We have De Previous Prez Allen Laudenslager to thank for this timely warning about the latest updates. "If you attend the monthly meetings regularly, you should remember Rich Charpentier who presented on how he uses his Mac in his work as a photographer and photo printer."Rich has been blogging for several days on problems he has had with updates to his Mac. If you aren't following Rich's blog, your really should give it a look since he regularly includes not only Mac tips, but some spectacular photos of the local area. "In his current post, Rich talks about his latest round of problems caused by the software update from Apple that updates his HP print drivers and because of the tweaks he needs to print his high quality, large format prints for his customer the updates hose his system. "If any of you have had any problems with your system after incorporating updates, change your process to accept only one update at a time and if you experience any trouble, put that on your 'don't accept this update list' to cut any future problems." Here's a link to Rich's latest post and his blog. Apple Discussions has some give and take on this issue. (Personally, I think I'll postpone upgrading to the HP 2.5.2 printer software update for my printer-- E. )
New to the Mac? Already Experienced?
Here's a helpful resource suggested by Art Gorski, "Macworld has started a new email newsletter for folks switching to the Mac."
If you're already a regular Mac user check out Macworld's website and their new Insider newsletter which advertises, "ad-free + content rich" at only $19.55 if you're a current magazine subscriber or $39.95 for new members.
Webcam Work-around
David Passell passes along this news: "Radio Shack has a sale on the Gigaware Webcam with Mike for $19.99 (+ tax). The instructions and disk specified Windows (XP or Vista; no wonder it is on sale). However; I bought one and plugged it into my Mac Mini USB input. I got image and sound (with some setting up) using Quick Time 10, VLC, and Skype. You may have to tweak a bit, but it can be used." We can envision David's smile as he adds, "One of my pet annoyances is the total ignorance (and sales loss) of people who only can read what is on the side of the box. (My other one is forgetting what I did two years ago : (.)"
WOW! We're Listed with Woz
Our PMUG makes it to the top of the list. Not any list, mind you, but the Woz List. Feast your eyes on this, a live link to our PMUG site. How did we get here? De Prez Howard LaPittus, take a bow!Howard emailed Janet Wozniak (Steve’s wife) who’s listed as a contact on Steve Wozniak’s website. Steve (as we know!) is the co-founder of Apple. Howard noticed that site's list of World Wide User Groups, and he inquired about having our PMUG listed. Janet emailed back to Howard, commenting “Woz and I are both big Mac fans. I have worked for Apple in the Education division for 15 ears. I used to go to the user group in Kansas when I lived there, and it was always a great experience.” Take a look at the Woz site; “you could spend hours on this page. It can really make you feel good you own a Mac. Enjoy!”
Smartphone Vs. Computer
Here's an interesting tidbit to consider. The new smartphones are better than your pc ever was . . . or will be. Jim Hamm shares food for thought from this site.
Anxiety? Students? Computers?
A survey of 287 students (notice the huge number!) who use Mac have greater computer anxiety than PC users. Hmmmmm. David Passell found this gem so you can see it here.
Mac Mentoring
"This is just in from Jim Hamm, "Are any of you interested in being a Mac Mentor at the Prescott Library? John Carter and I are presently mentors, but I’ll be spending a good bit of the winter at our condo in Scottsdale and won’t be available to do much mentoring in Prescott. John will continue mentoring at the Prescott Library, but his preference is to do more mentoring at the Prescott Valley Library since it is closer to his home.
"If any of you would like to devote some volunteer time helping people with their Macs, let me know. There’s a big need for this in our community. I’ll explain what’s involved and how to become a volunteer at the Prescott Library. I’ll continue doing Mac mentoring when we’re in Prescott, and we’re not moving to Scottsdale. Prescott is still our home. I just won’t be here as much this winter.
"Thanks, and let me know if you’d like to give this a try." Email Jim here.
