Hey all,
My grandmother, a 75 year old who can navigate email and a game of solitare, really needs a new computer. She's still on dial-up and on an ancient PC. We're getting her onto high speed and I'm trying to pursude the people doing the computer buying (who are PC users) to go with a mac for ease of use.

I'm wondering what this community could suggest for a very simple mac that is on the cheap side for an older user.

thx!

I bought a new Mac Mini for my folks and am in the process of setting it up and I'm seeing all sorts of graphical weirdness and I can't tell if the graphical weirdness is part of Snow Leopard, or a problem with the graphics card... or a problem with the combo of the graphics card, miniDVI adapter, and this screen.

here's what I'm seeing: When I go into the preferences for an application like Thunderbird, I'm see all sorts of odd ghosting and graphical artifacts as I flip through the tabs and options.

I'm using a Dell standard flatscreen monitor with the Mac Mini, connected using the MiniDVI to DVI adapter and DVI cable.

Any ideas what's causing this? Is this a known issue with Snow Leapard or is there a problem with the graphics card here?

Only see this problem in the options for Thunderbird and other 3rd party applications, and I know Apple broke all sorts of stuff with Snow Leopard ... so what I've trying to figure out if this is a hardware problem or not...?

Update: I've confirmed this is a Snow Leopard + Thunderbird setting rendering issue. I tested it on my Dad's MacBook Pro laptop which I just installed Snow Leopard and saw the exact same problem. So it's not a hardware problem. It's a Snow Leopard rendering problem.

Hey all,

So I have a whole bunch of podcasts that are meditation, relaxation music, "power nap" tunes, etc. All things that I don't want to delete. Some of the podcasts don't exist anymore, so I don't need to 'subscribe' to any new ones.

Is there any way to get these files out of the podcast library and into the music or audiobook library?

Is there any way to organize podcasts by folder, so I can put all the similar ones together? (I googled this one and it looks like 'no'.)

Thanks for any tips/advice!

Now that apple is only selling complete crap keyboards - what are people using for keyboards to go with their macs?

I just bought a Mac Mini for my parents, but there's no way in hell I'd buy them the flat apple keyboard. That thing just screams discomfort.

It's like apple just said, "Screw 2 decades worth of ergonomic research, let's come out with the most uncomfortable keyboard design ever because it's looks cool to be flat." Because we all know in the mac world, looks are more important than actual function.

That said, what are people using instead of the Apple keyboard. I'd like to find a replacement keyboard that actually supported all the apple buttons for things like volume.

I'd love to find some place that still sells the PREVIOUS Apple keyboard before they went to this flat design. Anyone know of a place that sells just the old style one?

Update: I think these might work.

Number of times the mini-DVI cable has fallen out of the mac mini on it's own in the first 24 hours of having the mac mini: 3 times in the first 24 hours.

The problem is the weight of the DVI (male) plugged into the DVI (female) part of the adaptor cable. That weight causes the mini-DVI (male) plugged into the mac mini to just fall out on it's own all the time.

MASSIVE design flaw.

Going to have to figure out a way to tape it so the mini-DVI (male) plug doesn't fall out all the time.

10.6.2 solved my sound preference issue. Thank god I'm lazy and didn't re-install. :)

I don't know how these (the Firefox html icon and gif icon) got to my Finder top bar and how I can get rid of them. It's driving me slightly insane. I've tried Finder Preferences and force quitting Finder altogether. I'm hoping for an easy solution to this. When I click on them they open right into my Firefox bookmarks html file and a gif thus they seem to be shortcuts? Please help. I'm on Snow Leopard on a unibody MacBook.

Apologies if this has already been posted, but I didn't see anything.

I have been sitting here for literally 20 minutes now staring at the "Checking iTunes Library" status bar. iTunes has been doing this to me for a while now and it keeps getting worse. I have a pretty large music library (a little over 37,000 songs) but this is just ridiculous. I don't want iTunes to check my songs, I just want to play my music. Is there any way I can bypass this stupidity or speed it up somehow? For reference, I'm on an Intel iMac running Tiger (upgrading as soon as I can afford). If anyone can give me a solution to this I will be so, so, so happy.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Nothing, because iTunes won't let me!

