WPR Mac Help

The next show is scheduled for Tuesday, September 25! From 11:45 to 12:30, I’ll be on WPR with Larry Meiller to answer your calls about all things Apple. You can join the program live by calling 1-800-642-1234 or 263-1890 in Madison. You can tune in on any of these stations in the Madison area:

• 90.7 FM
• 90.9 FM
• 107.9 FM
• 970 AM

You can also tune in on-line via iTunes. If you’re on a PC without it, you can also use Windows Media Player.

After the show, I’ll post follow up explanations and details about items we covered on the air.

On the show yesterday, we had a question about being able to send mail from the iPhone. There have been reports of folks who can retrieve their mail just fine, but cannot always send it.

As it turns out, this is a similar problem that laptop users have when they travel around. To reduce the amount of spam that gets sent through their networks, your mail provider or your internet service provider (or both if they’re different) probably have restrictions on how and when they’ll accept mail from you to be delivered to someone else.

In this article, we’ll talk about what’s happening here and what you can do to work around this.
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The topic of Cookies seem to come up fairly often. Folks wonder what they are, what they do, and how they can clean them out. Today on the radio, I mentioned two ways of cleaning out all your cookies. The wonderful audience of WPR very quickly pointed me towards a third option that allows you to clean out specific cookies if you choose.

In this article, I’m going to talk briefly about what cookies are, what they do, and just what kind of trouble they can cause you. I’ll also cover methods for clearing out some or all of your cookies.

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The audio archive from the latest show is now available on the WRP site.  If you have RealPlayer, you can listen to it using this link.

If you’d like to get an MP3 copy that you can store on your iPod, you’ll need to be a WPR member to download that.  If you’re a member, you can get your MP3 copy here.

Becoming a WPR member is really quite easy.  Besides getting access to MP3s of your favorite programs, you also get to support some really fantastic programming that just isn’t available elsewhere on the dial.  So go ahead, join now!

Hard drives die. And when they do, it’s a royal pain in the butt. To make it a little less painful, drive manufacturers have included a self diagnostic utility on modern hard drives. It’s called Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology or SMART. (My, aren’t we clever?) In this post, we’ll go over how to check the status of your hard drive using SMART on OS X.

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Here’s a link where you can listen to the show from Monday, July 16. You’ll need RealPlayer in order to listen to the stream.

http://wpr.org/ideas/noteslist_idcall.cfm?noteslist=69665

If you’d like to get an MP3 copy (that works well with iTunes/iPod) you’ll need to be a WPR Member. It’s quick, easy, and you’ll be doing your part to enable Wisconsin Public Radio to continue to bring us all such great programming.

Here’s a link the the MP3 download page for members.

Yes, it’s true. If you get an iPhone, forget trying to do almost anything else. It will consume every last bit of your attention. I just got mine today, and I can’t say I’ve been exceedingly productive. Too many buttons to explore! I’m hoping this wears off after a while…

Truly an amazing device.  I finally have a phone that doesn’t hate me.

At the moment, there are no circulating viruses for Mac OS X. That does not mean, however, that there never will be or that Mac’s are somehow immune to viruses by design. For now, we’ve been lucky enough that the virus writers haven’t targeted Macs yet.

While I do believe that OS X does offer some inherent protections from the kind of Windows viruses that are constantly showing up, anti-virus software is still a very good idea. In this article, we’ll talk about a free anti-virus program called “ClamXav” and how you can put it to work for you.

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Kevin had called in asking about iPod battery replacement.  Here’s the place I bought mine from:

iPodJuice.com 

They’ll sell you a tool and the battery, as well as take the old one in for recycling.  Keep in mind though, there’s a fair amount of force involved to get your iPod open.  If you’re not good with tools, you might want to send your iPod in.

Frequently, the question comes up, “Why do so many web pages look funny on my older (Mac OS 9) Mac?” I also frequently see folks using Internet Explorer or asking about it when using OS X. Here we’ll talk a about the state of web browser’s on OS 9 and IE for OS X.

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The Keychain is perhaps one of the least understood parts of Mac OS X, yet it’s something you’re using every day.

What is the Keychain?

