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On November 18, we’re teaming up with Apple to present a *free* seminar on adding a Mac to your business, as well as how to get the most out of using a Mac for work. It runs from 1:00 to 5:00 in Manchester, NH with an intermission.
Read more and register for free by “clicking here.”:http://www.smalldog.com/register
We hope to see you there!
_Dear Friends,_
I am writing this on Thursday the 11th, Veterans Day, and I want to give a shout out to all Veterans to thank you for your sacrifice and service. We will always remember.
With the change to Standard time it has been a lot easier to wake up in the morning since it is light out, but it is a sure sign that winter is upon us (notwithstanding the snow at my house) as we move towards the shortest day of the year. Many times during the summer, Art sets his iChat status as “the days are getting shorter and I hope it snows soon”. I don’t think I can fire him for that, but I’m going to counter with a “days are getting longer” message in a few weeks.
Grace went to get some straw to cover our strawberry patch in the garden and put it to sleep. Of course, the next morning I look out my window in the bedroom and there is a very plump deer pawing at the ground and munching on our dormant plants. I let Hammerhead outside to bark at the deer but he didn’t even see/smell her, so the deer finished her breakfast and strolled into the woods. I think that I’ll have to build a fence around the garden this spring since the deer pretty much ate our garden and we seem to be on the feeding trail now.
I really tried, I really did. I did not make it the entire week with the new Outlook mail client in MS Office ’11. I think that for those who are very familiar with Outlook on other platforms, perhaps this is a great boon to have Outlook for the Mac, but I found it to be a drag on my productivity. Outlook would crash a couple times a day and while it was very quick to re-load, that was an annoyance. Perhaps the clincher was the way that Outlook handles photos. I try to write a daily report to the entire Small Dog team. I usually start out with a picture from my iPhoto library and then talk about our business. Maybe it is just me, but I could not find a way to re-size a photo in Outlook. With Apple Mail, I can just drag a photo to an email message and then choose the size from the drop down box. With Outlook, the only way that I can have a correctly-sized photo is to export it from iPhoto at the appropriate size. While I am talking about iPhoto a bit–why is it that Apple does not support mail groups in the email shortcut in iPhoto?!
There were definitely some features of Outlook that I liked, including tagging messages with categories based upon my Address Book and the big collapsible headers in the inbox that separates messages by days. However, it was also missing some commands from Apple Mail that I definitely would miss. Two of those are “redirect” and “resend”–commands that I use many times each day. I have an enormous amount of email coming into my inbox, usually amounting to hundreds of emails even after I have eliminated the junk and spam. Many times these are messages that I want someone else to handle for customers or vendors (or I would be just doing email all day) so the redirect command is my favorite. I can redirect to a sales person who, when responding to the message, can just hit “reply” and be assured that the message goes to the right person. Resend is not used as much, but I use it if I have forgotten to include someone on a thread or if I have mistakenly sent the message to the home address instead of the business address.
There is an update to MS Office ’11 that might address the crashing that I experienced in Outlook and as I say, I think that if you are an Outlook experienced emailer you may find that Outlook fits your needs, but for this Apple fanboy, Apple Mail is still my email client.
Apple announced this week that they have stopped making the Xserve. I completely understand that it is difficult to maintain a product line that does not seem to have sufficient sales, but on the other hand, the Xserve was a rack-mounted powerhouse that gave us entry into many corporate clients. I just have to walk over to our own server room to see a few racks of Xserves powering our operations. Ben has more on this below–we’ll miss ya, Xserve!
Apple yesterday released the fifth revision of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Offering a series of updates and refinements over 10.6.4–which was…
When Steve Jobs announced the new AppleTV on September 1st, 2010 I looked at my wife and said “My first free $100 is…
Apple today launched an iOS 4.2-centric page for iPad, suggesting that the anticipated update’s release is imminent. Though an iPhone version of iOS…
AT&T’s myWireless Mobile can be a useful app for monitoring and managing your wireless usage. However, its clunky interface and limited functionality has…
Do embedded flash movies and other items ruin your browsing experience? Do you find flash as contemptible as Enron? Do you want to…
In a controversial move, Apple last Friday, announced it will be discontinuing the Xserve early next year. First released in 2002, the Xserve…
Whenever you connect a new iPod or wireless device to your Mac you get the option to name the device. Many times when I get a new device, I like to come up with a funny name for it. For example, my new little pink iPod shuffle is called “Little bubblegum shuffle” (don’t judge!).