I recently inherited a PowerBook G4 (1.5 GHz, running Leopard 10.5.8), and am getting really frustrated with using my Gmail with Mail.

I want to setup my folders in Mail to sync with my Gmail folders. I have Gmail setup as an IMAP. So if I delete something, it goes into my Gmail Trash, not just my "On My Mac" Trash. Same thing if I'm working on a Draft; I don't want to two draft folders. Basically I want using my mail to be as streamlined as it is on my iPod Touch.

Is there a way I can configure my Mail folders to sync with my Gmail folders, instead of creating new ones on the server? Or is this just the way Mail is on Leopard? I also had a lot of trouble importing all my messages; I had to do it in several sessions. Arg!

How can I have a AppleTalk share mounted @ boot like you have the NFS shares in Disk Utility?

Much thanks!

Every once in awhile my Mac Pro errantly selects one of its older hard drives to boot from instead of the newest one I want it to boot from. I'm not sure why it does that, but it takes longer to boot and then I have to reboot again and hope it gets the right one.

I rarely if ever actually need to boot those drives, so my question is: is there a switch or file somewhere that I can flip or lock to make these drives (reversibly) un-bootable? Thanks.

The folks at MacHeist.com are offering 5 software apps (6, if they get 500K participants) for free.

The apps in this "MacHeist nanoBundle" are:

Shovebox $25 FREE

WriteRoom $25 FREE

Twitterrific $15 FREE

TinyGrab $14 FREE

Hordes of Orcs $25 FREE

And if they get 500,000 participants, they will unlock Mariner Write $50 FREE.

If you are interested, got to www.MacHeist.com to check out the offer. The offer is good for the next 5 days.

The startup disk on my MBP filled up completely over the last day or so. It was getting up there, but on Wednesday *the last time I checked* there was 14 GB free. When I woke the old boy up this morning, I was greeted with the "Startup disk is almost full" message.

Poked around but I must confess I am not really sure what I should be looking for. Or how to, really.

But I looked around found a few redundant files, moved them to the trash, emptied it. The disk size briefly fluctuated and almost immediately went to zero KB available.

I haven't got a clue what is going on here.

What should I be looking at or for?


X-posted

Here's a tricky one for you: after my Mac wakes up from sleep (either display sleep or full sleep, it doesn't matter which), Firefox will not start up properly. The icon will bounce, then stay "lit," but the application window never appears, and I have to force quit. The only way to fix it, so far, is to log out then log back in. As you may guess, that's a pain. Anyone else have this issue? And more importantly, how did you fix it? (The obvious choice - never let the system go to sleep - is not an option for me.)

PS - I'm running an iMac 21.5", 4GB RAM, OS X 10.6.1, and Firefox 3.5.5. Addons are Echofon, Adblock Plus, and NoScript.

Ever since I upgraded to the latest version of Safari, I've had these funny downloads automatically pop up called ch.ashx.
Does anyone know why this happens? Is it a virus? Does anyone know how to make it stop?

thanks

Anyone have this problem:

I upgraded to Snow Leopard in September and every now and then, funny things happen with my desktop. For instance the hard drive icon will move by itself and it'll go off the screen to where I have to drag it back to its original place. Also once the menu bar went and started acting funny. It wouldn't show up right.

I zapped the PRAM and it seems to be working fine now but I was wondering if anyone else had this "glitch." I really don't want to schedule an appointment with a Mac Genius for this...I already feel stupid because I had to for a very minor iPod problem that I could of fixed myself (that is if I knew about the "shuffle shake" feature on the iPod Nano).

Also, how do you find a corrupt music file in iTunes? I was having a problem syncing my iPod and the Mac Genius I talked to at the Apple Store in Cherry Hill said something about a possible corrupt file in iTunes. So how do I find it?

Does anyone know how to go about changing apples mail setting so that Firefox is the default v.s. Safari. I've googled a few different times, but I've found things that require a script (which is way above my head). Just wondering if there is an easy fix?

