The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

You can use the iPod for more than just listening to music. It can be used for audio books and news reading as well. Another use is as a learning or training tool.

Any file that can be converted to text can be converted to an AIFF file and dropped onto iTunes. Most websites or manuals are in PDF format. One of the features of a PDF file is that it can be saved as text. This resulting text file can be edited and then converted to an AIFF file.

You have a digital image that measures 2202 pixels x 1704 pixels. You want your final print to have a resolution of 300 dots per inch (dpi). What’s the largest print you can make? Use Photoshop’s Image Size controls to find out.

Open your image in Photoshop. Choose Image > Image Size and deselect the Resample Image option. Now type 300 in the Resolution field and Photoshop shows you the size of your image in inches.

Now if a train going 60 miles an hour leaves Chicago at 11:30…

As my in-laws in Minnesota told me, “If you can’t talk about the weather, you may as well get a t-shirt that says ‘I’m not from around here.’” Here’s how to get more out of your Weather widget.(You ARE running Tiger, aren’t you?)

If you’ve got the Weather widget open and you want more information about the weather in your pick city, click on the city’s name. That launches Safari and takes you to Accuweather.com, where you’ll find more detailed weather information. If you have cookies disabled in Safari, AccuWeather.com may not save your default location.

Say you’re scanning a web page in Safari and you come across a word that you want to look up in a dictionary. You could use the Dictionary widget (assuming you’re using Tiger). But there’s a faster way.

Just highlight the word, and press Command Control D (all three keys). The definition appears in a small panel. If you don’t want to press that many keys (I know I don’t), just Control click on the highlighted word and choose Look Up in Dictionary from the contextual menu. That launches the electronic version of the Oxford Dictionary, which comes with Tiger.

With iPhoto you can generate a slide show from the photos in your collection, complete with dissolves and music from iTunes, in about five minutes.

So you’ve finally gotten around to downloading those vacation pictures from your digital camera into iPhoto. What’s the best way to look at them? Oh, sure. You could flip through them one by one in iPhoto (or Preview, for that matter). But what if you want to show them to your family and friends?

Apple is celebrating its 30th birthday. How much do you know about the company? Take the BBC quiz and find out.

Here’s the URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4860790.stm

I got 7 out of 10 (I missed 2, 6 and 8).

Know what I miss about old-fashioned adding machines? The paper tape that allowed me to quickly check my figures. Especially if I’m adding a long string of number.

If you miss paper tapes too, you’re gonna love the Paper Tape feature in Calculator. It keeps a record of every calculation you make, which can be printed or saved from the File menu To use the Paper Tape, choose View > Show Paper Tape.

I was talking to a co-worker the other day. He was creating a document in TextEdit and wanted to save it as plain text. He tried File > Save and didn’t see a plain text option. He thought that it wasn’t possible to save his document as plain text and he was right. Sort of.

You can create plain text documents in Text Edit. The trick is you have to convert your document, not save it. Simply choose Format > Make Plain Text or use the “handy” keyboard shortcut Command Shift T. (I don’t know about you, but I’m not overly fond of “shortcuts” that require a combination of three or more keys.)

No Robots Providing Mac Help Today

Ok, ok, let me start by assuring you there will be no April-fools jokes in this newsletter. I don’t promise something entirely humorless, either!

This is the second warm day in Chicago in what seems like, well, forever, and the sun is creeping in when it makes it past the clouds rolling by, warming my back, making my eyes squint and the text on the screen appear to dim. Ah, Spring! Which in Chicago at least comes on like Summer. Boom. It’s hot.