The Grafx Blogs

A couple of people have asked me what to do if you don’t have Time Machine on your Mac. My answer is to first see why you don’t have Time Machine, since it comes with Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6). Of course, there are many other reasons to upgrade your machine to Leopard or Snow Leopard, but backup is a pretty good place to start.

If you are stuck on Tiger (10.4) though, I’d recommend the software SuperDuper!. It’s a stupid name I’ll grant you, but it works really well and to use the basic features is free. I’d recommend it to anyone looking to backup their data one-time, but it’s no match for continual automatic backups if you have Time Machine.

You can download SuperDuper! for free, from www.Shirt-Pocket.com. You can then use the SuperDuper! to create a clone of your machine, an exact replica of your Macintosh HD to an external drive. This won’t be updated, but it’s a good one-time snap-shot as I said.

If you’d like help backing up on Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard then feel free to email me. We also have some other solutions we can provide for you starting around £25.

Firstly, a huge thanks to everyone that attended the free training last Saturday. It was our first foray into this area and it seemed to go down well with all of you. We hope to cover different ground every week and will try and keep the whole thing relaxed and enjoyable.

This coming Saturday (Feb 13) we will be looking at iPhoto, iMovie and iWeb. If you haven’t already signed up then please let us know you are coming as we were at capacity last week!

A couple of notes from me from last week then:

To access your Macs serial number, simply go to the Apple menu in the top left corner of your screen and choose About this Mac. Then click here on the window that opens.

Time Machine is a great way to keep your data safely backed up, and anyone on Leopard or Snow Leopard should be using it. If you’d like us to optimise it for you, please email me directly or leave a comment below.

Anyone looking to upgrade to Leopard or Snow Leopard can contact me via email or the comments below and we’ll get that sorted out also. It’s a painless process, I promise.

If anyone has any questions, comments or just wants to join the discussion, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Finally, for those looking for a new Mac, we have made a couple of bundles that some of you may have missed at the end of last week. We have a MacBook Pro bundle, including the MacBook Pro, AppleCare, wireless keyboard and mouse, backpack, backup drive and 2 hours setup/tuition. We also have an iMac essentials bundle, including the iMac, AppleCare, UPS for power, backup drive and 2 hours setup/tuition. If you are interested in either of these, please contact myself or tony.

Finally, a reminder that any Mac purchased from Grafx comes with complimentary FastTrack service, worth £35. This gives you priority service any time you need that Mac repaired.

Many typists like to learn the many keyboard shortcuts OS X has to offer, as I do. There are hundreds of them, and they are generally pretty well publicised. There is one that isn’t however.

We all know how to copy and paste right? Command+C to copy to the clipboard, Command+V to paste from the clipboard. There is another way though; a secret clipboard in OS X. Using this secret clipboard will not effect your main clipboard, meaning you can copy two things at once.

There is a nuance to this however. This trick will cut everything from wherever you are in the document, to the end of that paragraph. Cutting is a method of copying and deleting what it is you copied.Remember, anything you cut will be removed, but copied to your clipboard.

So try copying some of this text and pasting it into Word or TextEdit. Select a place in the middle of a paragraph and use the keyboard shortcut Control+K. Go to another place in the document and use the shortcut Control+Y to paste the text you just cut.

It’s far more difficult to explain than it is to do, and it’s not something you would use all the time. That said, if you are a writer, or typing 2 or more paragraphs of text and occasionally think you should rearrange your argument then it’s well worth learning.

I know a lot of people reading this will have iPhones as well as Macs, so today I thought I’d share a cheap, but very useful little tool called Pastebot.

Now you can copy and paste on the iPhone, I know a lot of people are doing so heavily, and while this is great, sometimes you need a little more. Pastebot is an iPhone app (currently £1.79) which allows you to store anything you copy on the iPhone, so you can store multiple “clips” for future use. You can store text or images and even manipulate them to make all the text UPPERCASE, or make a photo black and white, that kind of thing. Pretty handy.

Even more useful though is Pastebot Sync. It’s a free Mac application which allows you to share your Mac clipboard with your iPhone, or vice versa. So next time you find something cool on your Mac and you want to paste it into a text message on the iPhone, you can! It’s super simple and very powerful. I highly recommend you check out Pastebot on the App Store and Pastebot Sync at their website where there is a great demo video.

One of my most used applications, Dropbox is great for students, people with multiple computers and those wanting basic read-only access to documents on the go (on iPhone).

Dropbox is deceptively simple. Once installed you will have a Dropbox folder, just like any other in your Home folder. Drag any file or folder in there and it’s sync’d up instantly and invisibly to your online Dropbox account. You can then access that from any computer with an internet connection (just through a web browser), or on your iPhone (free app here).

