine, Dragon NaturallySpeaking.’

After using Macspeech Dictate since it’s release 2 years ago,  I can say MacSpeech Dictate is easily the best dictation software for the Mac. It is now up to version 1.5 and with each new release it keeps getting better. For those who for many years were limping along with iListen or Via Voice – you won’t believe the difference! The latest version of Macspeech Dictate achieves almost full accuracy with just 5-10 minutes of training.

There are a few (small) weaknesses. One is that every time it boots up you need to click to select your voice profile –  it doesn’t  have a default option.

Another weakness is that although the accuracy seems on par with Dragon naturally speaking,  the learning as you dictate is not quite as good.  With Dragon NaturallySpeaking  if I retrained a word it would never mistake it again.  I could even retrain it with words that I pronounced  badly,  so that it would  learn my bad pronunciation.  With  Macspeech  Dictate sometimes I have to retrain a difficult word five or six times and even then it doesn’t learn it  exactly how I said it – thinks.  So there must be some difference between the way Dragon Naturally Speaking and Macspeech Dictate  handle the retraining of words.

That said,  it’s a fantastic product. I use it every day,  and I’d totally recommend that you try it out if you do a lot of typing.  At the very least find a friend who has a copy and give it a trial! That’s what I did  10 years ago with Dragon Naturally Speaking and I was hooked.

If you live in the US It’s available directly from MacSpeech for $199, or people from Australia can grab it from Amazon who ship internationally.

There’s also a wireless version for $299 but if you really want the absolute best option, I’d go for the standard Macspeech Dictate version and buy your own separate top of the line wireless headset - I have written a separate article here on the best microphone to buy.

NOTE: You can read my  older and less flattering reviews of the earlier versions of Macspeech Dictate here.

My search for a good notetaking app has been a little on the obsessive side, but to me, the one thing a computer should be able to do well is take notes. I have spent 2 years on this one. I’m talking about an application where I can make a short note to myself and come back later and find it easily.

The combination of Notational Velocity on the mac, synced with Simplenote on the iphone, is for me the winner.
Step 1. Install Simplenote on your iphone.

Step 2. Sign up for a Simplenote account.

Step 3. Download Notational Velocity

Step 4. Enter your simplenote account details into the preferences of Notational Velocity.

Step5. change Notational velocity preferences to store the notes as rtf files in a folder instead of a single database file so that spotlight can find them.

That’s it! Now  all the notes in simple text on your iPhone will be synced with notational velocity on your  desktop computer.

Why I like these apps.
Simplenote is very SIMPLE, and Notational Velocity is soooo FAST. They are both elegant, and the best thing of all – they don’t get in the way.

Notational Velocity is a bit of a head spin the first time you use it. It’s so simple and it only has one box to type in – whether you’re writing a new note or searching for an old note you type in the same box!

And it is so FAST to search – the results appear INSTANTLY. It’s almost as if it’s reading your mind!

I use notational velocity for all kinds of things…

- writing down how I did something so that next time I need to do it I can remember.
- storing trivial information like the ranking of poker hands, or a list of things to take on holidays.
- lists of birthday present ideas for people
- poems and song lyrics
- lists where things are stored
- menus, letters, vision-setting, bits of computer code and so on.

I currently have 355 notes in it, and I don’t need to remember note titles, keywords or anything, I just type a word and it finds the note. It’s great.

For a long time SOHO notes was my favourite, but the worst problem is that you have to manually sync the iphone with the desktop app – I never remember to and get caught out looking for a note that is not yet synced to!

Likewise, Shovebox is a nice app  to capture notes into, but harder to search and browse them once they are in.

Like any other area of interest on the iPhone, when it comes to the Bible there are thousands of applications out there but the new kid on the block the ‘ESV Bible‘ is easily the best and here’s why…

Up until now, ‘Bible‘ has been my favourite iPhone Bible reading application. – it is simple to use and has pretty much every version you would want – NIV, CEV, NASB, ESV The Message and so on. The problem however is that it requires an Internet connection to work, and for that reason, it’s also a bit slow to use.

But having just tried out the new ESV Bible application, I have instantly fallen in love with it. Sometimes it takes a really good application to comes along to make you realise what you were missing and this is definitely the case with ESV Bible.

The navigation system is simple to use. You select a book of the Bible, it slickly pens out to give you a list of all the chapters. It’s so smooth it’s actually fun to use. To me that’s what makes the Apple experience and this app is an Apple style bible! Click on a chapter and the Bible opens at that chapter.

Click on any verse and a window slides open with cross-references to other similar verses that you can click on and navigate to, as well as a button to add your own notes to any verse, or post a verse to twitter or send averse to the e-mail app!

Click on the bottom of the screen and you have access to a ‘history’ of all the passages you’ve looked at recently – I’ve already found this very useful – and favourites section where you can add any Bible passage to your ‘ favourites’ and look it up instantly.

Of course there’s the standard ability to search the Bible, but again I like the way it is implemented with ESV Bible. The results are displayed by book of the Bible, giving you the first two results in each book, with a ‘more’ button should you wish to see more results.

You can grab it for free from itunes here: here.

I love the scroll wheel on top of the Apple mighty mouse, but after use the sweat and oil on your finger combined with grit and dust clogs the whole thing up. This manifests itself in the scroll wheel not scrolling down, or up, or in worst cases, not scrolling all. Here’s how to fix the problem.

I rang Apple and said my scroll wheel was not working and they gave me this simple but effective solution over the phone. It was not broken but just dirty. It’s funny that I could not find it anywhere on Google or on the Apple webpage, it has worked for me numerous times.

Simply take a sheet of clean white paper, put it on top of the mouse, and press down on the scroll wheel with your finger, but with the paper between your finger and the scroll wheel. Press quite hard with it and at the same time scroll around – moving it up and down and round and round. Move to a different area of the paper and give it another go.

The paper seems to absorb all the oil and gunk off the scroll wheel, and the scroll wheel in turn when it is clean must absorb the gunk off the sensors or whatever is underneath it.

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!