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Changing Documents from Word to Pages

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        With a huge file of things accumulated that I wrote with Microsoft Word '97 and then Word 2004 holding up my upgrade to Lion the question is: how to change every document to Pages. More recently I’ve gone from Pages ’08 to Pages ’09, which is currently v. 4.1.
        Here’s the solution, unless you can come up with something easier that doesn’t cost $$$.  Click on the title of a document in the folder to highlight it, then Control Click on the title. On the little drop down menu choose Save As and select Pages.
        (Pages is a good writing tool for me, with one exception:  it doesn't know how to alphabetize a list, or "sort" as Word refers to the procedure under the heading Tools.)

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Password Protection

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        Wondering about passwords, we queried David Passell.  Here's his take:
        "The password method I was speaking of finally bubbled to the surface. Of course MS Word, Open Office, and Pages allows you to password protect a single document, check HELP. However, I wanted to password protect a whole folder full of stuff. Like I would put it in Dropbox, but nobody else could see it (I don't know whether they could delete it though--something I don't like about Dropbox.)
        Anyway what I did was:
1. Start Disk Utility
2. Select FILE > disk image from folder
       • Window opens
3. Find the folder full of stuff you want to protect.
4. Click on it
       • A window opens and you will see the [folder name].dmg
5. If you click on the arrows to the right of "compressed" (the default) you will have choices, but you can leave it where it is.
6. Click on arrows to the right of "encryption" and you will be able to choose 128 bit or 256 bit encryption. 128 should be adequate.
7. Click SAVE button on the lower right of the window and you will see

8. Type in a password and then again to verify it. Note that as you type in your password a graph will tell you whether it is a strong or weak password. One punctuation mark seems sufficient to raise it from Fair to Good.
9. Now you will have a [folder name].dmg folder. You could put it in dropbox and nobody but you could open it.
10. To open the folder double-click it.
11. Enter the password and OK and if you didn't make a mistake (I usually do at least once) you will see

12. Now if you click on the disk drive symbol you can access what is there.
NOTE: If you did not uncheck "save in keychain" it will open on your own machine without typing in a password.
13. When you are through EJECT the drive symbol.
        Thanks, David, for your input.

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Learning About Lion

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        Yes, there's more to learn, but it's easy and it's fun -- so, of course, it's Mac!  Helping us learn about Lion Jim Hamm sends us some useful links, along with relating his own Lion experiences.  Read on:
        "I did another install of OS X Lion on my MacBook Air (3 1/2 years old) and the download took 50 minutes and the install took 50 minutes - an improvement from my older MacBook Pro. Again, everything seems to be working -- sometimes a bit too much. I noticed my CPU on the Air was running at nearly 100% and wondered why? Two processes -- MDWorker and MDS -- were soaking up all my CPU cycles. A little research found that Spotlight was indexing everything on my Air. Looking at the small Spotlight magnifier icon in the upper right corner of my screen showed a small dot in the center, which indicated that indexing was going on. The report I read indicated just to let this indexing continue and it would stop in about 15 minutes. I did and it did.
        "Occasionally there will be little blips in using Lion. For example, this morning my MacBook Pro, upon opening it, didn’t find my wifi network. A bit of fiddling got it going again. Zee had a problem in Safari when all of a sudden she couldn’t click a link and get it to do anything. I suggested a restart which fixed the problem. From our experience, and reading other blogs on the install of Lion, it seems the fix of the moment is to do a restart on these small blips.
        "Adobe and Lion don’t seem to play well together. Here is an article with more about this.
        "From reading various blogs and articles on Lion, most people seem to be pleased with Lion -- but not all. A couple of people have stated they want to go back to Snow Leopard. My impression of Lion? It’s fine, is probably the first thought that comes to mind -- and I’m glad we upgraded. If someone were to ask me if they should upgrade to Lion now, I’d say not necessarily unless they just want to experience the latest OS. The partial melding of OS and iOS is the way Apple is heading, so I thought we’d get on the bandwagon early-on and learn more about this new OS. Apparently the security of Lion has been improved significantly, which is a good thing. A couple of small blips -- like scrolling in a different direction than usual, and which I was accustomed to, and a missing scroll bar (which I didn’t miss, but other people did) -- were easily fixed and reverted in System Preferences.
        "Mail is quite a bit different in Lion. I’m adjusting to the new format and not sure, at this time, that I like it better than the ‘old’ format. It is basically the same format as one sees in an Apple mobile device, so my learning curve isn’t as steep as it might otherwise have been."  Jim also mentions an article about Mail.
        Now Jim goes on to say, "Walt Mossberg, tech writer for the Wall Street Journal, likes the new features in Lion and elaborates on his opinion in this review. Other tech writers report similar impressions. And the price of the upgrade at $30 is certainly reasonable -- in fact, a bargain I’d say. Just think about all the development work that went into Lion, and we’re buying all this for just $30. A lot of ‘roar’ for the buck, I’d say."  And here Jim gives us a grin.
        But wait, Jim has found more good articles to read after you've installed Lion.  First from techcrunch, and then from applegazette. (How to add your signature to a pdf caught my attention.)
        Here is the very latest from Jim. View a 19 minute FREE video tutorial on the installation of Lion from ScreenCastsonline.
        Stay tuned for more about Lion later.  Jim seems to have been the first from PMUG to make the plunge.

