You have your desktop tweaked with custom icons and custom images, now you might want a screen saver. There are several options for setting the screen saver on your computer.
Most of the screen saver settings occur in the system preference called Desktop/Screen Saver (the same one used last week in my article “Change that Desktop Picture“). To get here go to the Apple Menu, choose “System Preferences” and click “Desktop & Screen Saver.” Make sure the “Screen Saver” tab is selected.
Despite all the latest improvements in iTunes, the power of Smart Playlists remains the best way to navigate and get the most out of your ever-growing music collection.
iTunes comes with a few pre-installed Smart Playlists (such as Recently Added and Recently Played), but here’s ten more you should consider adding.
To get the most out of your Smart Playlist function, you have to do a little preparatory work. First, it’s a good idea to rate your songs and label them by genre. This can be easily done when you import songs into your iTunes. But if you have a bunch of untagged songs, a couple Smart Playlists can help rate them quickly.
Contest Time! We announce the Prosoft Drive Genius contest winners, plus give instructions for the NEW Macromedia Studio 8 contest! Enter now, contest closes at midnight, Monday October 31st!
This is our longest show ever at almost an hour and a half. We talk the latest in the Mac world, how we record our podcasts, and so much more.
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This being my first article for MyMac.com, I’d thought I’d write about one of my favorite websites for me, an aspiring photographer. The site is called Flickr, a Yahoo! owned photo community site allowing users to post and share their digital photographs with other amateur and professional photographers throughout the world.
Becoming a member of Flickr is quite simple. If you only shoot a couple of dozen photos a month, you could get by with a free Flickr account which allows you to upload 20 MB of photos per month and to organize and maintain them in three different photo sets. You can get by with the free account for a couple of months without experiencing any limitations. But once you catch the Flickr bug you’ll want to go pro level for just $24.95 a year which gives you 2 gigs of monthly upload, unlimited storage, bandwidth, photosets, permanent archiving, and ad-free browsing and sharing.
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In my previous article, I gave you an overview of Ethernet networking from the point of view of cabled connections, and a discussion of the basics of network protocols and addressing.
Cabled connections are all well and good, but in the home setting they are rarely overly useful. Broadband connections will terminate at their point of entry to your home – typically the main phone jack or your cable modem box, where as most people will want their Macintosh in a study, kitchen or bedroom. You can run long cables round your house if you like, but unless cabling is built into the walls like an office this is not an attractive solution.
The rise of wireless networking is a perfect solution to this dilemma, and recognizing this, Apple was one of the earliest adopters of the technology right across the Macintosh range. They branded the technology Airport, and made it available as an option on all machines – though nowadays, the vast majority of the range come with it as standard.
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In a recent Macspiration article, “Changing Icons,” I talked about customizing your computer by changing your icons. Another way to customize the look of your computer is to change the desktop picture. The desktop picture is the image you see on the main screen of your computer after it boots up.
Two ways to do this on the Mac are through the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preference or in iPhoto. I’ll cover both in this article.
Let’s start with the System Preference titled Desktop & Screen Saver. To get here, go to the Apple Menu, and choose System Preferences. Once the System Preference window opens, click the icon for Desktop & Screen Saver.
The weeks top Mac news stories are discussed, including the new iMac, iPod, and iTunes. We finally get to interview Mac writer Bill Palmer, who joins us for a great interview. Audio feedback this week from Andrew Darlow, email reader feedback, and a new contest. We are giving away two copies of Drive Genius compliments of this weeks contest partner, Prosoft Engineering, Inc. Learn more about Drive Genius at this link. And we reveal the winner of the RadTech contest!
Tim thinks he knows what Apple, the Mac mini, and the Media Center are heading. Check out what he thinks in this weeks Focus Segment.
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Nemo’s Ten Point Tutorial #3
“Record Audio Feedback for MyMac.com Podcast, Using Audio Hijack Pro”
Tim and Chad keep asking for live listener comments during each MyMac.com Podcast. Let’s call their bluff by learning how to create MP3 voice recordings that can be submitted for that purpose.
1. Download Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba. Use the demo, or, even better, pay and register your software, because it’s worth every penny.