The Keychain system came about to satisfy a problem. The people who wrote applications, such as your e-mail or your web browser, thought it would be a nice if their app would store your password or other information so you wouldn’t have to type it in each time it was needed. The problem is, how do they store it?

In this article, we’ll find out just what the keychain is and then talk about some of the neat tricks you can do with it.

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In previous posts, we covered a way to make a complete and total backup of your Mac. That’s great, but it can take a very long time to complete, and it’s not very automated. A good backup system needs to be non-intrusive and automated so it can happen regularly.

Here we’re going to cover a method of backing up your personal data that can be done every day with very little trouble. Used in concert with the occasional “ultimate backup” we covered earlier, you’ll be in great shape if something ugly happens.
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July 16th is the date! From 11:45 to 12:30, I’ll be on WPR with Larry Meiller to answer your calls about all things Apple. You can join the program live by calling 1-800-642-1234 or 263-1890 in Madison. You can tune in on any of these stations in the Madison area:

• 90.7 FM
• 90.9 FM
• 107.9 FM
• 970 AM

You can also tune in on-line via iTunes. If you’re on a PC without it, you can also use Windows Media Player.

After the show, I’ll post follow up explanations and details about items we covered on the air.

In my last post, I talked about how to create a full and complete backup of your Mac’s hard drive. With this you can restore your computer to exactly what it looked like when you created the backup. This comes in very handy if, for example, your hard drive was replaced or you did some major software upgrade and you just didn’t like the way it went. I’ve used this procedure when I’ve upgraded to a larger hard drive in a machine.

This article is about how to use that backup you’ve made to restore some or all of your data.

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There are times when it would be nice/helpful/necessary to have an exact duplicate of our entire computer. Perhaps we’re going to get a new hard drive, or we’re about to do a major upgrade, and we’d like a little insurance policy if things go wrong. If you’re sending your machine in for repair, it’s always a good idea to have a backup.

In this article, I’ll show you how to make the most complete backup possible. It’s called making a “disk image” of your hard drive. We’ll basically be taking an X-ray of your Mac and tucking it away for safe keeping. It’s what I use as a just-in-case plan whenever I do any kind of major surgery on a machine. As Murphy’s law goes, if you have it, you won’t need it.

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Here’s a link you can use to listen to the actual radio broadcast. You’ll need RealPlayer installed for this to work. If you’d like to download and keep a copy of it as a regular MP3 (that plays nicely in iTunes), you’ll need to become a WPR memeber. But really, why wouldn’t you want to become a member?

http://wpr.org/ideas/noteslist_idcall.cfm?noteslist=69136

On the radio today, I started off by talking a little bit about Cache files in OS X. These little guys help speed your computer along, but when they get corrupt, lots of odd things can happen. Applications become slow, fonts look or print oddly, or strange artifacts can appear on your screen.

Below I talk a little bit more about Cache (pronounced “cash”) files and how you can force them to be rebuilt. Often this can clear up little odd-ball problems. And you loose nothing other than a little time trying it.

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Scott had called asking how to download huge files when his dial up connection kept “helpfully” asking if he wanted to disconnect.

I don’t have a modem on my laptop, and I couldn’t quite remember where, but I thought there was a setting in OS X that would disconnect you from the phone line if it thought you were idle.

I was able to find a support article on Apple’s web site for diagnosing this sort of thing.  You can find it here.  In the first couple of paragraphs, it deals directly with this issue.  It also has some other helpful information about dial up connection quality.

Jim had called and asked about how to get his LaCie hard drive to show up on his desktop. After some errors and a restart of his Mac, it didn’t show up any more.

On the show, I had given him a couple of suggestions. Here, I’ll go over those again, as well as offer a few more. If you have an external drive that’s misbehaving, here are some tips.

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After the show, Jane from Green Bay sent in a question.

She wants to save very large files, such as video based projects, to her external hard drives. But once the files hit about 4 Gigabytes (GB), lots of Bad Things® start to happen.

Typically, when you buy an external hard drive, it’s set up to work for the largest possible audience. So they “format” the drive using a setting called “FAT32″, which means it will work on most any PC or Mac. The problem is, when they’re set up this generically, you miss out on all the features that a platform specific setup would give you.

Here’s how you fix this.

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