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TIDBITS, MUSINGS & HELPFUL HINTS
You need extra copies of your data because the hard drive inside your computer will eventually wear out. It is a fact of life. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I've been approached by distraught individuals who knew better, but had just never got around to making those critical backups. Human nature is such that probably over 95% of people are not able to manually do consistent periodic copying of data. Let's face it, it's time consuming and tedious, something easy to put off, the trouble starts when your hard drive takes a dirt nap. Here's what you want to do, hire me to set you up with an external hard drive on which I will clone the entire contents of your internal drive and setup a daily automatic copying of all the data that has been modified from the day before. It'll cost you about $159 for a great quality drive you can rely on and about an hour or hour and half of my time. And best of all you'll be able to start up from this drive in an emergency.
If you are still running old Apple computers that have OS 9 or earlier operating systems on them and these machines have no Firewire ports on them, you need to be aware that copying your old data off them takes a really really long time, if one can even get a USB device to mount on the desktop. Sometimes the operating system even has to be upgraded before an attempt can be made to save your data. If you are going to be a good frugal Yankee and be worrying about pennies, thats fine, you may want to get yourself a USB Flash Drive and spent those hours on your own time. If you can afford to spend the money and aren't going to freak out about the time that's cool, I'm happy to do it for you, but please figure this out ahead of time.
Penny wise and pound foolish. Ben Franklin was one smart dude, common sense to spare. As it applies to trying to keep old Apple Computers going it can sometimes be very hard for people to think about buying new equipment and letting go of what seems to be a perfectly fine functional computer. Here's the problem, OS 9 has not been updated now for something like 7 or 8 years, I've lost track of the exact amount of time. Apple does not support it anymore, period. There are several trip points now, probably chief among them is that Internet Explorer in OS 9 doesn't work. It doesn't have up to date security or Java script and that's a serious problem on some Web sites that you will try to visit. Same thing is true of AOL in OS 9, and it's ancient code is based on IE version 4! It's getting to the point you just can't get these applications to work anymore. Then there is Wireless, some of the older Powerbooks have the original Airport Cards in them and really really old Airport software. Nowadays we are working with Airport Extreme, a faster wireless standard that uses different encryption standards and sometimes you just are not going to be able to get the old software to talk to the new stuff. So folks, do yourself a favor, give the old machine to a nephew, niece, son or daughter for use as a word processor and buy yourself a new computer, everything will be so much easier and faster you'll be glad you made the decision and you won't have spent 2 or 3 hours with me beating a dead horse.
Do yourself a HUGE favor and avoid like the plague the purchase of HP All-in-One printers. Their printer Software is a resource hog and runs in the background all the time, not a bright plan in my experience. Of course if you'd have come to me first before you buy your equipment I can help you avoid these sorts of mistakes.
Please write down your Administrative Password. This is required for any future software installations or major configuration changes. This will typically happen in cases where the machine was setup without really understanding all the ramifications of the setup process. If you hire me to come set you up properly, I'll walk you through all this stuff and document everything.
I can source ram upgrades for you from a long time vendor who provides a lifetime warranty yet has great prices. Apple waaay over charges for their ram on the Apple Store. There's no good reason to spend that extra money.
Do not set up your machine to automatically login. Instead create at least a secondary administrative user as a clean emergency user that you can enter in the event your primary user space should ever get corrupted. Done this way, at each start up you'll be presented with a login window at which you'll enter your password each time before it will proceed to the desktop. It has the added benefit of keeping your machine more secure from potentially prying eyes.
Don't forget to repair disk permissions both before and after ANY software installation.
Learn how to properly install software in OS X, what is a disk image, what do I drag where ?
You can drag an Application from inside the Applications folder onto the dock to create an alias or shortcut on the dock, be careful not to drag the Application out of the Applications folder however, some Applications will not function properly out of their home folder.
Cool iPod (Hard disk based units) repair trick: Lots of flaky things can seem to garble up an ipod and make it unresponsive and seem to be broken. If all else fails to get your iPod to mount on the desktop, try this, plug it into your mac, launch disk utility, if it can see the ipod go ahead and erase the ipod by reformatting the iPod (this does assume you have backed up your songs already, if you have not, you are already hosed anyway so what the heck, hopefully you already thought ahead). Now you can launch iPod updater and click restore, you may just get a real nice surprise!
Can you navigate between Icon view, List View and column view ? I can show you how to take advantage of each mode. But do yourself this favor first, Apple in their infinite wisdom ships the operating system with a goofy default setting, so when in "Finder" (you do know what I mean here right ?), go under the menu item called Finder and select preferences, in the window that opens, check off the box next to "Always open folders in a new window". Now you can compare two folders side by side!
Ok, navigate to Applications folder, I like list view since things appear alphabetically and they are easier to find, then go down to Utilities folder, flip that open, and now take Printer Setup Utility and drag that onto your dock, it will come in handy later. You may also find some use for Grab if you want to be able to make screen shots. Disk utility is another handy utility to have on your dock, as you will use this to repair disk permissions.
In iTunes, if you are going to want to burn Mp3 CD's to use in your car, assuming your player will handle Mp3's, you will need to convert any ACC Audio file types into Mp3 file types. First of all, while in iTunes under edit menu, select view options and check off the box next to kind. I also like to have size and bit rate checked off as well as date added, artist, album & time. You may find unchecking the rest of the default items makes for a less cluttered itunes window. You can now drag headers to appear in whatever order you want. If you click on a header the entire list will sort by that header. Make sure you are in the main library when you make all these changes as they are specific to the playlist you are in, which frankly I find very annoying. Ok, now that you've sorted your Kind list you should be able to see all your ACC files. Next under iTunes menu item select preferences and then the advanced button, then click the importing tab and change the "import using" drop down menu to Mp3. Now, If you highlight one of these ACC songs, and go up to Advanced tab, you can see that you will be able to select "Convert selection to Mp3", choose that and a minute later your will have created a copy of that song that is now a Mp3 version, you may wish to toss the ACC version so you don't have duplicates. You can convert en mass by shift clicking on multiple songs at once. Now you can create a play list from the Mp3's that will burn as a MP3 CD no problem.