How to Speed Up Your Mac
John Carter writes, "The easiest way to speed up your Mac is to replace your existing hard drive with a solid state hard drive, but it’s not the least expensive way by far. Check out the video on the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro here."The best way to speed up the boot up time and the time to launch an application on the Mac is to install a solid state drive. The new MacBook Air is an example of this. "Another way to speed up your Mac is to attach an external hard drive and reconfigure your swap space (aka Virtual Memory) to use that external hard drive instead of the internal hard drive. There are two ways to do this: 1) the easy, costly way, and 2) the complicated, free way. "(For a quick review of the advantages of moving the swap space to another drive or partition, look here. NOTICE: SwapSwapVM is now available for Yosemite.) "The free way is NOT recommended as it involves using Terminal commands. Mistakes in entering the commands could prove fatal to the Mac. Take a look at two such procedures here and here. These articles are provided to give you some background on why you would want to move your swap space away from the primary boot disk on your Mac. "The costly way is only $34.99, and it comes packaged as part of MacTuneUp from MacWare (for Mac OS X 10.3.9, 10.4 or higher). See John Carter’s review on this software here. This is also the safest way. You can use MacTuneUp to move the swap space to another physical hard drive or to a separate partition on the existing hard drive. (MacTuneUp cannot repartition a hard drive.) "Re-partioning the primary hard drive to put the swap space in a separate partition is not as effective as moving the swap space to a separate physical drive, but is still a viable way to improve the performance of your system. There are few software applications that will safely repartition the primary hard drive without erasing all the data on it. One such application is VolumeWorks. Instructions for manually re-partitioning the primary drive that also destroys all data on it can be found here. Don’t worry. If you follow the instructions carefully, your system will be restored to what it was before you re-partitioned the drive, especially if you use Time Machine to restore from. If the primary hard drive is to be repartitioned for the purpose of moving the swap space to a different partition, that swap space partition should be the first partition on the drive. "For a more efficient usage of swap space, the partition that the swap space is on should not be used for any other purpose. The recommended size for swap space is at least 3 times the size of your internal memory (RAM). This means that the swap space partition can be very small, but probably should not be smaller than, say, 20GB for a system with 4GB RAM. "Finally, you can use a flash drive for your swap space, but that flash drive, if used like this, can NEVER be removed from your system. For a system with 4GB RAM, you would need a 16GB flash drive. That flash drive can be any kind, but the best kind would be a Class 10 SDHC. "All that said, there is one, simple way to improve the access time to any file on your Mac, and that is to change the preferences setting to NOT put the hard drives to sleep when possible. If the hard drives are spinned down, it takes time to get them up to speed before you can access any file on that drive. Even if you move your swap space to an external drive, if your hard drives are spinned down when they need to be accessed, your Mac will be slow. You change the settings for this in System Preferences —> Energy Saver. The figure below shows the preferred settings when the system is on Power.
"The Wake for network access is only needed if your Mac is serving a website or if you are sharing files on your Mac with other computers in your home. "If you’re using a laptop in battery mode (or an iMac in UPS mode), you really should be putting the hard disk to sleep when possible. The figure below shows the settings for this.
"It would be nice if Apple provided a way to spin down selected drives, such as the one used for Time Machine, and leave the others running." John concludes with, "(The images above are for Snow Leopard settings on an iMac.)"
Apple's Data Center Almost Ready
Have you been hearing about Apple's massive new data center in North Carolina? Jim Hamm wants to keep us informed. Take a look at the photo and article here! At 500,000 square feet Apple's $1 billion data center will be among the largest in the world. Does this mean cloud computing?
Creating Music CDs
A user had the following experience after inserting a blank CD in preparation to create a music CD:
Disk Utility started, but no disk icon appeared on desktop.
Well, that makes it rather difficult to copy files to the CD.
The disk icon won’t appear on the desktop, or in Places in Finder, if you have "Open Disk Utility" as the default action when inserting a blank DVD/CD.
In this case, it appears that the user had "Open Disk Utility" as the default when a blank DVD/CD is installed. That’s a mistake, in my opinion. If you want total control over what happens when you insert a blank DVD/CD, the default action is unchecked so that you get the following prompt when a blank DVD/CD is inserted:
Notice that the box for "Make this the default action" is not checked, and the above prompt shows up when I insert a blank DVD/CD.
The pop-up menu is exposed here to show what actions are possible.
When I select “Open Finder,” the DVD icon should appear in Finder as a folder under Places:
Now you can simply drag and drop files into that folder. When you have them all there, just click on the burn icon and in a few minutes you have your CD ready to use.
If the CD icon doesn’t automatically get removed after burning the CD, right click on it and select “Remove from Sidebar”:
So how do you unset the default action when you insert a blank DVD/CD? Go to System Preferences and open “CDs & DVDs”…
Change your preferences to “Ask what to do”.
Take back control over what you want to do when you insert a blank CD or DVD. Maybe you would prefer to set the default action to “Open Finder” so that you can then start copying files to it.
When you copy files into a blank DVD/CD this way, the files aren’t actually copied right away. The filenames you see there are just placeholders. The files actually get copied when you start the burn process.
However, if you are like me and you use Path Finder as your default browser, you get the following in Places:
And when you copy files into that folder, you actually do copy the files to the DVD/CD at that time. Notice that there is no burn icon there. So, in order to burn the DVD/CD, you should have the burn icon in the tool bar of the browser:
This simplifies having to search around for how to do a burn after copying files to a blank DVD/CD.
And by the way, don’t forget to rename the folder before you do the burn.
Got Comments?
