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!  

Also think about ALL your computers. I had an old laptop I use spasmodically and didn’t bother backing out up. It got stolen recently and the hassle of having to set it all up again is not worth it so back up everything!

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’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!

A photo object is a photo of an object without any background that you can can insert into a webpage or word processing document. Online clipart services such as photo.com and istockphoto have photo objects you can purchase, but here he’s how to make a photo object from any photograph using Pages, the standard OSX word processor.

Here is a photo of a camera, before and after we turn it into a photo-object.

Before

After

Step one is to open the image in pages. It helps if the background colour is different to the photo. For example if you have a black object on a black background it will be hard to differentiate the two.

Open the image in a new pages document

Next select “Instant Alpha” from the “Format” menu.

2. Select Instant Alpha from the format menu

The cursor will now turning to a cross-hair. Click anywhere on the background of the photograph behind the main object, an drag the cursor. This will cause the instant alpha tool to select all parts of the background that have a similar colour. You may need to do this multiple times if the background has various colours. Keep doing this until all the background has been selected. In the picture below you can see me highlighting a small section of the background in the middle of the photo – It is highlighted in pink.

Here I am selecting a part of the background using the instant alpha tool.

Once you have finished selecting all the background, click anywhere else in the pages document to finish the Instant Alpha process. You can now move the object wherever you want it in your pages document, or if you would prefer to use it elsewhere, for example in a webpage, simply take a screenshot using Shift-Apple-4 as described here, and this will save the image to your desktop.

Heres’s how to change the default font, size, colour etc of a new Pages document, so that every new document will have the style you want.

1. Open a New document
2. Select some text in the document
3. Change the font and color to what you want
4. Go to View: Show Styles Drawer
5. Click on the red arrow next to “Body” and & select “Redefine Style from Selection”
6. Delete all the text that you typed. Otherwise that text appears every time you open a new document.
7. Go to File: “Save As Template…” and Save the document as a name that is clear e.g. “100 black”
8. Go to Pages: Preferences
9. Under the General tab click the “Use template” for new Documents.
10. Select ‘”Templates” and select the template you just saved.

Choose your own page template for new documents.

It will now use that template for new pages documents.

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.

Quicksilver is the first app I install on any Macintosh and I’m lost without it.

With Quicksilver you press the Apple key once and a window appears on top of everything else. From this window you can pretty much do anything:  launch an app, find a file, find a contact, email someone, you name it.  Here’s how to get it going…

1. Download  Quicksilver from here: http://qsapp.com/download.php

2. Run though all the setup screens to set it up, notice that the ‘hotkey setup’ defaults to Apple-Space

3. Press Apple Space to launch Quicksilver, and click on the little triangle in the top right corner and select ‘Preferences’

In the quicksilver window select 'Preferences'

4. In the ‘Command’ tab select the box that says Modifier-only Activation. (Se Below) This was my personal suggestion and they implemented it. It’s not enable by default as it goes against Apple’s guidelines for the use of Modifier keys, but what it does is that if you just press the apple key briefly, it launches Quicksilver.

Turn on Modifier-only Activation

5. Quicksilver is now up and running.

Let’s try it. Press and release apple key: Quicksilver window appears. From there you can do all sorts of things:

• Type ‘m’. press return. Apple mail opens.
• Type ‘ph’ return and iPhoto opens.
• type ‘calc’ return and calculator opens.
• Type ‘documents’ and your documents folder opens, press right cursor then up/down to scroll through it. Press return to select a folder or document to open.
• Type the name of a song or playlist, scroll through the playlist, or press return to play the song.
• Type in the name of a document to open the document. You don’t’ need to know where  the document is.
• From the ‘save dialog’ of any application you can press apple, invoke quicksilver, find a folder, then drag the folder from quicksilver to the save dialog to save there!
• Quicksilver learns from your typing, so instead of typing ‘mail’ just type ‘m’ and scroll down to ‘mail’ and open mail. The next time you type ‘m’ it will open mail.
• Type the first few letters of a name name, and the address book entry appears. press ‘tab’ to go to the next pane, then type ‘compose’ or ‘email’ return to open an email to that person.

The list goes on and the more you use it the more surprises you will find.

There are plugins that you can access from Quicksilver preferences to give even more options to quicksilver,  e.g. address book, iTunes, mail, calculator.

You can customise the catalog in Quicksilver Preferences to include more or less of your files and folders.

There are forums everywhere on people’s favourite ways to use quicksilver:

http://lifehacker.com/247129/hack-attack-a-beginners-guide-to-quicksilver?tag=softwarequicksilver

http://superuser.com/questions/11095/what-are-your-best-uses-for-quicksilver

http://jxpx777.com/blog/five-of-my-favorite-quicksilver-tips

My advice is give it a full week because it takes you a while to get addicted to it.

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.

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.