2. Launch Audio Hijack Pro, and plug in and turn on your USB microphone or Apple iSight into the correct USB or FireWire port, or plan to use the computer’s built-in microphone, if your Mac has one.
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Griffin iVault
Company: Griffin Technology
Price: $19.99
http://www.griffintechnology.com
Are you constantly dropping things? Fingers mashed in your car door? Constantly dropping your iPod Shuffle? Do you slip it in your pocket and forget you have your keys and change in there too? Are you a klutz?
Well, if you answered yes to any of the questions, then you need to provide an armor barrier around your Shuffle. As any military leader knows, you don’t go anywhere without your armor. With Griffin’s iVault, that’s exactly what iPod Shuffle users will now have for their Shuffle’s, armor.
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For anyone wanting to take your iPod on the road using an FM transmitter, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind. First, if you’re using an FM transmitter and expecting to hear from your car stereo receiver what you’d hear from a CD player, expect to be disappointed (see Guy Serle’s iCarPlay Wireless Plus – Review for an explanation)
Second, the quality of your car receiver has a bigger impact on your FM transmitter’s performance than you might think. Both of these systems were tested in my car (with a Pioneer stereo) and my wife’s truck (with a stock stereo). Between the two vehicles, my wife’s truck has a much better receiver, and this made a big difference in the performance for the Griffin iTrip.
Finally, my preferred method for listening to my iPod on the road is through my iCarPlay Wireless from Monster Cable. This was the predecessor to the iCarPlay Wireless Plus that Guy Serle reviewed. The only difference between my unit and his is that I’m limited to only eight stations on the FM band (88.1, 88.3, 88.5, 88.7, 88.9, 89.1, 89.3, and 89.5). Other than that, I’ve been very happy with the sound quality from the iCarPlay.
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In my last article, Macspiration: Changing Icons, I recommended a great program called FinderIconCM. After I wrote that article I decided to look through my hard drive for all of the freeware (free downloadable software) I had installed, and I have a lot. From utilities, to games, to full applications – you can find it on my hard drive. I decided to start a regular Macspiration article suggesting different freeware programs. Everyone, beginner or advance user, always likes having a program that makes something easier or more fun on the computer, especially a free program.
A lot of sites, podcasts, or television shows do something similar and recommend one piece of freeware or shareware at a time. I thought I’d be bold and daring – I’ll list three pieces of software each time. Maybe once in a while, I’ll list four or five.
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An early show this week. Tim and Chad talk to Mike Talmadge from ThoughtOut.biz about their cool new FlexPed. They are also offering a 10-20 percent discount for our podcast listeners, so be sure to download and listen. Go to www.thoughtout.biz/mymac for the special price, but listen to the podcast for the needed user name and password.
We go back in our Focus segment to 1995 and revisit the article 1-800-Buy-a-Mac written by Tim in which he telephones mac resellers to find out what was hot and not. Zip drive, anyone?
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InvisibleShield for iPod nano
Company: Protective Solutions, Inc.
Price: $19.95
http://www.theinvisibleshield.com
Impossibly small, impossibly fragile? Continue reading »
Have you been seduced yet? Have you been suckered by the fabled “reality distortion field”? I am, of course, talking about the latest, hottest iPod device from Apple – the tiny nano.
FlexPed iPod Stand
Company: Thought Out
Price: $39.99 – $63.99
http://thoughtout.biz
A few podcasts ago, I was talking about how I finally upgraded my car stereo to a JVC model with an audio input mini-jack on the front of the stereo. The reason for this was simple: I wanted to do away with the FM Transmitters I had been using to get my iPod music to play in the car. While many FM Transmitters work well, there is simply no comparison to an iPod connected directly to the stereo for much higher quality music.
The problem I had run into was where to put my forth generation iPod. I was using the docking station that came with the unit, sitting it on my center console, but it was not the ideal solution. First, I had to run two wires to it, and there was no place to mount the base station securely. So my iPod was one quick turn of the steering wheel away from sliding and falling to the floor. Not an ideal situation any way you look at it.
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Want to spruce up you desktop or folders, and make it more pleasing to your eye? One way to do this is by changing the icons. An icon is the little graphic that represents a file, folder, or application in your computer. Changing these icons is very simple to do.
