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

Ever wonder what the /Library directory is for, and why there’s more than one of them?

The time has come. The time is now. I’m reviewing the basics, getting ready to recertify as an Apple Certified Systems Administrator (ACSA) for 10.4, Tiger, yes, just about in time for Leopard, 10.5 to come out (Spring actually seems very, very far away at the moment). It actually doesn’t come at too bad a time, I’m working less this week to help my wife with our new, third baby, and I’ve got time at all sorts of odd hours now to review technical details, and share tidbits with you!

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.

Where can you meet a professor who figured out how to use 2 Mac optical mice and a ping-pong ball to record and measure the direction and velocity of insects as they respond, and don’t respond, to sounds?

From Monday morning October 16 through Wednesday evening October 18, I attended Neuroscience 2006 at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta, GA. I stayed nights with my friend from college, a doctor living in Rome, GA, and his beautiful family, which was great, except for the traffic, blech!, which trapped me in the car for 4 hours each day.

We had a question on the show tonight on whether or not you can network Windows with Macintosh. The answer is a resounding “Yeah!”

Apple’s overview on the features of Mac OS X Windows - Mac Networking: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/networking/

Here’s an overview at Apple’s Knowledgebase on how to actually perform the connection between a variety of different Windows OS’s and Mac OS’s, going back the last 8 years: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=19652

Given he has already taken the somewhat drastic step of reinstalling his OS (clean install), and Shawn is still experiencing freezes on his Mac OS X 10.3.9 G4 tower, it’s looking more likely he has some sort of a hardware problem. Things to check:

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.

Try a new scene on your Mac’s desktop image with over 600 free wallpaper images to choose from at InterfaceLIFT . The site also features user submitted custom icons to keep your Mac in high style.

You can change your Mac’s desktop image by clicking on the Apple logo in the upper left corner of your screen (in Mac OS X) and selecting ‘System Preferences’. Choosing ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’ will allow you to change your desktop image.