Archive for Ask Dave Taylor
Chcek out this tutorial on how to install Boot Camp & WinXP
I’ve been a Mac user since about 1985, starting with a little 512K Mac that was portable, self-contained, and not much more than a toy. But I loved it, and I have owned a never-ending parade of Macintosh since then, upgrading about every twelve months or so. Man, that’s a lot of hardware!
All along, however, I’ve also had to buy PCs, whether laptops or desktop systems, because, well, you can’t run Windows on a Mac, can you? Yeah, there’s Virtual PC from Microsoft but I’ve never had good results running it, even on the fastest Macs I’ve owned.
That’s why when Apple released Boot Camp for its Intel-based computers, I was thrilled. Imagine, a single computer that ran both Windows XP and Mac OS X fast!. Click to Read the Full Post »
Sync your Mac with a Motorola RAZR V3c bluetooth phone!
I just got a fancy new cellphone from Verizon, a Motorola RAZR V3c, and was darn frustrated to find that it wouldn’t work out of the box with Mac OS X, either via USB cable or bluetooth. Apparently, it’s just too new for the OS to know about. Blech. Meanwhile, though, I spent hours digging through various net resources and managed to find out everything I needed to know to enable my phone to upload and download photos, ringtones, wallpapers, etc with my Mac and sync my phone book with Address Book too, all neatly via bluetooth. Darn cool.
Motorola RAZR V3c and Apple Mac: pictures, wallpaper and ringtones
Now if i can just figure out how to have the RAZR V3c work as an Internet access device, I’ll be one happy cellphone user!
Tags: motorola, bluetooth, motorola razr
Mac email attachments aren’t encoded properly?
While interoperability between Mac and Windows systems has come a long way in the last decade, and it’s rare to have Mac users wishing they were using a Windows system so things wouldn’t be messed up on transfer, there are occasional hiccups and glitches that can prove frustrating problems, particularly with email applications. A reader wrote in asking about a strange incompatibility with his attachments when sent from his Mac to other Mac users and Windows users, and it turns out that the most probable answer is pretty easy:
Mac email attachments are broken
Windows zealots will particularly appreciate my answer. :-)
Tags: entourage, apple mail
How to Tell Software Update to Ignore Programs
You’ve had it happen to you, I’m sure: the insistent warning message from the Software Update utility indicating that there’s a new version of an Apple program available for download, a program that you don’t use, and probably didn’t even know you had installed on your computer! You could just accept the update, but sometimes it’s a lot easier to simply disable the update tracking for that application:
Disable Software Update for Specific Applications
Fortunately, you can always change your mind, and re-enabling Software Updates for specific programs is also explained in the article. Ya just never know…
Tags: tiger, mac os x, software update
Managing Dashboard Widgets in Mac OS X Tiger
Much fanfare surrounded the release of Dashboard, a new feature in Mac OS X Tiger’s operating system, since picked up and mimicked by Yahoo, Microsoft, and many other companies. But while Dashboard is fun and lightweight, it’s not necessarily the easiest environment to work with, as a recent query from a reader in India attests. She asks how to remove widgets that cannot work on her computer or in her computing environment. The answer explains two different ways to solve the problem, one through the Dashboard management system itself, and the other using the command line:
&nbps; Manage Dashboard Widgets in Mac OS X Tiger
The more amusing question, however, is what people think of as the very best Dashboard widget or two, but that’s for another day…
Connect Your Mac To A WPA Wireless Network
Hello, I’m using a Linksys WRT54GS Router to connect my G4 Mac PowerBook w/ OS X 10.4.2 to the Web, and it’s working great. However, I created a closed WPA network internally with Airport and now I can’t seem to change the security setting without losing that WPA signal. This WPA network is all the router/Powerbook recognizes, and I can’t lower the setting for friends with Wi-Fi laptops. I know my SSID and lil’ password but not the WPA. So where or how can I change the security setting with Airport? Or is it permanent?
If I understand your question, it sounds like you have configured WPA on your Linksys wireless access point and your Powerbook, but are not sure what your WPA Pre-Shared Key is. Click to Read the Full Post »
Why Does Mac Safari Launch At Bootup?
I don’t know how, but my boot target drive recently changed which I fixed under system preferences. However, everytime I boot my machine now Safari opens. How do I stop this?
It’s strange that your boot drive randomly changed, without question, but I’m suspecting that you started up at one point and the standard hard disk was unable to spin up before the system bailed and switched to your secondary drive. Fortunately, you figured out that you can go to Apple –> System Preferences –> Startup Disk. Click to Read the Full Post »
Join IRC Chat On A Mac With Style…
Hi, Dave. I’m at a conference and have just been told by a fellow attendee that there’s an IRC channel for us attendees to chat in while we’re here. But I’m on a Mac and have absolutely no clue what IRC is and whether it works with my various instant message clients, so I don’t know how to join the discussion. Help!
