Apple has introduced a ‘print’ button onto iPads, iPhones and iPods to allow you to print directly to a printer from your iOS device. Unfortunately  you need a special AirPrint enabled printer. Thankfully there is a free application called ‘AirPrint Activator’ that allows you to print to any printer, here’s where to get it and how to use it.

AIRPRINT

On your iPhone at the bottom of some apps is a ‘share’ button. If you click this button you get a menu of different ways to share the content, one of these options is ‘print’ as shown below.

Share Button

Print Button

If you don't have an AirPrint printer there will be no printer here to select

Click on the 'Show Downloads' button to find it.

To find printer sharing click on 'Print & Scan'

 

In printer sharing preferences you need to select your printer on the left and then click the ‘Share this Printer’ box.

The final step - turn on Printer Sharing

 

The Printer should now appear in your iPad or iPhone printing menu!

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.

Macintoshhowto.com has been averaging 150,000 visits a month lately. It sits on a server with 5 or 6 other web sites but I thought it deserved a server of it’s own. I moved it across it today. You can read more about it here.

When you plug in a second monitor to Macintosh computer, it may display an exact copy or ‘mirror image’ of what is on your first display.  This is called mirroring.  This is fine if you are doing a presentation and you want to see on your laptop screen exactly what is on the projector,  but it’s not very useful at home to have the same thing on both screens. If you’d like to see different things on each screen, so the second screen gives you more desktop space, you need to turn mirroring off. Here’s how.

1.Go to’ system preferences’  in the Apple menu,  and then to ‘ displays’  and  click on the ‘arrangement’  tab.

2. Deselect the box that says ‘ Mirror Displays’

3. You have now turned off mirroring and should have two separate desktops!

NOTE:

On some machines,  for example lower end of iBooks and iMacs,   to differentiate them from the higher models, Apple have disabled the ability to have two separate displays so that your external monitor is permanently mirroring what is on your main monitor.

There is a program that can re-enable this feature to turn on the ability to have a separate second display.  It’s  called  screen spanning doctor. It automatically checks that your Mac is able to run a second monitor and then makes the appropriate changes. You can download it from here.

When you have more than one computer and more than one iPhone or iPod there are various ways to sync your iTunes songs across all your devices.  This article outlines them all.

Option 1: iTunes Library sharing

+ Simple, Free.

- Both Computers must be on. Songs can’t be copied.  iPhone syncing  can only be done manually to one computer.

ITUNES SHARING LETS YOU PLAY SONGS FROM ONE COMPUTER TO ANOTHER.

If you go to the preferences menu of iTunes and click on the sharing tab you can turn on ‘Sharing’  of your iTunes library.  This means that any other computer with iTunes on the same network as your Macintosh  can see and play the songs from your iTunes library. You can’t copy the songs from one computer to the other,  so for this to work both computers must be turned on AND HAVE ITUNES RUNNING.

The simplest way to share files to other computers on your network: share your iTunes library from the iTunes preferences.

After you share your library a  new entry will appear in your iTunes window on all other computers on your network under ‘SHARED’  and  will see  the entire iTunes library from your other computer. You can click on and play any song -  they will stream from your other computer. Streaming simply  means the song is played over the network but it is not copied to the 2nd computer,  so after you have finished listening to the song it is gone from your 2nd computer.  If the 1st computer is turned off you do not have access to the song any more.

 Option 2: Apple home sharing

+ Simple, Free, You can copy songs between computers.

- iPhone syncing is still manually to one computer.

The next step up is Apple Home Sharing.  It requires you to enter your iTunes ID and password,  and is limited to 5 computers, but it will then allow you to copy songs between computers that are on your  ’Apple Home Sharing’  account.

1. To turn on Apple Home Sharing go to the advanced menu on your iTunes application and click on ‘ Turn on Home Sharing’. It  will ask you for your Apple ID which is the ID that you registered up with the iTunes store.  You can register up to 5 computers on the same Apple ID. You need to manually sync your iPhone or iPad to one of your computers.

2. If you want a song to permanently copy across to your 2nd computer select the song and click on ‘ import’. This will copy the song across to your 2nd computer so that you can play it when the 1st computer is off.

Option 3: iTunes Match.

+ All songs automatically available to all computers and iOS devices.

- Songs are now limited to 256kbps in iOS devices, you can no longer manually sync, you need to be in internet range to play a song the first time, not all songs sync.