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Let's Hear About Lion

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        The news today is full of information and comments on Lion.  Jim Hamm sends this article on Lion security that introduces us to ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) and "security sandboxes," and this article on how to access your Library folder in Finder. He comments that Method 2 works fine.
        Jim also wants us to see this from the New York Times. Their last paragraph summarizes what they're trying to explain, "The Lion upgrade, in other words, is classic Apple: innovative to some, gimmicky to others, big leaps forward, a few stumbles back. It may never be the king of the jungle. But once the world’s software companies have fully Lionized their wares, and once Apple exterminates the bugs, Mac OS X 10.7 might be something even more exotic: a fast, powerful, good-looking, virus-free, thoroughly modern operating system."
        More news:  Lion will be available via USB drive for $69 from the Apple store in late August.

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Safari and the Cookies

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Earlier we'd looked at Cookies.  Now after the upgrade to Safari 5.1 the Command + Comma command brings up a new look at Preferences > Security.  Go to Privacy on the bar there to bring up Block Cookies, Limit website access, and the list of Cookies and website data.  After carefully opting in to Cookies only to post to my blogs and then afterwards deleting all Cookies it was a shock to see a huge list of 595 websites which have latched on to tracking my data since upgrading to Safari this afternoon.  (To see the topic of Cookies go to Labels on the right side of this home page and scroll down.)
        Since starting this post I've had 35 new websites latch on to my computer.  Is this the way Safari is going to behave now?

See Lion Tomorrow!

        Rumors are flying this morning, and Jim Hamm helps us out.  Possibly Lion will be released tomorrow or Thursday.  He sends this link from 9to5mac revealing rumblings about Lion distributing caching centers.  It suggests that customers who walk into the Apple store could purchase Lion from the Mac App store and download it directly from the store server in minutes, rather than hours it takes over a normal broadband connection.  This article reveals that Find My Mac, a new Lion feature for locating and wiping your Mac remotely, also works when one boots into the recovery partition.  This lets a Mac owner use another machine to locate and wipe out their stolen Mac's hard drive even if the person using it is not logged in.
        THIS JUST IN:  This article quotes Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer that Mac OS Lion launches tomorrow, Wednesday, July 20.  And this from Apple Insider says Lion launches tomorrow, and tells about Migration Assistant Update, needed for the update to Lion.