I'm in the middle of making up a wee movie of wedding photographs for a client using the iDVD program. I am basically putting all their wedding photographs of the day onto the dvd as a slideshow. However, I am experiencing a problem & don't know how to overcome it.

The 100 photographs run for approximately 11 minutes, which worked out that my client could chose 3/4 songs to play in the background of the slideshow. However, I can only seem to get the same song playing over & over again, which realistically isn't very professional! Not to mention how the music then just cuts off when the slideshow is over instead of gradually playing out.

Can anyone please help me out here? Maybe it's a different program I need to use? The dvd will only have 2 buttons on it: the slideshow of photographs & a link giving out my business information.

I would really appreciate if someone could help me out with how I put various songs in the background of the slideshow & how to make the music gradually fade out.

Thanks so much for your time.

(x-posted to macintosh)

Can anyone recommend me some good backup programs that'll do incremental as well as full backups? I'm using Time Machine for my primary hard drive, but I've got music stored on an external hard drive that I want to back up every week to a dedicated backup drive. I've also got another separate media drive, that I also want to back up to the aforementioned dedicated drive.

I used to use rsync, but I can't seem to get that to work anymore. Freeware solutions are preferable, but inexpensive one are good too, if they come highly recommended.

So I used to be able to click Command-` to toggle between documents in Word.

Now, it's not working. It's terrible!

Any ideas????




[ps - Word did crash a week or so ago, could that have anything to do with it?]

I just got my iMac back from the Apple Store today; they had to migrate my data over to a new one, since the old one had a bad DVD drive. Anyway, everything works great...except that Google.com and all of its associated sites (YouTube, etc) are now blocked. I get a "problem loading page/unable to connect" error immediately, every time. I get the same issue with Yahoo's homepage, but searching via Firefox's search box works fine for Yahoo. Pinging google.com in Terminal works fine. I've tried accessing the sites with other computers on my network, and had no problems there. The iMac's HOSTS file is clean, too.

Any thoughts???

Do you have already have Google Voice (Y/N)? y
If so, do you have a Google number (Y/N)?y

Post your question or report below (please include specific details and error messages, if applicable):
What are the costs/fees to call from a land line that has only local calling to long distance numbers (within U.S.A.) ?? i.e.- where it says call (the call button from my web browser) ...and where it says: 
"Google will call your phone and connect you for free (in the US)
Call: __________________ enter a number
Phone to ring
drop-down menu of places to call.
connect..."
Another question I have.. Is there a fee/cost from your land line provider (that only can make local calls...our phone only makes local calls...) ...... in order to make a call from a land line (that makes only local calls).....to another state, in otherwords long distance??
========================================================================
If I wanted to make calls from a land line that only makes local calls, to another state, in other words, long distance, how can I do this free??
x-posted to macrumors, googlevoiceforums, macosxdev (lj)

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: nothing.

If anyone's looking for a game to play of a weekend, here's one I'm not sure I'd recommend.

Hey Folk -

I am going to pick up my new macbook from Fed Ex tomorrow (I missed delivery today) and it just occured to me that it has no firewire. I would normally import things from my old computer using a firewire, but don't know how I might do that this time. Google has not been my friend or I've not been using the right search terms. Any of you who've gotten a new machine in the post-firewire era have any news or advice?

How can I share an entire volume in OS X? I just upgraded to a new iMac, and I want to copy an entire volume from my old Mac to the new one.

So I checked my hard drive status like a good mac user and I got a repair your hard drive with disk utility. The first problem really is that my cd/dvd drive is in need of repair. Yeah I guess I could shell out the cash and just get an external one. Which brings me to problem number two. I don't have an OSX 4 install disk. I just have the disk that came with the computer. So do I actually need the OSX 4 install disk or can I use the one that cmae with the computer itself?

