MAY TECH TIPS
May 25th Tech Tip of the Week
Backing Up Your OS 10 Mail
Go to Home>Library>Mail. Just copy the entire folder to a CD or external drive.
May 18th Tech Tip of the Week
Rebuilding the Classic Desktop from OS X
If you use Classic frequently, you can do the old favorite maintenance task "Rebuild the Desktop" from OS 10.X. Go to System Preferences>Classic>Advanced>Rebuild Desktop.
May 11th Tech Tip of the Week
Safari Trick
- Open up two windows in Safari
- Click on Window 1, so it's active
- Now in Window 2, hold down the Command key, and click a few links
- All of the links will show up (in the tab row) in Window 1
For a further discussion, see dealmac forum web page at http://forums.dealmac.com/read.php?1,2217958.
May 4th Tech Tip of the Week
For Tiger Users: Compatibility Updates
You can find a list of compatibility updates at http://www.macintouch.com/tigercompat.html. You can also find links to updates for: Camino, BBEdit, Cocktail, DiskWarrior, Graphic Converter, iPod, iTunes, SuperDuper and TinkerTool 3.4, among many others.
APRIL TECH TIPS
April 27th Tech Tip of the Week
Shutting Down (All Systems)
Go to the Shutdown Menu. Your Mac then asks if you are sure you want to do that. If you want to skip that part, hold the Option Key down when you select Shutdown.
April 6th Tech Tip of the Week
Cleaning Up Eudora (For All Operating Systems)
Eudora keeps track of things. It saves all attachments, ads and cache. It’s a good idea to occasionally empty the folders containing these things. You will find the Ads, Attachments and Cache folders in a file called Eudora Folder. Where you find it depends on how you installed and whether you use OS X or an earlier operating system.
With OS X you can expect to find the Eudora Folder in your Home Folder>Documents.
In earlier systems, it should be in your System Folder. Use Sherlock or Find if you can’t find it. Remember, you are looking for Eudora Folder, not Eudora Application Folder. Open each folder (Ads, etc.) to see how many files it contains. Sometimes you'll see several hundred Attachments, Adds and Cache files. Send them all to Trash. Eudora will add more as you use it. If you’ve somehow lost an attachment, this is a good place to find it if you don’t mind looking at a lot of items. The attachments can take up a lot of space on your hard drive. Do some spring cleaning on that mail program. You Mac will thank you.
MARCH TECH TIPS
March 30th Tech Tip of the Week
Saving as PDF (Both OS X and OS 9)
OS X users can very easily convert any file to a PDF (Portable Document Format) that will be readable by any computer. It’s a good way to send a document to a Windows user. PDFs will open in either Preview or Acrobat Reader on a Mac and in Reader on a PC.
In the Print dialog box, click “Save as PDF.” Instead of printing the document, the Mac sends the PDF to the Desktop, ready to attach to an email. OS 9 or earlier users can do this with a shareware application called, appropriately, PrintToPdf. Download it at http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/3595. When it's installed, PrintTo PDF shows up in Chooser. Select it there and the document will convert to a PDF. Questions about this? Email bjdean@basicisp.net.
March 23rd Tech Tip of the Week
Safari Applications
Safari users — that’s most of us, right? — can find a couple of freeware applications that can make Safari more useful.
Both of these Safari applications received high ratings at Versiontracker.
March 16th Tech Tip of the Week
Google Search for Tutorials
Would you like to find a tutorial for an application? Get Google in your browser. Type the name of the application followed by tutorial. Type AppleWorks tutorial, for instance. Google showed me 145,000 links. The first page should be enough. some are on-line, others in printable PDFs.
March 9th Tech Tip of the Week
Desktop View Options for OS9 or Older
In the March Magazine, I reviewed Curt Herrin's’ Tech Tip from the February meeting about setting Desktop View Options in OS 10. In OS 9, you have fewer options, but you can set Icon Arrangement and Icon Size. In finder, go to View>View Options. In Icon Arrangement, you can select None, Always Snap to Grid and Keep Arranged. The latter will lock the icons in place on the desktop. You won’t be able to move them. You have only two choices for Icon size.
