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

There are many ways to lose important data, and not just on your computer (where did I put my keys?). While it is almost always unexpected, and we as computer-users are often unprepared - occasionally data-loss occurs in ways that make you sit back and consider the infinite.

Recently at the OnDeckTech 24×7 help desk, I received a call from a customer who was upset, suspecting she had just potentially lost a TON of very valuable data. A video editor here in Chicago, she has a 15″ Powerbook with an 80GB HD, two Maxtor 300GB External Drives, and one 160GB LaCie Porsche drive. ALL of which fell victim to one of the most bizarre disasters I have encountered.

Have you ever longed for finding similar tunes based on your favorite artists & songs in your iTunes library? It’s only a click away as Pandora’s free web-based music player allows you to do just that!

Created by the Music Genome Project , Pandora offers continuous musical suggestions based on a vast library of song titles that are rated as a as a match for each station (artist or song title) you input into the player. Pandora also allows you to rate & skip songs, which assists in guiding a playlist fitted to your particular tastes while also allowing you to save stations so you can browse different styles of music without leaving the player. If you hear a song you’d like to own, direct links are available to Apple’s iTunes store, as well as Amazon.

In this step-by-step, we’ll walk through backing up Microsoft Entourage 2004 data in Mac OS X. Before we begin, know that Entourage groups, notes with multimedia items, and category information for everything except contacts cannot be saved in the backup file.

To create an archive of your Entourage identity, click on the File menu and click Export:

This will bring up an export window in Entourage. Select Export items to an Entourage archive and choose the items you wish to backup. In this example, Entourage will back up all items:

A good thing to do prior to first synchronizing your calendars and address books with .Mac or Zimbra here’s how to back up Apple’s iCal & Address Book data in Mac OS X 10.4.

Backing up iCal:
First, launch iCal and select File > Back up Database:

A window will appear in iCal requesting where to save the backup file to:

This will create a backup file of iCal:

After creating your backup file, store it safely on an external hard drive or burn the data to CD/DVD. To recover from your backup file, simply navigate to File > Revert to Database Backup and select the backup file.

For those of you who want a better understanding and want to go beyond the basics, there’s amazing depth of features available in Apple’s Mail.app. As of this writing, not updated since last Summer (2005), this site from Sam’s Publishing still has valuable information.

Juan called in asking about a sticky Mighty Mouse (sic).

Apple has a cute tongue-in-cheek intro to its recommendations here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302417%22

Here are pictures of how to open the Mighty Mouse:

http://www.applematters.com/index.php/gallery/category/C4/

Alcohol (not drinking!) and cotton swabs have also been recommended by some people, including posters at:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060210115417864�

Thanks to Rod who e-mailed us with a question tonight from his .Mac account.

“Is there anti spyware for Mac’s availble? I have a 1.67GHz G4 17″Powerbook. The firewall in the Mac OS X 10.4.6 is turned on. Any other suggestions for mac security would be appreciated. ”

While anti-spyware isn’t yet needed for your Mac, there’s plenty you can do to secure your Mac. To start, if you’re using Apple Mail, and have a $99/year .Mac account like Rod, securing your e-mail from potential prying eyes at public wireless access points, and elsewhere, is fairly straight-forward.

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.

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”.

I love to listen to my iPod when I’m walking to work. One problem that I have is volume control. One song is too loud, the next one too soft. And sometimes I have my hands full and I can’t manually adjust the volume. That’s why I like Sound Check.

Sound Check tried to maintain a consistent volume level for all the songs on your iPod. To use Sound Check, first you have to enable it in the Audio pane of the iTunes Preferences window. iTunes adjusts the volume of the tracks in its Library. When the songs are uploaded to the iPod, the Sound Check settings are maintained.