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

In essence, this is a discussion about Quality of Service on the internet. Ultimately, the internet is based on working interconnections between people and organizations, and I believe this interconnection *is not* fundamentally threatened regardless of whether Congress mandates “Net neutrality”, or not.

“Network neutrality” means: the service to people and organizations using the internet is not differentiated based on the destination/origination, content or amount of bandwidth used. This means that currently, for example, you’re not charged, and I’m not charged, for your reading this blog, nor are you charged for video conferencing with your friend using .Mac or AIM just because it’s audio and video. You are not charged for sending an e-mail, nor is anyone for receiving one.

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�

We have a caller tonight that is having problems opening Pagemaker files, from OS 9, in InDesign.

InDesign CS 2 should open Pagemaker files from 6.x -7.x. If you have InDesign CS (not version 2), and you have a version of Pagemaker between 6.0 and 6.5, you may have to update to InDesign CS 2 to open those files.

Other things you might try include standard operating procedures:

Open a document as a copy:

A. Start InDesign & choose File > Open.
B. Select Copy & find your file.
C. Select your file & click Open.

For those people in search of alternative web browsers for Mac OS X, and for Windows, too, we keep recommending Firefox and Opera to Mac users, along with Apple’s Safari , but we haven’t yet talked about how to synchronize your bookmarks, or even just move them over! once you’ve made the switch to a new web browser. Given many people horde, er, I mean collect many, many bookmarks (”favorites”), this is potentially an important issue we’ve neglected to address, as my family was quick to point out.

Thanks to Rod who e-mailed us with a question tonight from his .Mac account.

“Is there anti spyware for Mac’s availble? I have a 1.67GHz G4 17″Powerbook. The firewall in the Mac OS X 10.4.6 is turned on. Any other suggestions for mac security would be appreciated. ”

While anti-spyware isn’t yet needed for your Mac, there’s plenty you can do to secure your Mac. To start, if you’re using Apple Mail, and have a $99/year .Mac account like Rod, securing your e-mail from potential prying eyes at public wireless access points, and elsewhere, is fairly straight-forward.

We had a caller looking for audio software to manage live recordings. If you’re looking for specific functions, Apple’s archives are a good place to start, that is, if GarageBand, Apple’s software free with new computers or iLife upgrades, is not enough for you:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/audio/

Note that the latest version of GarageBand as of this post on June 15, 2006, version 3.0.2, has a bevy of tools for podcasts, both live and canned, and should not be discounted until tried. I’ve used GarageBand for everything from recording our radio show live, through preparing ring tones for both my wife’s phone, and my own.

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:

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).

Jason Snell is the editorial director of Mac Publishing, including Macworld magazine, Macworld.com, Playlistmag.com, MacOSXHints.com, and MacUser.com. He’s been covering the Mac for more than a decade. Jason began his career at MacUser in 1994 and has written and edited extensively on Mac issues ever since, both in print and online. He has been writing and publishing on the Internet since 1991.

Area of expertise:

Senior spokesperson, Commentary on Mac/iPod industry and Apple news.