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

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�

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:

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.

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.

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.

Download the PDF

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.

Jim called with a question about whether or not it’s safe to defragment an OS X G4 journaled hard drive. He has a sawtooth G4 tower.

OS X’s built-in disk optimization method, in fact, only works for volumes that are formatted in HFS+ and *have journaling turned on.* So, this means in most cases it’s not necessary to defrag your hard drive if you have journaling turned on with OS X 10.2 or later.

Apple has an informative article on OS X fragmentation located here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

Want to optimize your Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later system? Try OnyX, a free utility available here:

Check our our WGN page here: http://WGN.OnDeckTech.com

Tonight we have Jason Snell from MacWorld on the air with us, and the lines are packed with Mac listeners! Thanks.

Carol called, and it sounds like, given she can print to her HP, that she should try installing the HP printer drivers onto her laptop. She’s getting gobbledy-gook when she tries to print. It’s good she’s getting *something*, as it means she can “reach” the printer across the network. That it’s indecipherable may be because the printer driver is incorrect. A driver is a piece of software (program, or code) that tells your computer how to communicate with another device, in this case, the device is a printer. If you don’t have the right driver, your computer may not be able to communicate properly with the device in question (again in this case an HP printer).