It would be nice to have a solution where you can listen to any songs from any computer at any time without having to manually copy them to your computer or iPhone. Apple have solved this problem in the most remarkable way with ‘iTunes Match’. iTunes have 20 million songs ‘in the cloud’. That means out there on Apple servers. Rather than upload all your songs from your computer it simply looks at what songs you have, then let’s you access those songs (from the Apple server) from any of your iOS devices, anytime!

For example, I have the U2 song ‘One’ on my computer  which I imported into iTunes from a CD. When I sync to iTunes match,  Apple registers that I own this song. I can then listen to this song on my iPhone for free,  without my computer  even being on –  it streams the song from the Apple server.

Of course this uses Apple’s servers and Apple’s computing power so Apple charge a fee for this of  approximately $30  per year depending on where you live.

Here is how to register and setup iTunes match:

1. Click on iTunes match in your iTunes sidebar

2. Subscribe!

3. Wait while iTunes match syncs your files

In the setup process iTunes match takes 3 steps. First, iTunes will scan your entire iTunes library.  My library has approximately 3500 songs and this step took 6 minutes.

Secondly,  iTunes compares your songs to the songs in the iTunes library.  This step took about an hour  on my computer. All the songs that were on the Apple server are now available:

In the last step iTunes uploads all the songs from your computer to the iTunes cloud server that it cannot find on its cloud server. This last step took hours and hours.  There was approx 7 Gig of data in total uploaded!

Now you need to go to your iOS device and turn on iTunes Match. Go into ‘Settings’, ‘Music’ and turn on ‘iTunes Match’ to make the songs available to your iPod or iPhone.

Turning on iTunes match on an iPod

Now your songs are available on your iPhone - the cloud means they are on the cloud.

Now, there are a few limitations of iTunes match.

1. Songs are no longer lossless, even if they were lossless on your home computer. This is probably not a huge drawback as iOS devices don’t have the highest quality sound as it is.

2. The first time you play a song there is a 10-20 second delay while the song starts streaming, and if you skip forward on the song with the playback slider there is a delay while it starts streaming again.  Once you listen to a song it seems to stay on your iOS device and it plays straight away next time.

3. For some songs it says I need to be in wifi range and won’t play then over the phone network.

4. Not all songs are eligible for iCloud.  Of my 4912 items in iTunes, 1676 were not eligible for iCloud sync – a whole heap of talks I’ve collected plus my audio Bible.  The apple website says “You can match or upload music formats that can be played with iTunes. That includes AAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless, and more.” But the 1/3 of my iTunes that wouldn’t sync to iCloud were plain old  mp3 files that I can play in iTunes and on my iPhone. They sync with a manual sync, but not over iCloud.

In summary, iTunes match is a handy way to have most of your songs with you anywhere, but at the point of listening it’s not as convenient as having all the songs on your iOS device as you would from a manual sync.

This song for some reason needs wifi.

Quite often I want to SMS 10 or 20 people at once to let them know something, but it’s painful on the iPhone – you need to select each contact one by one each time. This great little app called ‘Peepo‘ lets you create a group (it calls them ‘peepo circles’) and then easily email OR  SMS everyone in the group.

Better still, it shows a little red alert to let you know who the SMS won’t be delivered to if your group has contacts without a Mobile Phone number.

Is your computer backed up? With 2T hard disks at around $100, there’s no excuse not to have your computer backed up. At the very least, you should have an external USB Hard Disk with some kind of backup on it. If you haven’t – do it now! This is the easiest way.

As for me – it’s the start of the New Year so I’ve re-evaluated my backup regime. I think it’s working well. Here’s what it is:

Backup 1 – Time Machine.

I have a 2TB external USB hard drive with an automatic time-machine backup. I can go back an ‘undelete’ or find any file I’ve deleted in the past year or so. If my main Hard Drive fails, my data is backed up hourly. How to setup time-machine.

Backup 2 – Manual Copy to USB Drive.

I have a 1.5TB  external USB hard drive that I backup manually with Carbon Copy Cloner each month (well, probably 3 monthly, but I aim for monthly). Backup 1 is not bootable. It’s useful to recover information off, but not to get things up and running in a hurry. My backup 2 is bootable so I can reboot and be running off it in a minute or so. How to make a bootable backup.

