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

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.

The Web can be a scarey place, especially for kids. As a repsonsible parent, you want to do all you can to protect them from the unsavory sites. One of the first things that you can do is to activate Parental Controls in Safari.

The first step is to create a separate account for your child (or children). Next, turn on parental controls by choosing System Preferences, clicking on the Accounts icon, and selecting your kid’s account. In account preferences click on the Parental Controls tab and click on the checkbox next to Safari.

I try to use a unique password for different websites. Sometimes I have trouble remembering them all. Fortunately, I don’t have to. I can use Keychain to remember them for me. And if I really need to know a password, I can use Keychain Access to look it up!

Start by opening Keychain Access. You’ll find it by looking in your Applications folder, then inside the Utilities folder. Use the search field in the upper-right corner to find a website. Double-click on the result to open a dialog box and turn on the Show Password checkbox. You may be prompted to type in your administrative password.

Playlist , a website focusing on digital music across both platforms, has a great feature article on how to coax a few more minutes of Tom Waits out of your prescious iPod. In addition to basic tips, he provides links to a few accessories that will give extra energy to the device. Given that the article was written by Christopher Breen (who wrote a few books about iPods for Peachpit Press), I’ll put my money on the fact that he’s a reliable source.

Idiosyncrasies.org offers up a delightfully comprehensive guide for those making the leap from Windows XP to Apple’s OS X. The article gives a great list of comparable features, keyboard shortcuts, and websites where you can nab useful free software. All in all, an easy and informative read even for those well versed in OS X.

Say that you work in an application like Microsoft Word every day, all day. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the application open every time you start or log in to your Mac?

No problemo. Find the application alias in your dock, then either Control-click (or right-click if you happen to have a two-button mouse like I do) and choose Open at Login from the contextual menu.

If you need to take a screen shot — and in my 10 years as a trainer I’ve had to take LOTS of them — here’s a nifty keyboard shortcut.

Press Shift-Command-Spacebar-4, which is a bit ackward (I had to use both hands) and your cursor changes into a crosshair (sometimes it changes into a camera icon). Just click and drag a bounding box around what you want to capture and release the mouse button to take the picture, which shows up on your dekstop as Picture 1 (or 2 or 3 depending on how many pictures you take).

Head over to Safari!

As discussed on the show tonight, unlike Windows where you go to the Tools to set the default web browser, in OS X, no matter which browser you’d like to use, set the default within the General preferences of Safari, Apple’s own, free web browser.

You’ll see the first pop-up menu is called “Default Web Browser:” and it should show any and all browsers you have installed on your system.

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?

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.)