March 2nd Tech Tip of the Week
Special Effects
OS 10’s Universal Access provides some interesting visual assists.
- You can zoom the screen for an enlargement of text that is too small for easy reading.
- You can see what’s on your screen in reverse (White on Black).
- Zoom
- Open System Preferences
- Open Universal Access
- Click Turn On Zoom
- Hold -Option. Click + To go back: -Option. Click -. If you zoom out too far, you might feel seasick when you move the mouse. Try it.
- White on Black
- Open System Preferences
- Open Universal Access
- Click Switch to White on Black. White on black was very useful when one of our members tried to view a web page that had links in dark red text against a dark blue background. When she switched to White on Black, the text was easy to see.
- Text will not print white on black
- You can also change everything on the screen to grayscale
FEBRUARY TECH TIPS
February 22nd Tech Tip of the Week
Watching Movies with Windows Media Player
Mr. Gates doesn't give much away for Macs these days. He does, however, let you use a Mac version of Windows Media Player. If you've received a link that ends in .wmv in an email from a PC friend, you won't be able to see the movie without Windows Media Player. You can find it at this site:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=windowsmedia.
It comes in both OS 10 and OS 9 versions. Download it, install it and watch the movie.
February 2nd Tech Tip of the Week
To Change your Browser Home Page
Setting what page you see (Home Page) when you open your browser is an easy task, regardless of what Operating System or Browser you use. You can set any web page. Some people use their hometown newspaper. Others open to their ISP Web Mail. Bill Dean uses refdesk.com as the Home on his iMac and yahoo.com on his iBook.
Go to Preferences:
- Safari (OS X): General. Type the URL (the www, etc.) in Home Page box. Close window.
- Internet Explorer (OS X and 9): Web Browser>Browser Display. Type the URL in Address. Click OK. Close Window.
- Netscape (OS X and 9): Appearance>Navigator. Type the URL in Location. Click OK. Close Window.
Some people like the browser to open with a blank page. Preferences in all these Browsers provide that choice. In Safari, You find a Pop-up Menu that provides four choices. When you have the Home Page Preferences set, quit the browser, then reopen it. It will open with the new Home Page.
JANUARY TECH TIPS
January 26th Tech Tip of the Week
Google is a great search engine. You can find out more than you need to know about anything imaginable. It does other things that you might find a need for.
Tricks with Google. Go to google.com in your browser.
- Find an Address. You’ve got a phone number, but you don’t know the address? Type the phone number (area code, etc.) in the search box. Google will find the address and give a link to maps.
- Find Pictures. Select Images on the Google page. Type the kind of pictures you want to see and click Search. Control-click on the picture you want and select “Download image to disk” to put the picture on your desktop. Bill Dean looked for “elephants,” and found 61,000 pictures.
January 19th Tech Tip of the Week
To Make Symbols with the Keyboard
You can use the keyboard to make special symbols in your Appleworks documents:
- To make a bullet (•) use Option-8
- To make a check mark (?) use Option-V
- To make degree symbol (º) for 72º, for instance, use Option-zero
January 12th Tech Tip of the Week
To Cancel a Drag and Drop
- Press esc during the drag. Icon snaps back to original position.
January 5th Tech Tip of the Week for OS X Users
If you have the unhappy situation that your mouse doesn’t work, you can navigate the cursor with Mouse Keys in Jaguar or Panther.
- Use Mouse Keys
- Open System Preferences
- Open Universal Access. Select Mouse. Turn Mouse Keys On. Set Initial Delay to Short. Set Maximum Speed to Fast.
- On Numeric Pad
- 1 moves cursor diagonal down left
- 2 moves cursor down
- 3 moves cursor diagonal down right
- 4 moves cursor left
- 5 One click selects; two clicks open
- 6 moves cursor right
- 7 moves cursor diagonal left up
- 8 moves cursor up
- 9 moves cursor diagonal right up
