Macintosh How To

How to take a picture of part of your screen.

admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:42:55 +0000

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:

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.

Personal Plug

admin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:06:08 +0000

Selling a 3G iphone here.

Tethering your iPhone as a wireless modem with Telstra.

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:27:59 +0000

Connecting your laptop to the internet through your iPhone is called tethering. It’s useful if you are out with your macbook and you don’t have access to the web. You can surf the web on your laptop using your phone as a wireless modem. It was made possible with iPhone Software Version 3. Here’s how to turn it on.

1. On your iPhone go to Settings/General/Network/Cellular Data Network/APN and see if it says ‘internet’ or ‘telstra.iph’

2. If your phone had ‘internet’ in step 1, then, using Safari on your iphone, click here.

If your had telstra.iph in step 1, then from your iphone click here.

3. After you click on the link you will be automatically be taken to a screen like this:

Click on ‘Install’

3. Go to Settings General Network and there will be a new pane called internet tethering that looks like this:

Turn it on. Tethering is now enabled on your iphone.

4. Plug your phone into your computer via USB. Rather than the usual sync, you’ll get a message like this:

Note the number, here it is (en2). Click on ‘Network Preferences’

5. In the left pane click on the number (en2) you noted above.

6. Click on advanced button (bottom right of window). You’ll see a window like this:

Click on ‘Renew DHCP Lease’ and all the numbers should fill in something like above.

7. Click on OK and you will go back to the original window and the (en2) or whatever number it was should now be green and move to the top – you are connected!

You should now be able to surf the web on your laptop. Your iphone will light up like this to show you are tethering.

Speed is nothing great, but it works. (Make sure you are on a big data plan!)

NOTE: For other carriers (Optus, Vodaphone etc) you can do this too, click here to get the configuration file.

How do I speed up my webpage?

admin — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:24:09 +0000

You’ve made a webpage, but people are complaining that it’s too slow to load.
It may be that they have a slow computer, or it may be that your webpage has too many large files in it, and it should be made smaller. Safari can tell you how many files it needs to load, and how big they are. Here’s how.

1. First enable the developer menu in safari. To do this QUIT SAFARI, open the terminal and type in the following and hit return:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
OR
Download Onyx and under ‘Parameters’ ‘Safari’ select the ‘Enable Debug Menu’ option.

2. Load your page in Safari, and under Develop select ‘Show Web Inspector’

3. This will open a new window down the bottom. Click the Resources Tab, then the Size Tab.

You will now see a graph of all the files on your webpage and how big they are. It will look something like this:

You can see in this example (wpcc.org.au) that the entire webpage is 1.028 MB – reasonably large, most of it images. The best way to reduce it would be to go back and find the original images on your computer and compress them to make them smaller. Lots of these images are quite small and yet are 70KB – they could be reduced to 10 or 20KB probably without muck loss of image quality.

As a comparison:
Apple.com uses about 600K, notice it’s reasonably graphic rich and yet only 250Kb of images.
macintoshhowto.com uses 963Kb – a bit big.
google.com uses 177Kb – very slim!

If you click on ‘time’ instead of size you can see a graph of how long the various parts take to load on your computer.

Shovebox review – a new notetaking app.

admin — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:55:28 +0000

There is a noticeable lack of any notetaking app for mac that will sync with an iphone. By notetaking application I mean an application that you can use like a notepad: Write down thoughts on a topic. Come back later and find them. Add a few more notes when you want to. A new application, Shovebox seems to be OK, although it’s still early days…

Firstly to appreciate how seemingly hard this is to do, consider the following apps:

FAILED CONTENDERS

Evernote:
Great for capturing information, but you can’t edit notes on the iphone.

Apple Notes app:
Good on iphone but you can’t edit the notes on your mac.

SOHO notes:
My favourite I’ve been a user of SOHO notes for many years, but you can’t even read notes from iphone let alone edit them.

Yojimbo:
again great app but no iphone application apart from webjimbo is too complicated.

Together:
again, it may be a great app but no iphone access to notes and they say they have no plans to develop one.

Devonthink:
again, it may be a great app – a lot more than just notetaking but no editing of notes from the iphone

So there have been various workarounds. Some people have been using contacts to store notes, some have been using draft emails. It’s embarrasing to be a mac user and hear about this, so it’s nice to finally have a solution.

Shovebox:

Shovebox is a new piece of software just for taking notes. It’s got great potential.