First, to change the icon you need some new ones. You can find icons for downloading all over the Internet. My favorite icon source is “InterfaceLIFT” at http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/. This site has a great catalog of free icons for downloading that includes cartoons, hardware, foods, you name it.
Once you have your icons downloaded, you’ll need to find their folder and pick the one you want to choose. Click the icon once, so it is highlighted.
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iCarPlay Wireless Plus
Company: Monster
Price: $79.95
www.MonsterCable.com
I recently bought an Apple iPod nano and I love it. While many apparently have had some screen problems, mine has chugged right along like the good little 1.5-ounce color screen digital music player that it is. It even worked with my Belkin TuneBase FM Transmitter and though it didn’t quite fit properly, it was close enough for government work.
Everything was fine and dandy until my Belkin device’s fuse burned out. It uses a very odd fuse size that I couldn’t find anywhere. So, being the “just make it work” kinda guy I am, I substituted a slightly bigger fuse. The fuse holder for the TuneBase has a spring to hold it in place against the metal and it workedfor a while. I noticed that on occasion, the FM transmitter would stop working, and then start up again. Not often enough to replace it, just enough to be annoying. Then one day as I was driving along, I pulled the device out and it fell apart in my hands, right where the plug goes into the auxiliary power hole (what used to be called the cigarette lighter). Pieces went everywhere and I think the spring sprung out the window. I never could find it. I needed a new way to get music from the iPod into my car stereo without resorting to buying a new audio system. Also I wanted it to keep my iPod charged. I decided not to get another TuneBase, so I started looking for another solution. While not perfect, The Monster iCarPlay Wireless Plus does what it’s advertised to do.
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Contest Time! This week, we are working with RadTech to give one lucky listener four cool items! To enter, listen to the podcast and send all entries to contest@mymac.com
Tim takes Chad by surprise with this weeks focus segment, Five Questions for Chad.
Get the show Continue reading »
(RSS) Subscribe to our RSS feed via iPodder or other RSS newsreaders.
(iTunes) Subscribe to our podcast via the iTunes Music Store and have each episode downloaded every week automatically
(MP3) Download the MP3 file directly here, or listen in your web browser.
(Vote) For our Podcast on Podcast Alley
As autumn yields to winter, light is clearer and shadows are in evidence throughout much of the day. Our minds sense drama in the contrast between highlight and shadow, but our photos often don’t capture the experience, as we perceive it.
All current versions of Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have a feature called Levels, which use black, white, and gray point sliders to alter darks, lights, and midtones in images. This tutorial refers to Adobe’s new Photoshop CS2, and if you are using an earlier version, or Elements, you can achieve the same affect. Hint: the keyboard sequence Command (or Apple) and the L key should bring up your Levels box.
1. LOCATE your desired shadow photo, and drag it over the Photoshop CS2 icon in your Dock to OPEN IT. If necessary, use Image / Rotate Canvas to view the picture correctly upright.
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ScanSnap
Company: Fujitsu ScanSnap
Price: $495
http://www.fcpa.com/
I am offered items to review almost every day; everything from iPod cases to large format printers to hard drives to monitors to the plethora of software available on the Macintosh. Most things I turn down, as there are only so many hours in the day, and only so much space in my office for another piece of hardware. So when the opportunity came up to review the ScanSnap, I was surprised that I actually wanted to.
I had in my mind, before the unit arrived, what the ScanSnap was all about. A document scanner, not a flatbed scanner. I read it does duplex scans (both sides of a document at the same time) and outputs directly to Adobe Acrobat format. It all sounded good to me, but the proof is in the pudding.
Well, the pudding is small, as in tiny, it is fast, and it tastes really good! Okay, enough of the metaphors.
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You have your photos in iPhoto, and now you want to email them to a friend or family member. Using the email features in iPhoto can save you a lot of frustration and time.
To start, after opening iPhoto, click the “Library” icon on the top left. This will show you every picture stored in iPhoto. To see only the last batch you imported, click the “Last Roll” icon.
So now your photos are in front of you in little thumbnail versions. To enlarge them, so you see them better, use the slider on the lower right. Move it to the right and the photos get larger, and move it to the left and they get smaller.
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MyMac Podcast #385
MyMac Podcast #384