Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • Tip of the Week: Searching in Safari

    If you haven’t assumed it already, I’m a bit of a nutcase when it comes to searching for stuff on my Mac. I use Spotlight every few minutes, Google like a pro, and also have little patience for locating relevant sections of websites I visit while doing research.

    Some websites are designed in a way that makes skimming text difficult, and some pages are just so long that I don’t want to skim the whole thing. To find a word or chunk of text in a web page, simply press command-F and type what you’re looking for. All instances of that text will be highlighted, making for easy at-a-glance skimming. To move to the next instance of searched-for text, press command-G (Find Again), and to move to the previous instance, press command-shift-G.

    This tip works in Firefox, too. I haven’t tested it in Google Chrome, Opera, or other web browsers, but it’s a good bet these browsers offer similar or identical features.

    The shift key functions in this same fashion when combined with other keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can simulate the function of a Page Down key by pressing the space bar in Safari, Preview, Adobe Reader, and many other applications. Pressing shift-space is like pressing Page Up. Command-à will rotate through open windows in an application, and shift-command-à will rotate through them backwards. Same with the Application Switcher.

    I love keyboard shortcuts!

  • Permissions are Powerful

    I arrived in the office this morning around 8:30, and Rob must have seen me drive in. My phone was ringing as soon as I went in the door–all of his preferences had reverted to defaults, so his Mail folders and rules were gone, his iChat accounts had to be re-entered, his keychains were toast, and some of his programs needed to be re-registered.

    Rob is a very organized guy, and has his own methods of keeping information easily accessible. Needless to say, this was a blow to his productivity. After fiddling around for a while and manually re-entering mail servers and iChat configurations, it dawned on me that his Preferences folder at ~/Library/Preferences might have some permissions issues.

    I’d normally recommend just going back a day or two in Time Machine to restore this folder to a known-good state, but Rob hasn’t backed up his machine in months. I examined the permissions on this folder, and found they were awry.

    You can check the permissions of any file or folder on your Mac by clicking once on the item in question and selecting Get Info from the File menu; you can also right-click on the item and select Get Info from the contextual menu that appears. Sure enough, somehow he had no access to this folder, so Applications could not call on the individual preference files to display options correctly.

    This wasn’t too surprising, especially since none of the changes we were making actually stuck after re-launching applications. By changing the topmost item in the Sharing and Permissions part of the Get Info window to Read & Write, applications were once again able to access their preferences.

    Rob is updating his backup as we speak. You should, too.

  • Happy Tuesday,

    Last week sure did bring crazy weather to our corner of the world. First we saw significant snowfall (Don had over a foot up on Prickly Mountain!), and the weekend brought temperatures in the seventies and eighties with high humidity. It was a first real taste of Spring, and I took full advantage by prepping my gardens, attending a health care rally at the State House in Montpelier, riding a few hundred miles on my motorcycle, and enjoying excellent barbecue with excellent friends.

    I’m headed down to Washington, D.C. with Don, Ed, and Kali for the Apple Specialist Marketing Coop (ASMC) annual conference. This conference includes valuable seminars and provides lots of time for networking, all in the name of better serving you – our customers. Sharing best practices with other Apple Specialists is perhaps the most productive way to spend the little free time we’ll have. Our community is open and eager to collaborate. I’d love to hear of your experiences with other Apple Specialists. Do you prefer an Apple Store for your repair services, or do you have a favorite independently-owned repair shop?

    I look forward to hearing from you, and sharing your stories in next week’s Tech Tails.

    Enjoy this issue, and, as always, keep in touch.

    Matt
    matt@smalldog.com

  • Contest Winners!

    This week we selected three winners of our Facebook, Twitter, and Kibbles drawing. From Facebook we randomly selected Laura P. from Charlottesville, VA,…

  • Mark and I took an afternoon off this week and got the Norton wiring almost complete. All the lights work and we have spark at the plugs, so all I need to do now is button things up, put some oil in it and mount the gas tank and then get Artie or Hapy to come over to kick start it while I mess with the timing and carbs. I’m getting excited about getting this antique on the road. I’ll post pictures soon.

