Resurrecting Laptop Batteries

There are some tips that are too good to pass up (and too good to not pass along). Such a tip was published on Ric Ford's MacInTouch website (http://www.macintouch.com) recently.

MacInTouch reader Rob Wyatt has a 600MHz white iBook with an apparently dead battery. After doing everything he could to resuscitate the battery -- reseating it, zapping the iBook's PRAM, and resetting the Power Manager -- he booted the iBook into Open Firmware by pressing Command-Option-O-F at startup and first typing "reset-nvram," pressing the Return key, and then "reset-all."

When the iBook restarted, the battery was recognized and recharged perfectly. Subsequent readers confirmed that the technique revived batteries they too had given up for dead.

Assigning Junk Mail Status in Mail.app Without Having to Open the Offending Email

More often than not, if you find an offending piece of email in Mail.app, it is quite obvious before it's even opened. Usually, the subject or the sender name is a dead giveaway. Normally, you would click on the email and then on the Junk icon. This changes the email's status to junk and removes it in the predetermined way. However, clicking on the email automatically opens it, and thus the offending material becomes apparent. Worse yet, if it's in HTML, it notfies the sender that it arrived at a valid email address. All you need to do is click and hold on the email and immediately drag it right to the Junk mailbox. Go check your Junk mailbox, and you will see that the offending piece of email is now marked as junk and remains unopened.

Fast Access to Applications etc on OS X

Organize your favourites into sub categories by creating folders in your Favorites folder and naming folders/subcategories however you think most helpful (for example: Applications, Internet, Multimedia, Documents, Utilities, etc.)
Then drag your Favorites folder into the Dock. That gives you a quick menu/submenu access to the apps and docs you use most.
Items can be quickly added by dragging them to the Favorites icon in any Finder window's toolbar.
A quick click on the Favorite icon then lets you file the alias you just created into the correct subfolder/subcategory.

Dragging the hard drive icons onto the right side of the Dock separator (the part where the trash icon resides) allows full access to all folders and files of each hard drive or partition you have.

Binary Powers Of Ten

Relating storage capacity to the real world.

The growth in peer-to-peer networks and the digitisation of culture - storing images, sounds and videos on digital media - drives the need to find new ways to describe unimaginably large storage numbers.

Byte (8 bits) 1 bit (1/8 byte); a binary decision.
Kilobyte (KB) 1024 bytes or 10&Mac184; bytes; 2KB - a typewritten page.
Megabyte (MB) 1,048,576 bytes or 106; bytes; 5MB - Shakespeare's complete works.
Gigabyte (GB) 1,073,741, 824 bytes or 109 bytes; 1024 megabytes 1GB - a truck filled with paper.
Terabyte (TB) 1,099,511,627,776 bytes or 1012 bytes; A trillion bytes 1TB - a hospital's collection of X-rays.
Petabyte (PB) 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes or 1015 bytes. 1024 terabytes; 20PB - production of hard-disk drives in 1995.
Exabyte (EB) 1,152,921,504,606, 846,976 bytes or 1018 bytes. A billion gigabytes; 2EB - total volume of information generated worldwide annually.
Zettabyte (ZB) 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes or 1021 bytes 1024 exabytes; About 200 million 200GB hard drives (would reach from Melbourne to Tokyo, 5000 kilometres, if laid on their short sides i.e. upright).
Yottabyte 1,208,925,819, 614,629,174,706,176 bytes or 1024 bytes. 1024 zettabytes; 130 trillion DVDs.

Compiled by Nathan Cochrane

Internet-based playlist sharing in iTunes 4

If you have someone's IP address you can access their iTunes music library if both those on the server and client side of the equation are running iTunes 4. If you want to make your iTunes music library available to others, you should have a permanent IP address. If you have a dynamic IP address and it changes, people won't be able to locate your Mac on the Internet.

Got all that? Now, launch iTunes 4. Select Preferences from the iTunes menu, click the Sharing button in the resulting window, and switch on the Share My Music option. Do not enable the password option.

Once you've done that, launch the Sharing system preference, click the Firewall tab, click the New button, select Other from the Port Name pop-up menu, and enter 3689 in the Port Number, Range or Series field. Enter a descriptive name such as iTunes Sharing in the Description field, and click OK. The Mac's iTunes music library is now open for business.

To access the library from another Mac on the Internet, launch iTunes 4 and select Connect to Shared Music from the Advanced menu. In the resulting Connect to Shared Music window type daap://12.34.56.789 where 12.34.56.789 is the IP address of the Mac sharing its iTunes library.

If you'd like to listen in on others' music libraries but don't have IP addresses for any servers, check out Rob Lockstone's list of publicly available iTunes servers, The iTunes Database (http://www.itunesdb.com/index.jsp).