Like me, it sounds like you probably either use specific instant messenger programs like Yahoo! Instant Messenger, Google Talk, or AOL Instant Messenger, or you use a Mac multi-IM client like Adium or Fire. They’re darn nice, particularly the last two, but none of them are compatible with IRC chat rooms. (Well, Fire is IRC compatible, but I have to say that I find it quite difficult to configure it for an IRC channel and have it work properly. Your experience may vary, of course.) Click to Read the Full Post »
How To Customize Icons And The Default Apps On Your Mac
How do I change the program associated with specific file types and the icons associated with specific file types? For example, I want to change all my PDF icons…
There are two parts to this question, so let’s tackle the harder one first. To actually change the icon associated with a specific file type, you need to munge around with the innards of Mac OS X. This, as you might expect, isn’t recommended for most users, so I would instead strongly advise you to check out some of the great shareware applications that have arisen to help you accomplish just this task. Click to Read the Full Post »
My Mac iBook Won’t Sleep When Closed!
My partner’s 12inch Apple iBook no longer sleeps when she puts the lid down. I’ve never had to fix this kind of problem and hope you can help, hence the email!
You’re not the first person to encounter this sort of problem with a laptop, but have faith, there are a number of standard paths you can travel to find a solution to this problem.
Here are the four top possible solutions to fix your sleepless, insomniac iBook, according to Apple:
- Check your Energy Saver preferences to make sure that you’ve allowed your Mac to sleep: From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences. Click Energy Saver, then click the Sleep tab. Make sure that the two sliders are not set to “Never” sleep.
- If DVD Player is the active application, your computer won’t go to sleep even when…
Setting the command shell prompt in Mac OS X Terminal
I’m new to Mac, last Apple I owned was a IIe in the 80’s. This question is related to your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger book, page 41 “Changing the Command Prompt. In this section you give the following command for changing the prompt:
PS1= “? “
I typed this, but got the following response from the terminal window:
-bash: ? : command not found
What am I doing wrong?
I can see exactly what the shell is complaining about, and I’ll end any suspense by saying that you need to ensure that you never have superfluous spaces in the commands you type into Terminal or anywhere on a Unix command line. There’s a world of different to the Bash shell between…
My Mac Always Picks the Wrong Disk at Startup!
Upon attempting a Software Update, I was told I didn’t have enough memory and was to remove unnecessary items from my Start Up Disk, I seem to have my HD in my Start Up Disk (is that normal?).
I simply restarted my machine to find that there was a flashing square box with a globe in the centre. After about a couple of minuets of this flashing an old OS 9 emblem (two faces) in a folder flashing up along with a question mark.
It now does this all the time. Could you tell what is going on here.
You’re not the first to get into this situation, but the good news is that it’s surprisingly easy to fix it! The problem is that you’ve ended up indicating that the wrong drive or partition on your computer is where the “bootable” operating system can be found.
Your Mac then dutifully looks on that disk for an OS it can use, eventually decides it can’t find one and stalls out.
To fix it…
Dashboard Widgets and Mac Desktop just aren’t enough layers!
I love dashboard widgets! I access them by moving my cursor to the bottom left corner of my screen. Since I use my laptop for school, it would benefit me to have a third desktop layer besides the ones presented by the regular desktop and the widgets layer. Is there a way to have a third “desktop” that I can access the same way I access the widget layer?
As it happens, there are some terrific programs available that can solve the exactly problem you’re talking about, and they work by creating “virtual” desktops. With one of these programs installed on your computer, you can easily have two, three or even four or more different Mac desktop windows, with different content and application windows in each.
On my laptop, for example, I have four windows, labeled “Firefox”, “Safari”, “Entourage” and “Editing/Research”, with the applications you’d expect running in each.
The specific program I use is a freeware application called…
How to Edit HTML source files with Mac OS X TextEdit
I wrote all of my web site’s code using SimpleText in MacOS 9. Recently I made the step up to OS X and I’ve transferred all of my data from my old G-4 to the new system. When I open the html pages in TextEdit on OS X I am unable to go in and edit the code. Instead I get a screen that reads the the html and presents a page like one would see on the web. Is it possible to edit the html that was written in SimpleText and still keep it as a text file?
There are a couple of ways you can address this problem. First off, in Mac OS X, files with “.html” filename suffixes are automatically associated with Safari, the Web browser, so if you double click on them, you don’t get to an editor at all.
To open a file in your editor, Control-Click on the file’s icon. You’ll see…
How to subscribe to RSS feeds and Blogs with Safari
I’ve been running Mac OS X Tiger for a while now, and when I encounter Web sites that have RSS feeds available, I’ve noticed that a blue “RSS” graphic appears in the address bar, but I haven’t figured out how to actually subscribe to RSS feeds and use Safari as an RSS / syndication reader.