    I’ll be attending the “Health Care is a Human Right” rally tomorrow in Montpelier. We are supposed to have great weather and I’m sure a motorcycle ride is in my future this weekend, too!

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
    _Don, Kali & Ed_

  • April's Contest Winners!

    This week we selected three winners of our Facebook, Twitter, and Kibbles drawing.

    From Facebook we randomly selected Laura P. from Charlottesville, VA, and from Twitter we chose Leah K. of Brooklyn, NY. We’re still awaiting confirmation from our newsletter winner, so we’ll be back to you next week… who knows, we may need to pick another!

    “Small Dog Electronics on Facebook.”:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Small-Dog-Electronics/18904017006

    “Small Dog Electronics on Twitter.”:http://twitter.com/hellosmalldog

    We’ll have another drawing in May. Good luck in the next round!

  • Enter to Win Tickets To See Rodrigo y Gabriela + An iPod nano!

    On Saturday, May 8, progressive guitar phenoms Rodrigo y Gabriela will performing at the “Flynn Theatre”:http://www.flynncenter.org in Burlington, Vermont. Small Dog Electronics is teaming up with our friends at “Higher Ground”:http://www.highergroundmusic.com/calendar/show/3438 with a fun contest to help promote these amazing musicians, and what promises to be an excellent show.

    Learn about the show and musicians “by clicking here.”:http://www.highergroundmusic.com/calendar/show/3438/

    One grand prize winner will receive a pair of tickets to the show, an “iPod nano”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/74504/ipod-nano-8gb-black-5g, and a set of “Chill Pill mobile speakers!”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/71679/chill-pill-mobile-speakers-black

    To enter, please send an email to “intern@highergroundmusic.com”:mailto:intern@highergroundmusic.com with a correct response to the following trivia question: *What is the title of Rodrigo y Gabriela’s most recent album?*

    In case you haven’t heard of them, Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero have been playing guitar together for more than fifteen years. Here’s their blurb:

    bq. From their first steps as teenage thrash metallurgists in their native Mexico City, through the innocents abroad street players of Dublin’s Grafton Street at the turn of the Millennium, to the universally acclaimed globe straddling tour machine of 2009, theirs is a musical union where mutual understanding goes beyond intuitive and into the realms of Zen–rhythmic Yin to melodic Yang.

    __The fine print:
    The deadline to enter is Thursday, May 6 at noon. One entry per person. Winner will be notified on Friday, May 7. Prize must be claimed in person by the winning contestant the night of the show. Contest will be conducted at the discretion of HG and SD. Good luck!__

  • WWDC Dates Announced

    Apple has announced the dates for the this year’s “Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC)”:http://developer.apple.com/wwdc: June 7th through 11th at San Francisco’s Moscone West convention center.

    The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is the premier technical conference for developers innovating with Apple technologies. Over 1,000 Apple engineers will be at Moscone West to present advanced coding and development techniques that will show you how to enhance the capabilities of your applications with the revolutionary technologies in iPhone OS and Mac OS X.

    The conference includes technical sessions and hands-on labs for attendees, as well as other special events. Registration costs $1599, and tickets tend to sell out very fast.

    Among other demos, previews, and features, Apple is expected to unveil the latest version of iPhone hardware during a keynote at the event. New iPhone hardware is highly anticipated, especially after a test model was “discovered” in at the Gourmet Haus Staudt in California.

    “Click here to read more about the “Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).”:http://developer.apple.com/wwdc

  • Adobe CS5: Now Shipping and Demo-Ready

    So many big things seem to be converging at the end of the month… iPad with 3G pre-orders are shipping, and now CS5 is ready to go.