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Welcome to Our New Ambassador

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        Stepping up to volunteer to serve as PMUG Ambassador is Ward Stanke. Let's get acquainted!
        Ward's introduction to computers was a FORTRAN programming course using an IBM 360 with punch cards. This occurred during his undergraduate days at the University of New Mexico where he earned a BS in Electrical Engineering in 1969.
        He spent nine years in the Air Force doing research and development in computer architecture while picking up his MS in Electrical Engineering. The personal computer bug bit him early and he played with Motorola 6800 and 6809-based home-brew systems in assembly language.
        After leaving the Air Force, Ward moved into the aerospace industry and later into the application software development industry. He bought and programmed an Apple II (and even made some prototype add-in boards for it.) His first Mac was a 128K original Mac bought about two months after it was introduced in February of 1984. He wrote his first programs for the Mac on that 128K machine in Apple's BASIC and C.
        Ward worked on a number of commercial Macintosh software applications in various roles ranging from developer (programmer) to technical lead to software architect to manager. Some of the products he has worked on include Roxio's Toast, Quicken for the Mac, and installers for a number of Adobe products as well as several other much more obscure products.
        He officially retired in 2009 and moved from Silicon Valley to Prescott where he continues to program his Mac "just for the fun of it." His current machines include a dual processor quad-core Mac Pro, and a MacBook. His wife has an iMac and an iPad.
        Ward fills the position held by Roger Lakner who asked us to let him retire.  We appreciate all Roger has done, and look forward to working with Ward.

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Making Your Computer Run Faster

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        Responding to a question about a "slow" computer, John Carter gives ideas on what to check and what to do.
        "A faster computer doesn’t actually improve computer performance that you would notice.
        "Most people who say their computer is too slow are really suffering from a slow Internet access and not a slow computer. To confirm this, do a speed test. If your Internet download speed is around 1 MB/s, you need to increase your Internet speed, and I recommend nothing less than 5 MB/s if browsing the Internet is a priority for you.
        "Another way to test your computer performance is to determine how long it takes just to launch an application that does NOT access the Internet. Every Mac comes with Pages. It takes about 12 seconds for Pages to come up on my brand new laptop (2.8 GHz, 8MB memory). Some people would say that is slow. Once you have launched an application and then exit, the next time you launch that same application during that same login session, it will come up in about 2 seconds. The thing to know is that it is always slow to launch any application the first time during a session on any computer.
        "If you want to do something to improve your computer performance, then you need to do some maintenance on your computer. There are several applications that can do this. Just do a Google search on 'mac maintenance' and take your pick. Some are free. One of the things to read is “Five Mac maintenance myths.”
        "If you have a large hard drive (say, 250GB) and it is almost full (say, less than 50GB free space), that can also slow your computer down. It’s important to clean out the old logs, the temporary files, and other stuff. Any one of the maintenance applications mentioned about will do that.
        "Another way to really boost the performance of your computer is to replace the internal hard drive with a SSD (Solid State Drive). It’s about $500 for a 240GB drive (prices are expected to drop soon). What this does is boot up almost instantly, launch all your applications almost instantly, and make all your applications run super fast, but it won’t access the Internet any faster (except for those web pages that are cached locally). If you have a lot of personal data files (movies, photos), then you’ll also need to turn your old internal hard drive into an external hard drive so all your personal files can be moved there, instead of taking up room in the internal hard drive.
        Here John closes with a personal opinion, "And to be honest with you, I thought my new laptop would be really fast. Compared to my three year-old iMac, it’s only a tiny bit faster. So, unless you think you really need to be able to upgrade beyond your current OS of 10.5, you can stay with your current computer for at least another four years. After that, you should really consider getting the latest model."
        Tagging on to John's recommendations take a look at finding out what files are taking up all that space; see this Macworld article.

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Widgets That Make You Say, "Wow"

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        Quick little smidgeons of information, awaiting your summons. Touch that magical key F-4 and there they are, the chosen few, popping up in front of anything else you have up on your screen.  (Click on the illustrations to enlarge the screenshot.)

        Choose them from a long list of categories at http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ There are thousands to choose from! What fun to explore the possibilities.
        You'll see that many are free, so how nifty is that!  They're simple to add, and when you change your mind, they're easy to delete.
        A Google search for Mac:widgets brings up other websites with comments and suggestions. You’d want to specify a time limit under “Any time” so that your search could have a reasonable date. Here I wanted to check Past Year, but there are other specifications at your finger tips.
                                                        What are the Top Widgets today? 

