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Watch the Olympics

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Watch the Olympics in London via a free app for your iPad, Jim Hamm tells us.  And you can watch streaming video from any computer on numerous websites.  Read about it here.Jim Hamm also found this article about various ways to watch the Olympics this year.  This describes the Alert Me feature that will email you about a half-hour before every event that you select will start.

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Lessons Learned? OK!

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        "This is sort of related to 'Learning about the Mac'" begins Allen Laudenslager.  (Who?  when? you ask. Yes, Allen, a PMUG's Previous Prez, and his wife are back. And here's the latest lesson learned.) 

        "After Jeff Ian's great presentation on printers, I rushed right over to Best Buy and picked up that $59.95 Brother all in one printer before the sale ended. In attempting to connect it to my home Wifi network I had the following problems.
       "First, I was able to set it up with my home network from the printer panel front with no problems, second I was able to connect my Macbook to the printer with no problems. I kind of expected that cause the Mac is great! The problems started when I tried to connect my wife's Windows 7 laptop to the printer.
        "The instructions 'presume'  that you are connecting the printer for the first time and there was no reference that I could find in the set up guide to attaching the printer to a second computer. Like the dummy I am, I followed the instructions and the Windows laptop wouldn't print. No big surprise there, the big surprise was that my Macbook stopped printing too!
        "Tried to contact Brother and it seems that they only support the product during regular business hours Monday through Friday. I guess most of their customers don't try to install their products on the weekends or evenings. I did try their email support but gave up after receiving a set of Windows setup instructions to fix the 'can't print from a OS X 10 Macbook' help request.
        "Finally gave up after three hours Saturday and just waited till business hours Monday to call the Brother help desk.
        "First thing was that the Windows instructions told me to use a static IP address, and I should have used the dynamic IP address setting. Once I reset that to the factory default my Macbook started printing again. The Windows 7 problem was a 'printer busy' error and turned out to be a really unusually issue.
        "First a little background — we are staying in a friend's guest house till we find a permanent place following our return from Denver two weeks ago. Second, our hosts have another Wifi network for their computers. When I set up mine, I just connected to their DSL modem router and went back to work.
        "My wife came back earlier than I did and had logged her laptop into our host's network and didn't change the log in to our network after I set it up here!
        "Logged into the correct Wifi network with her laptop, and lo and behold, I could find the printer and get it to work correctly."
         Here Allen explains with a smile, "Lesson learned. A little embarrassing to share with all the computer experts in PMUG, but I finally decided that I'd rather spread the word and put up with the pointing and laughing."
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Serious Bug Discovered in Lion

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        John Carter wants our attention now!  "I just discovered that LION has a serious bug that Apple isn’t recognizing as a bug yet.   Files disappear from the hard drive.  Do a search with the keywords “files disappearing on mac."

        "It happened to me, and it’s happening to others.  I’m still looking into it.
        "There doesn’t seem to be any fix in the future. Maybe Mountain Lion won’t have the bug. It’s totally random while at the same time appears to be completely selective. All the files in every subfolder of one of my folders are missing: e.g., folder A contains folders B, C, and D. All files in B, C, and D are missing.
        "Other folders that I know should be on the machine are now missing — stuff that I put there just two weeks ago.
        "Using Time Machine only helps if you actually use it. In my case, the folders and files in question were deliberately excluded from Time Machine — to save space in my Time Machine backup. What a shame on me!"
        John concludes for now with, "Now, I recently worked with a client who has Snow Leopard, and dozens of photos disappeared off his Mac. No Time Machine backup. Another client also claims to have missing files — and he is not using Lion. So when did this problem start, and how widespread is it?"
        Want to see John's posts on this problem on the Apple Discussion site?  Find it here.  He is posted as jrc39 and his comments are as of 7-15.  Keep up the good work, John, and let us know the resolution of the matter.  
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Wondering About WriteBox

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        Now Jim Hamm finds something else to pass on:  "If you use Dropbox frequently here is a simple web app called WriteBox that can sync directly with Dropbox. Details are provided in this article.  Click here and start typing: https://write-box.appspot.com/ . Although it is a simple text editor, it does give you a count of lines, words and characters. Also, you can change the font size and type, but it does not accept images.
        "Be sure there is nothing confidential in your Dropbox account before allowing this app access. One never knows what or who WriteBox is all about." 

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Entertainment on the Cheap

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        John Carter finds this to pass along, "MakeUseOf keeps coming out with articles that talk about different ways to watch movies on your TV.  The latest article is "Entertainment On the Cheap: The Mot Affordable Ways to Set Up a Home Theater," includes information on Raspberry Pi, Apple TV, and an old Netbook.  Keep informed with handy tech tips like this by subscribing to the MakeUseOf newsletter."

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iTravel is Coming!

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       Watch for convenience and simplicity:  iTravel is coming.  Jim Hamm found this interesting article here.  The writer gives a glimpse of the future with iTravel.  He states that Apple has been granted a patent for a service that will use near-field communication (NFC) so you'll just wave your iDevice near the reader to check in or board the plane.  It seems the function will be handled by Passbook, one of the new features of iOS 6 to be released this fall.  Read the article for more details.