Pro’s:
It syncs with the iphone.
You can edit notes on the iphone.
There are rules that automatically sort notes by keywords if you wish.
Amazing selection of hotkeys to grab data instantly.

Con’s:
On the iphone you can only edit the files as text files not RTF (not sure if this will be addressed in the future or not?)
On the iphone app you can’t search notes – only browse.
It’s complicated to actually read a note on the mac! There’s no preview, and I’ve found that sometimes when you click to open the note it doesn’t work.
It cost’s $25.
It’s still almost a beta version. There are some things that are a bit messy, and/or missing.

It will be interesting to see how shovebox develops.

How to watch and record TV on your mac

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:29:30 +0000

To watch digital TV on you mac you first need some hardware to get a signal into your computer, then you need software to display it and record programs etc.

1. Firstly you need a USB TV tuner stick.
One end plugs into your USB port, the other end has an antenna socket where you plug the lead coming out of you antenna. So the antenna lead coming from your roof now plugs into you computer as if it was your TV.

It looks like this:

2. You then need to load up software, the EyeTV software is great, it has a setup assistant that will automatically tune the channels in for you, guiding you along the way like this:

3. Now you can Watch TV!

I found EyeTV to be a good solution for both the hardware and software. It records shows, you can watch them later and skip the adds. It comes with it’s own remote, but also works with the apple remote.

It has some nice tweaks too, so you can set the forward skip to be 30 seconds, so each press of the remote skips exactly 1 30 second advertisement, and then set the back skip to be 2 or 3 seconds to jump just that little bit back if you miss the start of the show again.

Not too hard to set up. When I did have problems, I emailed EyeTV support and they helped me within a day with my questions.

The macintosh will automatically wake up if it is asleep, record the program, then go back to sleep when it is finished. It can even power on from powered down to record a show if you want it to. This preference (start EyeTV when the device is plugged in) is the one that allows EyeTV to automatically wake up from sleep to record – it took me a while to work out!)

For $99 per year you can subscribe to IceTV, which allows you to have more detailed and up-to-date program information, and an iphone app that will allow you to tell your computer to record shows. I just used it for the 3 months for free and didn’t sign up as I found the recording not as reliable as directly from EyeTV.

Here’s a screenshot of the iphone program:

How to integrate things and ical and mail

admin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:12:48 +0000

1. To integrate things and ical, look here. This will put all your things next and today items into ical.

2. To integrate mail with things, use this script. Place it in your mail scripts folder (User/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail), or put it anywhere and use the free beta version of Mail Act on from here or you can download the latest full verion from here). It will take the current email and turn it into a things todo without you even leaving mail.

Dr Who ringtone

admin — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:55:00 +0000

Here is an iPhone ringtone I made based on the 1980’s Dr Who TV theme.

Right click here to download.

1. Double Click it to put it into itunes.
2. Sync your iphone
3. Select it from settings/sounds/ringtones.

How to get your iphone working on the Telstra 3G network

admin — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:40:28 +0000

I’ve had a few goes at getting a browsing pack for a Telstra pre-paid iphone, it took a while for Telstra to work out how to get it going, here’s how to do it.

1. Purchase the Telstra pre-paid Next-G SIM card, and get Telstra to put it in your iphone.

2. Purchase a datapack. Do this first or you will waste all your credit on expensive data rates! You do this by sending an SMS that says browsepluspack10 to 1257587

3. Turn off WIFI and try to access the web via safari. Your phone will give a message that says ‘could not activate cellular data’.

4. Ring the Telstra general number, 125111, and say to the computer lady ‘Next G mobile phone” Hopefully the computer lady will say ‘Was that Telstra Next-G mobile and Communic8′ – you are on the right track.

5. If you happen to talk to an operator they may suggest you ring prepaid (1258880). Do not ring pre-paid, you will get put to call centre who have no idea how to fix it. Ask to be put through to Next G mobile.

6. Ask if you are talking to Telstra Next G, if they say no, HANG UP AND GO BACK TO STEP 4!

7. When you are talking to a Next G person, you are almost there! Let them know you have an iphone, and you need it activated so you can access the data network. They will place an activation code on your account that let’s the network know it’s an iphone, you need to turn your phone off and on again, and now it will work.

There is no way to directly ring Next G.

How to buy an iphone for under $300 on $49 cap plan.

admin — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:08:02 +0000

This post is obsolete now – Telstra have just launched great new iphone plans with the iphone 3G S release.