Recently, De Previous Prez Allen Laudenslager reminded me to remind YOU, we do like to hear your comments about PMUG. Send them to info@pmug.us or to editor@pmug.us
Gmail: Comparing IMAP and POP
John Carter responds to questions about Gmail. "Regarding the difference (as a user) between IMAP and POP for a Gmail incoming account, using an IMAP Gmail incoming account actually provides two benefits over a POP Gmail incoming account, but one of those benefits can appear to be an inconvenience and confusing if not clearly understood.
Let’s start with a simple display of what Mail looks like with an IMAP Gmail account:
| Figure 1 |
With a POP Gmail account, the GMAIL mailbox you see above wouldn’t exist.
The arrows for Inbox, Sent, Trash, and Junk indicate that there are subaccounts. I have three subaccounts aside from Gmail, and the messages in those accounts are being collected by Gmail. If you have only one account, you won't see those arrows.
Figure 2 shows what an IMAP account provides that a POP account does not:
| Figure 2 |
Everything you see in Figure 2 under [Gmail] are references to the actual mailboxes in the remote Gmail repository, and you can actually play around with the messages in those mailboxes as though they were local in your computer.
Let me expand those mailboxes under MAILBOXES in Figure 1 to show you:
| Figure 3 |
“jrcarter” is my primary email. “AstroGimmicks” and “Sunrise Trust” are business accounts. The reality is that those three accounts actually forward their messages to the Gmail account. The Gmail account is a secondary personal account and is rarely given out and which has the primary purpose of delivering messages to Mail. And to be on the safe side, I have set up all four email accounts in Mail to collect messages. Complex, but that is my nature.
An IMAP Gmail account gives you access to all the mailboxes available in the remote Gmail mail repository as well as the local mailboxes (ON MY MAC). A POP Gmail account only gives you access to the local mailboxes. What gets confusing about the remote mailboxes is the “All Mail” mailbox, which is visible only by expanding both GMAIL and [Gmail] as shown in Figure 2.
TIP: In Gmail, they don’t call them mailboxes or folders. They call them labels. That’s rather confusing to anyone who ever used any mail program other than Gmail.
Any message that appears in the All Mail label actually resides in one of the other labels. If you delete a message from All Mail, it also gets deleted from the ‘real’ label. Deleting a message from any label other than Trash or All Mail moves it to Trash and it remains visible in All Mail (All Mail includes Trash). That’s another confusing aspect. The trick is to never delete anything from the All Mail label if you’re not sure which other label it actually resides in or if you don’t care if it gets deleted permanently. If you delete everything from the All Mail label, you delete everything from all other labels as well, including any messages you may have wanted to keep. Simply put, the All Mail label is only there to let you search for a message that might live in one of the other labels. Otherwise, leave it alone. To add even more confusion, sometimes I have deleted messages from All Mail only to see it show up there again. Stop chasing your tail and just manage messages in the other labels.
The really scary part is that if you delete a message from one label, it just might show up looking like a duplicate in All Mail and/or Trash. You can go crazy trying to track that down, so just worry about keeping Trash in the remote repository cleaned out regularly. And by the way, Trash in the local repository is not the same Trash in the remote repository.
I discovered that with an IMAP account, you can copy a mailbox from the local repository (ON MY MAC) to the remote repository (GMAIL) just by dragging it from within ON MY MAC to within GMAIL. That’s very useful, because if you created mailboxes in the local repository, you might prefer to see them in the remote repository when accessing mail from another computer or online. Just be sure to remove it from the local repository after copying it to the remote repository. Any Rules you had set up to move messages into a mailbox will NOT automatically update; you have to edit the rule to point to the new mailbox in GMAIL. Copying a mailbox with lots of messages may take time to trickle up, so don’t delete the local mailbox until you know it has completed the transfer.
This brings up the other major advantage of using an IMAP account over a POP account. If you keep all your mailboxes in the remote repository, you can access those messages from any computer anywhere by going online to access Gmail. Furthermore, if you have two or more computers that you access mail from (laptop and desktop), using IMAP on each computer gives you the advantage of accessing all your mail in any mailbox as long as those mailboxes are in the remote repository.
If what you have now is a POP Gmail account and you want to switch to an IMAP Gmail account, follow these steps:
- Set the POP account to not include that account when checking for new mail (in the Advanced tab under Accounts).
- Create the IMAP account (taking the defaults - don’t tinker yet).
This will retrieve ALL mail that was hanging around in the inbox of the remote repository. - Set the IMAP account to include that account when checking for new mail.
- Copy the messages from the POP account mailboxes (Sent, Inbox, etc., but NOT from the ON MY MAC mailboxes) to the corresponding IMAP mailboxes, being careful not to duplicate any messages.
- Disable the POP account (this makes it disappear from view, but does not delete it).
- Now you can tinker with the preferences on the new IMAP account.