        When you’re done viewing the widgets on your screen just click anywhere on the screen off of a widget and you’re back in business with whatever.
         Even if you’re satisfied with the widgets you already have you might spend some productive moments viewing what else is available.
        Some, like Astronomy Picture of the Day (below) have a place to click (here is is D) to show you the reverse side for more info.
        Click on the X at the bottom left on your screen and bring up a wide view of your choices. Here’s just a few for my illustration.

        Here’s a view of the corner of my screen with 5 of my widgets. They can be dragged to any position on the screen. Here mine are in front of a blank Pages page. Widgets come up in front of whatever you already have open.
        The National Doppler Radar widget enlarges when it’s clicked.
        What widgets do you use?
(The above is today's PMUG handout.  If you missed the meeting we MISSED you.  If you were there now you see the color version of the screenshots.  See you later! -- Elaine)

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Compare Four Social Media

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Compare Facebook vs. Twitter vs. LinkedIn vs. Google+ with the help of this article.  Jim Hamm observes, "In the article the author comments that although Google+ is new and hasn’t yet found a niche, some proponents surmise that it might end up being a Facebook for grownups. I’ve only used Google+ briefly and it will be interesting to see how it develops. I’m a big fan of Google’s Gmail, Google Reader and Google News, so maybe this will fit right in the lineup. All these, plus more, can be accessed on the Google+ website."

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A Look at Google+ . . . Updated

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Here's a Computerworld look at the many features of the new Google+ which declares it will replace email, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, blogging, RSS, Gmail and email newsletters.  The writer says that spammers can't copy, retain and sell your email address.  He says the term "social networking" is not an adequate term for Google+.  Jim Hamm sent us this info. Just now (7-12)  this PCWorld article tells about security risk issues involving an app that allows Firefox and Chrome users to view Facebook data within Google+.

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Worried About Dropbox?

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        Here's the latest on Dropbox from Jim Hamm.  "If you use Dropbox, as I do, you might have been concerned a few days ago when they updated their Terms of Service -- I certainly was. It appeared that by using Dropbox they owned everything we put in there. Not good. They are now backpedaling quite a bit, and this article gives an explanation of the subsequent revisions to Dropbox's T of S. Take a read and see if you feel more comfortable using Dropbox."  (Earlier postings about Dropbox are here, dated 6-2-11 and 7-3-11.)
        After questioning him about encryption Jim expounds further this morning (7-9), "Yes, there’s a Mac version for TrueCrypt available.   If I were going to store sensitive data in Dropbox I might try TrueCrypt. Reading through the instructions it’s a bit of work to use TrueCrypt, though. Not something I want or plan to do with the data I use Dropbox for. I don’t like the idea of using any ‘Cloud’ service to store sensitive data, say, like a password to Amazon or a bank account. I keep that stored on my own Mac."

Possible Problems with Upcoming Lion

        Making us aware of possible problems with the release of Lion Jim Hamm explains, "While reading a blog about the coming upgrade to OS X Lion, here's what one blogger had to say about the upgrade only being available via download:
        'While the issue of distributing Lion to people who don't have adequate bandwidth is one thorny and important problem, I also expect the strain of Apple's servers to be excessive as millions of people flock to download the upgrade the first few days it's available. Which will mean a torrent of complaints about failed downloads. I think Apple is walking into a large hornet's nest here. It's hard to imagine they are unaware of the matter, but as yet they've not acknowledged it publicly. This could turn into a debacle that would dwarf the Mobile Me roll out. In which case, Apple will have once again been too cute - and too smug - for their own good.'
        Jim goes on to offer his opinion, "I must say I agree with his/her comments. It seems to me it would be much better if Apple offered, in addition to the download, the option to purchase a CD for the Lion upgrade, and charge a slightly higher price for it. On the download side, Apple could spread the load on their servers a bit by saying if your last name starts with A thru D, for example, your download window is July...to July...Then E thru H it is July...to July..., and so on.
        "How long will it take to download 4GB of data (the approximate size of OS X Lion)? That depends on several factors: the speed of your internet connection; the load on your ISP network; the load on Apple's servers; et al? As an example: nominally I have a 10 Mbps connection speed. However, I was watching the download speed of the upgrade I did to OS X 10.6.8 and iStat Menus (in my Toolbar) only showed a download speed of approximately 1 Mbps, and that fluctuated around. So, my download time may range anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, depending on what assumption of download speed I use.
        Jim concludes, "It seems to me that many Mac users are not going to be happy with that download scenario. I'm not happy about it, and I haven't even started the process...(grin)...I hope Apple doesn't stub their toe big time on this upgrade."