However, when I plugged my shuffle into my computer today, I realized how stupid that nickname is. I had never actually changed the name of a Bluetooth device, so I had to play around for a little bit until I realized how to do it.
You want to go to System Preferences from the Apple menu at the upper left corner of your screen. In the System Preferences window, go to the third column down, and then select the “Bluetooth” icon (third icon in).
You will see a column on the left side that shows your connected Bluetooth devices. Click on the device that you would like to rename. Click the little gearshift icon towards the bottom of that column and you will see the option to rename the device. Select Rename and there will be a pop up window that will allow you to rename your Bluetooth device to whatever you desire.
Do embedded flash movies and other items ruin your browsing experience? Do you find flash as contemptible as Enron? Do you want to stop Flash from loading during a browsing session, or from running down your battery? Well, welcome into your computing experience “ClickToFlash.”:http://clicktoflash.com/ I found ClickToFlash on a whim while reading through blogs and forums about negative browsing experiences.
Am I anti-Flash? No, but most websites I frequent do not use significant amounts of Flash, if any, at any point. With all the buzz about Flash being a closed, proprietary Adobe product that does not play well with open source products, there is a growing number of groups looking to exclude Flash from their content.
I downloaded ClickToFlash to a new user account on my machine to make sure that installation would not adversely affect my primary user account. Installation was through the standard Apple installation/software installer routine. After installation I jumped in and found that the Flash items loaded without any difference. You need to restart the computer after installation to enable the plugin. After restarting, the loading time of web pages with Flash was much quicker since Flash is disabled until you actively click it.
The preferences for ClickToFlash can be entered by Control- (or Right-) clicking on the Flash window. From the contextual menu that pops up, you can select to load that specific Flash item on that one page, all Flash images on the page in question, and add the page you are on to the Flash whitelist.
On the main settings page, the options are laid out in a straightforward manner with the most important button of all: Uninstall ClickToFlash.
Normal Flash performance was seen in the behavior of the browser after allowing it to load. My testing was done in Safari 5.0.2. This is a worthwhile tool to add to your utilities to improve your browsing and computing experience.
“Download ClickToFlash here.”:http://clicktoflash.com/
Last week, I performed a major upgrade for a corporation in Burlington. A design department was having all of their Macs upgraded to Snow Leopard, CS5, and Office 2011. A few users also had hardware upgrades. One of those users was moving from a first generation Mac mini running 10.5.8 to a brand new 2.4Ghz Quad-Core Mac Pro.
The first step was to transfer the user’s data to the new Mac Pro. I used the built-in Migration Assistant that comes up right in the initial Setup Assistant, as I usually find this is a great and easy way to transfer data. Unfortunately, right at the end of the migration the machine kernel panicked (KP). I shut the Mac Pro down, disconnected the Mac mini, reset PRAM and reboot the Mac Pro. It KP’d once again. My next step was to boot to the install disc, open Disk Utility and repair the volume; no repairs were needed. Then I reinstalled the operating system, which in Snow Leopard is equivalent to the “Archive and Install” option, meaning no data was lost.
After the reinstall, the Mac Pro still kernel panicked. I decided to start from square one by performing and Erase and Install and re-migrating the data. This time, I first created a test account and then used Migration Assistant from /Applications/Utilities. I also chose not to transfer network settings, thinking it could have run into an odd driver issue. As the migration proceeded, I busied myself around the office performing the rest of the installs that needed to be done.
Much to my chagrin, after the migration completed the Mac Pro once again boot to KP. Crap. It was clear that I was going to have to dig deeper. I reboot in single user mode and once again ran an fsck (file system check), which found nothing. I did a little research and found other users were having the same problem due to items in their startup folders. With the Mac Pro in target disk mode, I connected it to my MacBook Pro and deleted the contents of /Library/StartupItems but that had no effect.
I then boot in safe mode (hold down the ‘shift’ key while booting), which worked successfully. I disabled all of the user startup items, but a reboot found the issue was still not resolved. I reboot once again into safe mode. From safe mode I was able to check the Console logs and that’s when the lightbulb turned on; the kernel panics were referencing Parallels drivers. I was already kicking myself that I hadn’t just checked the Console logs hours before. I get a slap on the wrist for that one.
Now that I was able to pin-point the issue to Parallels, I found several other instances of people running into the same specific problem after migration. Using the instructions in “this Parallels Kbase article”:http://kb.parallels.com/4709 I fully uninstalled Parallels (which does not delete virtual machines) and, sure enough, the machine reboot just fine. This particular user was getting an upgrade to Parallels 6 anyway and after installing that, her virtual machines opened just fine. Problem solved!