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

The application iPhoto is used to manage digital photographs and quicktime videos taken on your digital camera.

I use iPhoto for offloading digital pictures and video clips from my camera and modifying the pictures and cataloging the videos on it. The Quicktime videos can be moved to iTunes for cataloging and playback. You can also use iMovie for digital movie clips and stills.

The secret editing mode gives you much better control over the Red Eye and Retouching tools. You can adjust the size of the Redeye and Retouch tools and the intensity of the Retouch tools. The Redeye tool now shows up as a round center in a oval cross hair. The Retouch tool now allows you to control the size and of the tool and the intensity.

A caller had a question about how to “see” his printer, and print to it, from his Mac, given it’s connected to his Windows machine by USB.

I thought that we had answered this question before, however, I see that while we did answer a Mac-Windows printing question earlier this month, we did not answer this specific question! [see this May 3 MacWork.com article about cross-platform printing ]

The straight-forward answer is probably:

As a system administrator, I have experienced one particular problem with User Names when moving users from local to network-based home directories. The long name(s) or short name(s) cannot be the same on the local machine as the one on the ODM (Open Directory Master). If the long name or short name is the same, the user just logs in locally (local NetInfo is always first on the search list).

A solution:

1. Log in as an admin user and delete your account, DO NOT PRESS THE IMMEDIATE BUTTON!, just hit return and it will create a compressed .dmg file and place it in a “Delete Users” folder.

I bought the Missing Sync (www.missingsync.com ) and I have to tell you, for anyone using Palm products and the Palm desktop HotSync software I must tell you it is a GODSEND. I know a client that is using the Sony Clie and I myself am using the Palm Treo 650. Syncing it via usb cable or wireless thru Bluetooth is incredibly simple. Bluetooth takes a few minutes longer, but is still flawless in data transfer. The interface plays nicely with Palm conduits as well as the .Mac sync suite (iCal, Address Book) and even will sync up your tunes from iTunes. I was amazed at the ease of use with it. I have in the past spent many a long workday futzing with Palm HotSync and the conduit setting for my clients. Palm doesn’t seem to proactive as of yet to change the interface of their software, and until then I will gladly recommend this software title to our clients that struggle with the integrated Palm suite.

Many of us enjoy the easy and convenient use of PayPal, an online payment service most often used in tandem with the electronic marketplace eBay. But like flies to sugar, online theives are drawn to the cash that PayPal’s electronic banks hold. They use fake emails crafted to look like something you would receive from PayPal to get your personal information. The term for emails like these is “phishing” emails. There are some dirty folk out there on the internet, but luckily they are easy to spot if you know where to look.

Here’s a typical example of a PayPal “phish”.

The next time you set an iCal alarm, instead of a boring alert sound, have it play one of your favorite tunes.

First select an event in iCal. In the Info panel click on “None next to alarm and choose Open File from the pop-up menu. A new field appears directly below alarm. Click on the new field and choose Other from its pop-up menu. In the Open dialog box that appears go to your music folder, find the tune you want and select it. Now choose when you want the alarm to go off and you’re all set.

If there was an emptiness inside you because you couldn’t find your favorite Dave Matthews Band song on iTunes, get ready to leave Gray Street and get your ants marching.

Apple reports that the entire DMB catalog is now available on iTunes. You can download each song for the usual pittence of just 99 cents per song.

The Slide Show command in Mac OS X is a really cool way to look at photos.

Let’s say you’ve downloaded a bunch of images from you digital camera onto your Mac. Select some or all of the images, Control-click (or right-click if you have a two-button mouse) on any image and choose Slideshow from the contextual menus. (In case you didn’t know, Mac OS X is LOADED with contextual menus). Ta-da! A full-screen slide show, complete with smooth dissolve transitions, appears on your screen. To end the show, press the Escape (esc) key on your keyboard.

The Chicago Sun Times had an intereseting story about the “Spam King.” Since my wife is from Austin, Minnesota, home of the George A. Hormel Company, any headline that includes the word Spam always catches my attention.

Anyway, the Sun Time story notes that Sanford Wallace and his company, Smartbot.net, have been fined $4 million by the Federal Trade Commission for installing spyware, altering browser settings and inundating users with those nasty pop-up ads.

Talk about your poetic justice. The feds notified Wallace of the ruling by sending him a thousand emails with subject lines such as, “Are we still on for tonight?”, “Here’s that link I was telling you about,” and “News about a mutual friend of ours.”

Photoshop’s Photo Filter command acts just like a colored lens filter. The built-in Warming filters makes images warmer by adding more yellow. The Cooling filters makes images cooler by adding more blue.

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