Latest iPhone Rumors

        Here's something interesting from Jim Hamm, "There's lots of rumors about what the next iPhone might look like and contain. Here's one speculation from InfoWorld that makes some logical sense. 
        "The biggest change, if it should occur, that would negatively affect our household is the reduction in size of the 30-pin dock connector. We have too many radios and other 'stuff' that fits the exiting 30-pin opening. A slightly larger screen would be nice, but I don't want the iPhone to grow any larger than it presently is —well, maybe a tad would be okay. It's comfortable to hold now, but if it got too big then it could become unwieldy."
       So, stay tuned for the next chapter . . . 

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Upgrading to Mountain Lion?

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        Getting ready for Mountain Lion, Jim Hamm shares some helpful advice, "If you plan to upgrade to Mountain Lion, the TidBITS newsletter is offering two books for a discounted price of $10 each until Mountain Lion is released. At that time the book price increases to $15 each. You can read more about the offer in the following link.
        Jim follows up with "If you're planning to upgrade to Mountain Lion later this month, here is a Macworld article with preparatory steps to take before 'roaring' off to that new OS."

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Malware Attacks PowerPC or Intel Mac with Rosetta

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        Ever on the alert to help Mac users, Prez Art Gorski sends this info:  "Note that this malware cannot affect the latest version of Mac OS X. It is a PowerPC binary, which means it can only run on an old PowerPC Mac or an Intel Mac with Rosetta installed. Note also the Mac dialog box shown, which warns you not to trust this! That's why it's called social engineering, it depends on you clicking on it when you shouldn't."  Here's the article. 

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Cell Phone Costs

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     Save money — sounds almost as good as FREE.  Jim Hamm to the rescue.  He's found a very important article with warnings we need to read and heed.  See here.  He explains, "If you use a cell phone, you may want to read this article about third-party vendors somehow adding subscriptions to your service. Subscriptions that you don't want and didn't subscribe to, and which increase your monthly cost. I don't understand how this can happen, but according to the article, it can. I notice that AT&T (and maybe other carriers) permit a subscriber to place a block on their service so this can't happen. We've not had a problem yet, that I'm aware of, but I plan to call AT&T and place a block on our service.
        "The other thing to do is review your monthly bill carefully." 

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Mac Dictionary Will Speak to You

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        It started with reading a news article about the horrible flesh-eating disease.  Wondering how much info the Mac Dictionary would give I looked up that long word "necrotizing fasciitis" and my curiosity just got started.  Would Dictionary read it to me?
        Yes, Mac will read aloud to you.  You can use this feature in Dictionary, Pages, Word for Mac, even news you highlight from Google, other Internet sites, and . . . get this!  You can listen to the PMUG newsblog being read aloud to you.

        Go to Apple in the menu bar across the top of the screen.  Click System preferences, under System click Speech.  On the Text to Speech tab, select the Speak selected text when the key is pressed check box.  Click Set Key, then press the combination of keys that you want to use to hear the text read aloud.  Then click OK.    I decided to use Command + S.  Now the fun of trying it out, here and there.  
        Oh, here's more about that flesh-eating disease.  Click on Dictionary, choose  Wikipedia and type in "flesh-eating disease."  Up it comes with medical explanations, photos, and links to further resources.  There's even a list of notable people who have been afflicted with it.  

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How to Upgrade to Mountain Lion -- FREE

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        Well, it's the e-book that's FREE, but that's good!  The e-book that John Carter tells about will be offered as raffle prizes at our July 14 general PMUG meeting.  Here's the info:  "Apple is poised to release OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in July, and the people at Take Control want to help smooth your transition to Apple's next big cat. Because many of you will want to upgrade soon, Take Control is offering Joe Kissell's "Take Control of Upgrading to Mountain Lion" for sale now, with Matt Neuburg's "Take Control of Using Mountain Lion" available for pre-order as a single-page placeholder that you can use to get the full title once Mountain Lion ships."
        John sends the link to the article about it here.  The winner receives the e-book on an 8GB thumb drive.  

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Where's My Computer's Library?

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       John Carter was telling about a problem with Adobe.  "After allowing Adobe to install updates, I discovered I could no longer view a PDF file in Safari.  I found the following fix in the Apple Support Communities:  Try removing the following files:

       /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin

      /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin

      OK, John, but how do you find the Library on Mac?  So, here's the info we need. 

Lion reserves will NOT display Library. Snow Leopard and below lets you see it.

Regardless of what version of OS you have, the one way that works for everyone is:
1. Open Terminal (type "terminal" in Spotlight to get it)
2. At the command line, enter the following commands, one at a time. When the first command is entered, you will be asked for your login password, but not for the second command.
When you first open Terminal, the command line may look something like this:
jcarter@JC-Mac ~
$ 
or this:
jcarter@JC-Mac ~ $
Regardless, the command line is identified by the dollar sign. You start typing after the dollar sign.
Here are the two commands:
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin
You can copy and paste these two lines directly into Terminal (one at a time) and get the same results. Every command has to be followed by pressing the Return key.
        So, there we are, thanks to John.  Another question answered! 
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How Long Will CDs Last?

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        You didn't expect CDs and DVDs to last forever . . . but how long will they still be good?  John Carter grabs our attention with this information, "Here's an interesting article that attempts to explain the reasons why you might not want to rely on CDs and DVDs for an archive of your favorite images, videos, and documents. The life span of such a media is dependent on more than just how the CD/DVD is made - mold and rot are also factors."  This MakeUseOf article was posted yesterday, and it tells how to check your disks for deterioration.