    On April 12, I watched “Adobe’s CS5 webinar,”:http://cs5launch.adobe.com/?sdid=FDSEN which outlined some of the top new features of Creative Suite 5. Nothing was available for download yet, but Adobe announced that it was coming by April 30.

    Well, it’s here, and I’m currently taking a first look. We’ll report back on the newest features in a future issue. Don, Ed and I will be in DC next week at ASMC 7.0, an Apple Specialist conference, so we’ll be reporting from the road!

    In the meantime, “download the CS5 Trial here.”:http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26294&vid=11376487&mode=info

    P.S. Check out the Content-Aware feature… absolutely amazing!

  • MAC TREAT #123: Using MobileMe's Remote Wipe and Find Features

    I’ve been using Apple’s MobileMe service for years–even way back when it was called .Mac.* I remember when it was free a free service; it’s now a $99 annual subscription (though we often have coupons, rebates, and other offers for up to $30 off MobileMe).

    I continue to pay for MobileMe because, for the money, it’s a very useful service. It offers synchronization of email, contacts, Safari bookmarks, and calendars between Macs, PCs, iPods, and iPhone. It also offers a very attractive online photo gallery, 20GB of online data storage, and my favorite feature, *Find My iPhone*.

    The Find My iPhone feature helps you locate your iPhone (or iPod touch or iPad) if has been lost or misplaced. It also allows you to display a message on your iPhone to help someone return it to you.The Remote Passcode Lock feature lets you remotely lock your iPhone and create a new or replacement 4-digit passcode. Finally, the Find My iPhone features *Remote Wipe*, which lets you erase all your information on iPhone/iPad/iPod touch in case you don’t recover it.

    Apple famously used Remote Wipe to “brick” the prototype iPhone that was “found” in a bar in California a couple of weeks ago. Just today I watched Don use MobileMe to remotely reset his iPad in advance of selling it to upgrade to iPad 3G. All he had to do was log in to his MobileMe account, click the “Find My iPhone” button, enter his password, select his iPad from the list of his registered devices, and select “Remote Wipe.” Within a minute, his iPad had automatically erased all data and reset to the factory settings.

    To enable this feature, you have to turn on Find My iPhone in your MobileMe account settings. iPhone OS 3.0 or later is required to use Find My iPhone and the Remote Wipe feature; iPhone OS 3.1 is required for the Remote Passcode Lock feature.

    You can learn more about Remote Wipe “by clicking here.”:http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/find-my-iphone.html See “MobileMe on Smalldog.com by clicking here.”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/74171/apple-mobileme-individual-retail-package-1yr-subscription-renewal

    Here’s Apple Support article to help you troubleshoot Remote Wipe: “MobileMe Troubleshooting Find My iPhone and Remote Wipe”:http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2734

    __*Editor’s Note: Actually, I think both of us have been users since it was called iTools in 2002!__

  • _Dear Friends,_

    This was a week of weather swings here in the Green Mountains. I was motorcycle riding on Sunday in warm sunny weather with Tony and Grace and we went over to Conway, NH to the Lobster Pound, our favorite destination over the White Mountains. Tuesday, I received a foot of snow at my house and was slipping and sliding on the way to work since I had removed my winter tires on the weekend. Today it is warm and sunny again with the forecast for the weekend in the 70s and 80s. Truly proves the cliche “if you don’t like the weather, wait a moment.”

    The iPad with 3G and Wi-Fi is being released tonight at 5PM and I will be upgrading to the 3G model for those inevitable times that Wi-Fi is not available. I have found the iPad to be the ideal meeting computer. I can access all the word processing and spreadsheet documents, my email and have Safari to quickly look things up. It is less obtrusive than having a laptop in front of you, and as companies and organizations adopt this technology, we will save some trees, too.

    Despite the snow, it is the official Green Up Day in Vermont and hundreds of volunteers will be scouring the roadsides and picking up a winter’s trash to make the Green Mountains truly green. One of the things I really enjoy about Vermont is that billboards are illegal here, so our roads just look cleaner even without greening up!