While Safari’s detection of RSS is cool, I have to agree with you that it’s definitely non-intuitive as an RSS reader. I’ve spent some time figuring it out, however, so let me show you the step-by-step process involved.
First off, let’s go to a page that is on a site that has RSS. How about… um… my own Ask Dave Taylor site? Perfect!
When viewing a page on this site, Safari (on Tiger, not Panther or previous versions of the OS) adds the following to the address bar…
How do I transfer my iTunes library?
I am currently living with my Dad, have about 1700 songs in iTunes and don’t want to lose them when I move to my Mother’s house! How could I somehow transfer the songs to my computer at my Mom’s house? Is there a way where I could burn the data to a CD or something? If you could please let me know, it’d be very appreciated.
Does your Dad’s computer have a DVD burner? If so, you could use one of the slick iTunes export utilities to pull them out of iTunes, then burn them onto DVD.
Hmmm, so how many would DVDs would you need?
Let’s see… 1700 songs at an average song size of 4MB means your 1700 song library takes up 6.8GB. An average DVD disk holds about 4GB so you should be in good shape with two DVDs for the entire music library. Not too bad.
Or, if you can afford it, go buy an external 30GB disk or larger, drag and drop your entire iTunes Library onto the disk, then import it when you get to your Moms house.
Checking CompUSA, they have…
Transfer Music Via iPod And iTunes On Your Mac
I’m running iTunes v 4.9 on my Mac (running OS X 10.2.8). I screwed up somehow and deleted my old music library trying to fix a different problem. I learned my lesson on that. I have on older v 1.5 iPod with all my music on it. Can I transfer those songs into my library?
How to move Dashboard widgets onto your Mac desktop!
I’ve fallen in love with Dashboard on my new Mac OS X Tiger system, but I hate having to type f12 to get them to show up. Is it possible to have my dashboard widgets show up on my regular desktop? Click to Read the Full Post »
Set the default email program on Mac OS X?
Mail is set as the default email program on our Mac, so when we happen to click on an email link in anything (say, our browser), the Mail app automatically opens up and creates an email message. We don’t want that, we’d like to be able to designate our chosen email apps (I use Thunderbird, she uses Entourage). How do you change this? Click to Read the Full Post »
Save HTML files from Mac OS X TextEdit?
I am new to the Mac world and I have started with Tiger. When I use the textedit program to type HTML code and save it as an HTML document all I see is the code when I open the file in any of the browsers that I use. Unlike Notepad in Window, why can’t I see the results of my code in a web page? I am completely lost and have combed the Internet. The simple Text Editor program in the older versions of the Mac OSs’ seemed to work just like Notepad in Windows. Please let me know what I am doing wrong. Click to Read the Full Post »
© 1996-2006, Lockergnome LLC. ISSN: 1095-3965. All Rights Reserved. Please read our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Email newsletters powered by WhatCounts. Domain registered at GnomeDOMAINS. T-shirts and Screen Printing at CustomInk. Computer service from Comtec.
- Add to iTunes
- Add to YouTube
- Add to Google
- Add to Yahoo!
- Add to AOL
- Add to Bloglines
- Add to NewsGator
- Blog Feed
- Video Feed
- Audio Feed
- Live Feed
-
-
Search
-
About
Dedicated to the world of OS X, Carbonized and Cocoa downloads, terminal tips, GUI tweaks, cross-platform help, application skins, new fonts, and anything else we care to share with the Apple community-at-large.
- Laser Triggers Electrical Activity In Thunderstorm
- Computer Game Helps COPD Patients Breathe Better
- Getting Wired For Terahertz Computing
- High Blood Pressure May Protect Against Migraine
- No Wonder Many People Are Disappointed With Hybrids
- Location Spoofing Possible With Wi-Fi Devices
- Scientists Debate The Accuracy Of Al Gore’s Documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”
- Popcorn-Ball Design Doubles Efficiency Of Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells
- Human Values Key To The Development Of New Technologies
- Can Micro-Scaffolding Help Stem Cells Rebuild The Brain After Stroke?
- Breakthrough At Stonehenge Dig
- Nanotechnology Could Solve Lithium Battery Charging Problems
- The Future Of Solar-Powered Houses Is Clear
- Study Sheds New Light On Habits, Roles Of Blog Readers
- Revolutionary CO2 Maps Zoom In On Greenhouse Gas Sources
- Evolution On The Table Top
- Computer System Consistently Makes Most Accurate NCAA Picks
- Hybrid Computer Materials May Lead To Faster, Cheaper Technology
- Are Animals Stuck In Time?
- Foldable And Stretchable, Silicon Circuits Conform To Many Shapes
- Online Web Conferencing for Meetings
- Network Tools for Windows
- Trade in Your Cell Phones for Money
- Get Your Own Web Site
- Get a Free Audio Book
- VMware and Parallels for Virtual Machines
- Screenshots and Capture Software
- Shopping Coupons and Codes
-
Meta