Backup 3 – Offsite Copy to USB Drive.

I have another version of my 1.5TB backup – an exact copy of backup 2, which I keep offsite at a friends place.  I swap it every 6 months or so , so that if my computer gets stolen I at least have an off-site copy of all my files that’s reasonably recent. When I go to my friend’s place I occasionally take the new drive and pickup the old one.

Extra Precautions.

I also run my computer’s main Hard Disk in a Pegasus RAID array. This is a bit fanatical for the home user, but worth it if your work is stored on your computer. Basically the data is stored on more than one drive. If one of my hard drives fail, my computer will just keep going, and tell me to replace the faulty drive. When I replace the faulty drive it will repair itself.

What about you?

I’ll say it again, at the very least, you should have an external USB Hard Disk with some kind of backup on it – either a Time-Machine backup OR a manual backup of your entire computer. If you haven’t… do it now!  This is the easiest way.

If your hard drive fails – it’s too late! I cannot count the number of times people have come to me with a broken hard drive asking if I can get data off it, and they didn’t have a backup.  Think of all the data on your computer: photos, word processing documents, music, etc.  If you lost it all, would it be worth $100 to get it back? If so then get it backed up now!

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.

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 four-year-old Mac pro to a new Mac mini, only to find that my 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 it. 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.

Even though I am  fairly good with audio and computers I have gone back to having a regular phone line simply because even at best quality VOIP  calls on a broadband connection don’t match the quality of a land-line phone or even a mobile phone, at least in Australia.

If  you do have a VOIP connection, here are some tips.

What you need.

1. BROADBAND INTERNET

For VIOP to work well you need broadband with at least 128Kbps UPLOAD speed.

Eg 512/128 is too SLOW.

1500/256 is GOOD.

1500/512 is EXCELLENT.

The main danger is that internet plans generally have faster download speeds then upload. (Eg if you have a 8000/512 connection that means 8000 download and 512 upload.) This means that you might hear the other person properly, but they can’t’ hear you well. Therefore the main thing to check when you get a VOIP connection is that the person on the on the other end can hear you clearly.

2. FAST INTERNET

Secondly you also  need an Internet connection with low ping time. Ping  time is how long it takes for the smallest piece of data to go from your computer to the Internet or the other way.  Download speed measures how fast lots of data can come,  it’s the equivalent of how much water is flowing down a river. Ping time  is closer to how fast  a boat will float down the river. It’s  possible to have a wide river that’s flowing slowly, in other words it possible to have a big download speed but  slow ping time, and this is the case with satellite connections.  This is why you can have a reasonable sized plan on satellite connection but VOIP  still doesn’t work well.

3. A GOOD PHONE ADAPTER.

YOU NEED A PHONE TO INTERNET ADAPTER, called an ATA. (Otherwise You’ll have to have your computer turned on all the time and use a program like skype)
The ATA plugs into your ethernet router or may even be included in it, and then your normal phone into it.
You can spend lots of time looking for a good one, but the SPA3102 I use is pretty good, it plugs into the phone line as well so that if your internet is not working (eg in a blackout) you can still call out via your normal phone line.

4. A GOOD VOIP PROVIDER
Engin is very popular, but like Telstra, popular doesn’t mean the best deal.
I tried 4 or 5 for a month, and now I use pennytell, 2c per minute calls, 13c per minute to mobiles.
Also you need to pick a good codec, this is a bit tricky. Make sure whoever you buy the SPA3102 from can help you set it up.

5. GOOD CODEC SETTINGS

Talk to your VOIP provider about this.

I’ve found G726-32 is good.

G711 may be better quality theoretically but breaks up too much when the line speed drops.
G723a. I think may be good too.
I read this somewhere…
“The most commonly used mode G726-32 , since this is half the rate of G.711, thus increasing the usable network capacity by 50%. It is primarily used on international trunks in the phone network. It also is the standard codec used in DECT wireless phone systems.”

6. QoS on your Router

Another problem is that the VOIP connection may work fine, but when you download or browse the Internet it gets choppy.  To avoid this you need a feature on your Internet router called QoS which stands for  quality of service.  What this does is gives priority to your phone calls.  This means that a phone call can interrupt a webpage being loaded, but a webpage won’t interrupt a phone call. If you don’t have QoS  the router will try to let the phone call and the webpage through and the phone call will become “choppy”.