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

Since you have no doubt heard by now that the tv has been delayed, I thought this would be an excellent time to share some tips that will make your impending digital home theatre experience all the more sweet. As an added challenge, I will try to subtitle each entry with a Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers song. So, here we go!

In this installation, I want to tackle content. Apple offers movies on the iTunes Store now, but who wants to pay for iTunes-compatible versions of movies they already own? Who wants to wait for all the legal battles to be fought so that they can finally download their favorite films on iTunes? Not this Mac addict.

If you have more than 1,000 messages sitting around in Mail, you are sure to have noticed things can get a little slow. Here’s a neat tip that really speeds things up in Mail.app!

http://www.hawkwings.net/2007/03/01/a-faster-way-to-speed-up-mail

This involves using Terminal, which should be used with care as it can be potentially hazardous to your system. Be mindful of where there are spaces in the commands.

Enjoy a much faster Mail experience!

We had a listener write in with a problem that sounds like it could be solved by a download and update from Apple:

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macbooksmcfirmwareupdate11

This updates the firmware of MacBooks to version 1.1, solving a heat and freeze issue.

Safe Boot (aka “Safe Mode”) allows you to start up your Mac with a simplified operating system, helpful for identifying and circumventing minor corruptions to startup items, extensions and fonts. Here’s info from Apple’s website on Safe Mode on the Mac, since it was discussed, too, press Shift during start up to enter safe mode on Mac OS X:

Everyone’s talking about the iPhone (although no one is talking with it yet), and while this article is about communication, this is the last sentence that will mention the iPhone. For the moment, pass on, you hordes of latest gadget-lovers! We have other fish to fry. Last Website Wednesday Night we had a caller bring up the question of video conferencing between Macintosh OS X and Windows XP. In the past we’ve promised we’d share at least one way to make this work, and today is that day.

If you have attempted to partition an external drive to include an OS boot disk on a new Intel Mac, you may have noticed a few options. In Disk Utility, you have three options for partitioning.

GUID Partition Table - used to create a boot disk for an Intel-based Mac.

Apple Partition Map - used to create a boot disk for Power PC Macs, or non-startup disk for any Mac.

Master Boot Record - used to create a boot disk for DOS/Windows machines.

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.

If you’ve tried to configure your free GoDaddy.com domain e-mail address with Apple’s OS X Mail, you’ll find it’s not the most straightforward thing in the world. There’s also not a whole lot of options for support. I recently found settings that work marvelously with Apple’s OS X Mail, and would like to share them here.

Account Type: POP
Incoming Mail Server: mail.yourdomain.com
User Name: full email address
Password: (your password)
Under the Advanced Tab
Port: 110
Use SSL: Not checked
Authentication: password

Outgoing Mail Server: smtpout.secureserver.net
Server port: 80
SSL: not checked
Authentication: Password
User Name: (user name from GoDaddy.com)
Password: (your password)

Make your Mac into an internet router! Sometimes it’s convenient to use a friend’s internet connection for a moment, when visiting them at a hotel, or a Starbucks, for instance. You can share to and from many of your connections, including airport (wifi), ethernet and even firewire.

Visiting a friend at the Hyatt Regency yesterday to listen to his presentation at the InHowse Designer conference (brought to us by How Design ), I found myself in his room afterward. He could get internet access through an ethernet cable by his desk, or through WiFi, however, the connection is good for only one computer… unless, you use that one computer to provide access to other computers.

My friend Joe came to our office today, he’s been trying to use Yahoo Messenger on his 12″ PowerBook to communicate with his friend in Italy, on her Windows system.

Here’s a tutorial he’s going to try, let us know how it goes:

http://www.mvldesign.com/video_conference_tutorial.html