Note: A steady stream depends a great deal on the speed of both your Mac's and the server's connection to the Web. A slow connection on either end will result in an unsatisfying musical experience due to rebuffering interruptions during playback.

Note: Don’t install iTunes 4.01. Apple killed Internet-based playlist sharing in iTunes 4.01 - you will still be able to share music across networks, but not IP addresses with 4.01.

Get Info Window placement

Have you noticed with OS X Jaguar that whenever you open a window or use the Get Info command it seems to place the windows in the exact area you don’t want them to go to -- the Get Info window appears in the upper left corner even if the icon is on the opposite side of the screen. Wouldn’t it be nice to set the Get Info window to open in a specific place, namely the middle of my screen.

It’s easy to do. To change the default location of Get Info windows, press Command-Option-I and move the window where you'd like subsequent Get Info windows to appear. When you next want to view a Get Info window, once again press Command-Option-I. The window will appear in the location where you dragged the last Get Info window. Note that pressing Command-I or choosing Get Info from the Finder's File menu will place Get Info windows in the upper left corner of your Mac's Desktop.

As for regular windows, they appear in the position where they last appeared. Just place a window where you want it and it will open in that position ever after (or at least until you next move it).

How To Kill iMovie 3's "Ken Burns" Effect

The "Ken Burns" effect pans and zooms across a still image even when you don’t want to. Thanks to the latest iMovie update, Ken can be dispatched wth brutal efficiency.

Just download the iMovie 3.0.3 update (available via Mac OS X's Software Update or from http://www.apple.com/imovie), launch iMovie, click the Photos button, and make sure the Ken Burns Effect option is unchecked. Any still images you now drag into iMovie will remain so.

If you've already applied Ken to an image in a movie created in an earlier version of iMovie and you'd like to de-Burns it, select the image in the timeline, uncheck the Ken Burns Effect option, and click the Apply button.

Palm and iSync

New versions of iSync and the iSync Palm conduit have been released - remember that when you install the iSync Palm conduit, you will no longer be able to sync your Palm device with Palm Desktop.

To restore this capability, you must replace a few of the files moved by the iSync Palm Conduits Installer. To do so, follow this path: /Library/Application Support/Palm HotSync and open the Disabled Conduits folder. Move any conduit files that you'd like to work with Palm Desktop to the Conduits folder-for example, the Datebook Conduit, Address Book Conduit, and ToDo Conduit.

Now launch iSync and select your Palm device. In the Palm configuration window uncheck any options that will conflict with Palm Desktop synchronization. For example, if you want to synchronize your Palm Device with Palm Desktop's calendar and To Do items, uncheck the Calendars option in iSync.

Return to HotSync Manager and make sure that the conduits you want to use with Palm Desktop are configured properly.

iChat AV and cameras

You don’t need an iSight camera to use iChat AV.

Apple states that iChat AV offers "zero configuration with support for FireWire cameras." That means that not only can you use FireWire cameras designed specifically for video conferencing, but you can also use the same FireWire camcorder you employ to create your iMovies. Just place your camcorder on a tripod, pointed at your face, plugg it into your Mac's FireWire port, switch it into camera mode (without a cassette loaded so the camera wouldn't go to sleep), and fire up iChat AV.

To complete the picture select your camcorder from the Microphone pop-up menu in the Video portion of iChat's Preferences window. The camera's built-in microphone will now pick up your voice and you are ready for face-to-face iChat chatting.

And yes, it is cool that you can use the camera's zoom feature and record your half of the chat to the camera's tape.

iChat AV will be included with the next version of Mac OS X Panther later this year. It will also be available separately for US $29.95 for users of Mac OS Jaguar 10.2.5 and above. The public beta is now available as a free download.
http://www.apple.com/ichat/download/

Entourage to Address Book

Thinking of moving addresses from Microsoft's Entourage to Apple's Address Book?

Apple includes an AppleScript that can perform this feat for you. To reveal the script, open the AppleScript folder inside Mac OS X's Applications folder and double-click the Script Menu.menu item. This places an AppleScript menu in the Mac's menubar.

From this menu select Mail Scripts and then choose the Import Addresses script in the submenu. When you run this script you'll be given the option to import addresses from Entourage, Outlook Express, Palm Desktop, Eudora, Claris Emailer, or Netscape into Mac OS X's Address Book.

Michael Zapp’s US $15 iPod It (www.zapptek.com/ipod-it), in addition to transferring all or a subset of your Entourage events, contacts, messages, notes and tasks to an iPod, can easily move all or a selection of Entourage's address book to a vCard file that can be easily dropped into Mac OS X's Address Book.