- Copy any mailboxes from ON MY MAC to GMAIL that you want to access when accessing mail online or with another computer.
- Delete the mailboxes from ON MY MAC that you copied to GMAIL.
- Update any Rules that accessed a mailbox that has been moved.
Do we need a class on this?
Avoid Firesheep!
Responding to the warning from De Previous Prez Allen Laudenslager posted a few days ago, "Here is an article on avoiding Firesheep," begins David Passell. He goes on, "I also noted some of the comments, particularly the last one. I haven't tried Firesheep and probably won't. John (not any moron) is probably capable of using it. Maybe he should see how difficult it really is to eavesdrop on a WiFi network and get into a computer connected to it."
Then David comments, "Firesheep has made it possible for any moron to raid your Web use, but there are ways you can stop it. Here are a few of them." See the "Five Ways to Shear Firesheep" article.
MBA Getting Good Reviews
"What do you think of the new MacBook Air?" was the question posed to Jim Hamm. He's the only one in PMUG with the MBA. He writes back, "The new model is better than the one I have, and mine can't be upgraded to solid drive. As to more features, no, I'm pleased with what the MBA has. I like the light weight, crisp screen and great portability. I may end up getting the new solid state 13" MBA. It is getting great reviews.
"Zee really enjoys her iPad, and I enjoy my MBA. I probably won't get an iPad, but may get the new MBA. I'm using my MBA as I type this. Both the iPad and MBA have their strong and weak points, It's a matter of personal preference, I think." Jim goes on to refer us to the report, "MacBook Air Has the Feel of an iPad in a Laptop."
"One negative review of the new version is the keyboard is no longer backlit. Bummer. I suppose Apple did this to conserve battery power. There is some question whether an SSD (solid state drive) will continue to perform well over time, or tend to clog up. Time will tell, I guess," Jim concludes.
Beware of Firesheep
"What the heck are Firesheep? Actually the question is what are, but what is Firesheep." After so getting our attention De Previous Prez Allen Laudenslager instructs us, "It's a new application that give even novice computer users the capability to capture your online session (yes, even transactions that include your banking password!) without being a hard core programmer.
"So start thinking about enabling the password security to your in home WiFi network. While my WiFi router does use the older and less secure encryption, I do live in a location where you must actually drive 200 feet into my private drive to get a signal. Trust me, my dog will go nuts if you do that.
"Once more, commercial applications are ahead of the power curve. For the full article, click here."
Now today (10-29) here's an informative piece on how Firesheep brings hacking to the masses. Security issues grab our attention!
New Accessory for the iPad
"I just found this article on the Fastcompany magazine website about the new Toccata keyboard accessory for the iPad," announces Allen Laudenslager. He continues, "The article reports that it connects via bluetooth when you press any key, has a battery life around 45 hours and recharges from the iPad USB connection. It has a integral screen stand with several angles to suit most users and the author reports good key 'feel.'
"The key are a softer plastic since the whole thing doubles as a case for the iPad and the face of the iPad rests on the keys with the case closed. The only drawback the author reported is that since it's not a full sized keyboard, the apostrophe key is not in the 'right' place, and he ends up hitting the Enter key by mistake. Well, life is trade offs; a new Macbook Air starts at $999 while the iPad Tocatta keyboard priced out at $670.
"If you already have an iPad, a new keyboard and you're up and running for just 70 bucks."
Seven Ways to Use Evernote
At our last PMUG meeting the presentation was on Evernote. Jim Hamm found this article on seven ways to use Evernote.
Report on New iLife
"Got my copy of iLife and installed everything without issue," begins Art Gorski. He goes on, "I'm mostly interested in iPhoto right now, and there are horror story reports on-line of problems with the upgrade, so I installed it first on my MacBook. That went fine, so I went ahead and installed all the iLife apps on my Mini. Still fine. I recommend you have a good backup of your iPhoto Library before you upgrade. If needed, I can do a presentation on the new features in iPhoto in the spring."
Look What's Inside
Fascinating! View 19 large photos of the innards of the new 11" MacBook Air. See as individual photos or as a slideshow. Jim Hamm sends us this link. "It's amazing how small everything is. Take a look at those small speakers -- but it does have stereo now." And there's no spinning hard drive. Detailed captions explain what you're seeing.
How to Print Help Screens
Here's a how-to from David Passell: "I may be describing what everybody already knows, but often you will get these multiple-link Help screens from Apple applications. To get a printout of a Help screen, click the down arrow next to the wheel and you get a drop down menu:
"You can click on Print and you will get a printout of the help screen. In addition to this, if you find the screen will print too many pages, simply click on 'Make Text Smaller.' Your screen text will be smaller, and the printout will use up fewer pages. All Help screens provide this capability. Help screens from many other applications also appear to use this scheme."