Ninja move: install Dropbox on your iMac and your MacBook to get the contents sync’d across them automatically. You don’t even need both on at once as you can change something on the iMac, turn it off, go to work, open your MacBook and a few seconds later it will sync down and be ready for you.

If you want a simple way to get a few important files backed up off-site, to share files with friends online, or just to get your files/preferences sync’d across computers it’s a great way to go. Loads more info on uses and features can be found here, with a short demo video below.

Dropbox is free if you want up to 2GB storage (enough for most people). If you want to you can upgrade to 50GB for USD$9.99/month or 100GB for USD$19.99/month.

You can see a demo video here.

This is an app I couldn’t live without, so I thought I’d share it with you. We all know how useful Apple’s Keychain is in saving our passwords, but 1Password takes it a stage further.

One of my favourite features is the secure password generation. Many of my customers use very insecure passwords, and nearly all of you use the same password for everything. This isn’t very secure. 1Password can generate massively secure passwords for you, and store them for you so you never need to remember them.

1Password integrates with Safari, Firefox and other browsers so you can enter your usernames and secure passwords at the click of a button. 1Password can also store details about you, your credit cards, your software licences and much more. This means that the next time you sign up for a new service (like Amazon or something) you can click one button and have the form filled out with your name, address etc.

It’s all stored securely so you don’t need to worry about security. There is also an iPhone app, so if you want to log int to Twitter, Gmail or even your online banking on the go you now can, securely.

The free trial is highly recommended and will save you a ton of time and effort which is what computers are for right?

It’s a tough thing to admit as a Mac user, but when Windows 7 hit the streets there was one feature I really liked about it. If you drag a window to the edge of the screen then it will snap to that edge, and resize appropriately.

This is a great feature, useful for moving things from one window to another, cut and paste, layout, proofing and file transfer among many other uses.

Now you can do this in Mac OS X! It’s a USD$7 app called Cinch. It’s a tiny download and when you launch it a new menu bar icon will appear in the top right of your screen. Just start dragging windows to the edge of the screen for easy access. The videos are below, and I can say from experience how useful it is. Simple but effective.

A demo video is available here.

For those running OS X Server 10.5, it’s important to note a new bug we have come across. It effects servers who use two ethernet ports to connect to the same subnet.

If you have a server running 10.5.8 and you have two ethernet connections to the same subnet then you will notice that your serial licence will become invalid. In essence, OS X is checking the local subnet for duplicate serial numbers and it’s finding itself.

This occurs only if you are using two different NICs to connect to the same subnet.

Depending on your configuration, there is a workaround for this. Go into System Preferences, Network and write down the settings for the device Ethernet 2. Add a new device on Ethernet 1 and call it Ethernet 3. Use the Ethernet 2 settings for Ethernet 3 and you will have the same configuration as previously, however it will all be using the same NIC and as such will not conflict.

Your server licence should now work as expected, however a restart may be required to allow additional connections. More information can be found on Apples discussion boards here, or you can call us for additional help on +44 1242 704330 (or email us).

I have been asked time after time to write a basic guide to home wireless networking. The problem is that there are things to think about and people loose interest quickly. For that reason I will talk you through my personal home setup, why it is how it is and what I would do to it to improve it in the future. Here goes…

Below you will see a sketch of my house. I have a large HiFi in the games room where we like to listen to music while playing snooker or darts. There are a number of other HiFi’s around the house that we’d also like to make wireless. Finally, it would be great to print wirelessly to the printer in the spare room and of course we want internet access from anywhere from the laptops.

These are the things you need to think about before you set up a wireless network – what do you want out of it and where?

With that done, it’s time to set up the first Airport Express. Take a look at the video below for how to do that, then do the same with the other Airport Express, each plugged into another HiFi around the house. Remember, all I did with the Airport Express was plug it into the wall and plug the HiFi into it also. Simple enough right?

The printer setup is exactly the same, except you need to plug the printer into the Airport Express instead of the HiFi.

More is coming next week including how to boost your signal and hop a signal around in bad coverage areas. Simple, but quite effective. See you

I receive email all the time which has a subject line like “Hi” or “RE: that thing”. That kind of subject doesn’t help me know the message is full of important information I will need later. It’s not going to appear when I search Apple Mail for details about that meeting either. Just because someone else uses bad subject lines though, doesn’t mean you have to live with it.

Just drag the email into your Drafts folder, and double-click to open it. Edit the subject line to something more appropriate, click save, close the window and drag the message back to your inbox. Now the email you received has a subject line meaningful to you, and searchable by Apple Mail.

[Note: this will change the date & time-stamp on that message