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

We like Firefox, for all platforms, especially when used in conjunction with Zimbra, the enterprise e-mail, calendaring, contact and document sharing software. And we all know how easy it is to take screenshots on a mac. But have you ever wanted to take a screenshot of an entire webpage, especially one that scrolls beyond the size of your screen? And what about when using Firefox on a PC using WindowsXP or Linux? Well, now you can, with Pearl Crescent, a new Firefox extension. You can get Pearl Crescent here . It comes in both a free basic version, and a Pro version for $15. For independently written software, those are great prices, especially for what it can do. We know around here we are going to be recommending this often to our users.

I’ve had this wonderful little freeware application for many years now. And, since I had to yet again refer to it to definitively answer a call that just came in to the OnDeckTech helpdesk, I thought I’d pass it along to y’all as well. MacTracker is a database with a nifty-looking front end, that does just as it says. It gives you information about every model of Macintosh computer ever made. It even does iPods now as well. You can read more about it, and download it here . And, since it is freeware, if you find yourself relying on it, please consider donating, so that the authors can continue to develop it.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me if I knew how to do this, as he was writing up a document about a PC-only application in which he wanted to include screenshots, and rather than switch back and forth between Mac OS X and Windows XP, it seemed easier to do it all in Microsoft Word on the PC partition of his MacBook Pro. After a little googling, we found this wonderful little article that explains how easy it is to accomplish this task. Now go forth and PrintScreen!

Prior to installing sync software, prior to various software updates, prior to troubleshooting any problems with your email software, your techs may be, should be! recommending you backup your mail.

A free way to do this with Mail.app in Apple’s OS X 10.4 is here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301239#mail

An almost free way to do it ($10), and do it automatically, scheduled, with Apple Mail as well as Entourage and Thunderbird, is here:

http://homepage.mac.com/minge/emailbackuppro/index.html

This is for users of OnDeckTech’s Zimbra hosting services, however, it also explains how to configure Eudora more generally for other users, who will have to substitute their settings where appropriate.

1. Click on Eudora in the menu bar at the top of the screen then click preferences.
2. Then click “Getting Started” at the left hand side of the screen



3. Change the Mail Server to macsuite.com
4. Change the SMTP server to mail.macsuite.com:587
5. Click “Checking Mail” on the left hand side
   
6. Make sure the mail server reads macsuite.com
7. Make sure “save password” is also selected

From time to time, for a plethora of reasons - we may lose connection with Mail. No, that sentence was not just an excuse to use the word plethora. Your Mail settings may have changed, you could be having issues with your ISP, but regardless of the issue - Mail troubles can be confusing and frustrating. But there’s help!

Under the Window menu in Mail, is a little tool called Connection Doctor. This feature arrived with Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” , and was designed to diagnose and fix networking issues directly from Mail.

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.

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.

Apple allows you to authorize five machines to play music and video purchased from a single iTunes store account. While most people don’t have five different machines of their own from which they play five different iTunes libraries - it is still very easy to run out of authorizations. It’s easy to lose track. You might give four different songs to four different friends, and you’re done. Four of your five authorized machines are not even yours. Not to mention remembering to deauthorize your iTunes account before selling or giving away a computer (it doesn’t happen automatically when you clean install the OS).