The Screenshot Spectacular – Useful Mac – a handy guide covering the different ways of taking a screenshot in OS X
Category: apple (Page 1 of 2)
I recently bought a Time Capsule from Apple. This wondrous device’s basic function is to provide automated incremental wireless backups of all your Macs using Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine; it’s a fantastic invention that makes backing up so easy that perhaps now, finally, home computer users will start protecting their data. (Unfortunately people never seem to realise how valuable their information is until they lose all their baby photos or accounts.) It also provides fast wireless-n networking, Gigabit Ethernet on each of its 4 network ports, a USB2 port for wireless printing or wireless Network Attached Storage (NAS), IPv6, amongst several other features, and is generally an remarkable device.
Unfortunately, it’s not all roses. When the backups are working, it’s brilliant ? indeed, it’s backing up my laptop right now: I can just about hear it whirring away and the Time Machine icon in my menu is rotating ? but when you get the dreaded “Backup Failed” message, that’s when things get interesting?
Excellent commentary on the current Apple iPhone ringtone debacle at Alistair’s Place.
Braun Apple Braun collectors like myself have known for a long time where some of the ideas came from that led to the perforated-aluminium-look of some Apple computers. I took a few photographs of my world receiver T1000 from 1962 (!). Radii and perforations look almost identical to the ones on a MacBook Pro or a MacPro, 45 years later. [From SpiekerBlog (en): Braun Apple]
Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. They’ve just released version 1.0, go get it. Use it alongside NicePlayer to get full-screen video on your Mac without shelling out for QuickTime Pro. If VLC‘s not your bag, that is.
This one’s bugged the hell out of me for ages, but until I started using GNU Screen I never got round to fixing it. Desp has the skinny on fixing the backspace and forward-delete keys in OS X 10.4’s Terminal.app.
Well it’s about time! Engadget has coverage of the Apple & EMI joint event, live from London. In summary, EMI are selling their entire catalogue as a new iTunes Music Store “premium” option: $1.29/€1.29/£0.99 per song gets you a DRM-free, 256kbps AAC track. That’s 30 cents/20 pence extra for no DRM, hence better interoperability, and better audio quality. Apple will still sell “standard” EMI tracks with DRM and 128-bit AAC encoding for $0.99/€0.99/£0.79.
“Premium” albums will cost the same price as “standard” albums, which is great news; along with Apple’s new “Complete My Album” feature this will hopefully redress the “death of the album” that’s been happening since single-track purchase came into existence.
Update: Turns out the reason Mail.app was downloading everything was due to to an malfunctioning plugin (JunkMatcher). Uninstalling this fixed it all, thankfully! Continue reading