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Tips for Keychain Access

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        "Whether you are a guru or a beginner, what follows is something that every Mac user needs to know about Keychain Access."  John Carter has some important information to share! From here on John is being quoted.
        "There is a simple way to change the administrative password, and this is what crooks do when they steal someone’s computer, but you need the install disk (or a copy of it). If you don’t have the installation disk, follow these instructions to create a new admin account (you cannot use the same name as before). The instructions to reset the administrative password using the install disk are as follows:
• Insert the Mac OS X Install disc and restart the computer.
• When you hear the startup tone, hold down the C key until you see the spinning gear.
• When the Installer appears, choose Utilities > Reset Password. [Look in the Menu bar at the top of the screen for Utilities.]
• Follow the onscreen instructions to change the password.
• Quit the Installer and restart your computer while holding down the [left] mouse button to eject the disc.
        Be sure to change your login password in Keychain Access to match your new admin password. Here’s how to do it;
• Open Keychain Access located in Applications/Utilities, and select the keychain in the Keychains list (click Show Keychains if the list is not open).
• Choose Edit  >"Change Password for Keychain 'login’.” (The name of the keychain in the menu matches the name of the selected keychain. If you selected the keychain that unlocks when you log in, the name you see is “login.”)
• If the keychain is locked, type the password to unlock it.
• Type the current password for this keychain.
• Type a new password, then type it again to verify.
• Click OK.
        You can use Password Assistant to help you choose a new password. Click the key button to the right of the Password field to see how secure your new password is.
        When you open Keychain Access, you will notice something like the following in the left panel:

You have several keychains in Keychain Access. Each of these keychains can have its own password. The keychain you need to change the password on is the login keychain. Make sure it is highlighted (selected) when you choose “Edit > Change Password for Keychain ‘login’.” If it is not selected, then the word ‘login’ will be replaced with the name of one of the other keychains in the above list.
        All of the entries in the right panel are for storing the passwords for different applications, services, or Internet accounts. Do NOT mess with these unless you are absolutely sure you know what you are doing. The only way anything in Keychain Access gets deleted is if you do it manually, so be aware that things can hang around forever there. For example, if you closed your account with your bank, then you can safely delete the keychain entry for that account. If you changed your password for a specific Internet account, you will have two keychain entries for that account and you can safely delete the older one, but there are exceptions to what appear to be duplicate entries.
        A keychain entry might be appear to be duplicated more than once, but each keychain entry was for a different web page for that same website (my bank has several different pages for logging in, and each page needs its own keychain entry). So be real careful about deleting entries. When in doubt, don’t.
        In one case, I couldn’t quite remember the right password for one Internet account, so as I entered each password they were being “remembered" in Keychain Access. It’s a simple matter of deleting all the wrong passwords and keeping the right one.
        Every keychain entry has two sections. The first section you see when you open the keychain entry. This is the Attributes section. The other section is Access Control. When you click on that button, a list of Names shows in the panel. These are the applications that are allowed to use the password without needing your specific permission. All other applications access the password depending on the settings in this section.

When you click on the plus (+) button, you can actually add other applications to the list that don’t need permission to access that password. Highlighting the name of an application and clicking on the minus (-) removes that name from the allowed list.

For more on this topic, simply search with keywords like, “mac 10.__ how to ___” and fill in the blanks with your own criteria.

And here John lets us catch our breath.  His quotation is completed -- at least for now.