I have a powerbook 1GHz PPC G4 with OSX4.11

And here is the message that I got. ( cut for largish image )

So any advice would be helpful. Thanks for your time : ) BTW the computer seems to be working fine, I'm more concerned about the future.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Machine Head-Elegy-Through the Ashes of Empires [Bonus Disc] Disc 1

Hi!
Here's what I get: a folder on a corporate file server (WinServ 2k3) which is changed by me and my team constantly. The folder is about 60gb on disk.
Most of the changes are offline, so I need to sync from and to my laptop (MacOS X 10.6.1). I used Windows offline folders before with no problems, but i'm lucky Mac user and that's the only thing I cannot setup.

I tried
1. rsync - doesn't allow to manage files which were changed both in folder A (local) and folder B (server)
2. Unison - works good, but scanning for changes takes him about 3 hours (60gb of files!)
3. Dropbox - not for me - too many sensitive files to upload them somewhere on the Net. and again - it's 60gb!
4. Synkron - always treats last changed file as a master version, which is not always true
5. GIT and Mercurial - good, but i tested it on a smaller folder and both of the tools created repository of 1,5gb for a folder of 3gb. This means that for a working folder the repository will take approx. 30gb. Not my way..

Would be great to hear any other ideas... :)

This may not strictly be a Mac OSX question, but I wonder if anyone might be able to help.

I sync some playlists from iTunes to my iPhone - who doesn't?

In iTunes they're all sorted by name.

When I connect the iPhone and look at the listing in iTunes, they're sorted by name there.

Yet on the phone itself, they're all shuffled around.

I think that I saw a setting for shuffling under Settings before, but I can't find it under v3.1.2.

I've removed the playlist and re-added it back, but it still remains shuffled.

Am I missing something dumb and simple here? How do I un-shuffle this playlist, or set the sort order to something else?

Has anyone here deleted their Windows/Boot Camp partition?

If so, how did it go? I'm thinking of doing this (since I'd like to replace XP with Windows 7) but would like to hear others' experiences first.

Macbook Pro
10.5.8
Purchased in September/October 2008

Current Mood: good
Current Music: Damh the Bard - Samhain Eve

So this might be a Word question, but... This has happened to me 2 times now.

I spend all my time making my fancy custom toolbars for MS Word. They work great. I love them, they love me.

Then, some disaster happens, and Word "Unexpectedly Quits".

Luckily, my documents are saved, but something gets reset, and my custom toolbar is gone! Into the ether! *sobs* And now I'm left to recreate them again.

Recreating them is driving me bonkers. Aren't they stored in some normal.dot somewhere? Or does the crash wipe out my normal.dot? (I notice that my default folder to save in is wiped out, too, and a new "Documents" folder appears.)

Please let me know if you know of a way I can find my toolbar again!

Thanks, y'all.

My MacBook Pro was running 10-20 degrees F hotter after I installed Snow Leopard than before. I lived with it for a while, but today I finally googled the matter and found that it is actually not a natural consequence of the upgrade.

For me, resetting the SMC appears to have cooled things down a lot. Maybe not all the way down to pre-Snow Leopard levels, but close.

I don't use Crashplan, but I have read widely that uninstalling it has solved even more aggressive heat problems under Snow Leopard.

Hope some folks find this helpful.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Super-Electric -- Stereolab, Switched On

Does anyone have any experience with a time machine restore from a non server account to a server account? I'm going to buy the new server edition mini but my time machine backups on my current mac are on a standard snow leopard. Do I need to run through the initial setup and restore from a time machine backup afterwards or do it during initial setup or is it possible at all?

Hello,

Sorry if this has been asked before. I just upgraded to Snow Leopard this weekend and I'm having trouble dragging PDF files from Preview into Pages. I'm working on my thesis and I need to insert different pages of PDF files into the appendix in my thesis in Pages. I could easily drag it from Preview on Leopard previously, but this feature seems to have been disabled in Snow. So it's quite frustrating, cos one day it worked, the next day it didn't. I tried to insert-choose into Pages directly but it only inserted the first page of the PDF - which is really not helpful. The only thing other thing I've tried is screen capture - but it's not very effective cos the resolution is kinda fuzzy.

Does anyone know a way around this?

Thanks,
Sheri

Current Mood: aggravated

I found some old memory components from my original iMac (hard to believe that was a decade ago!).
It's this:
Kingston 128 MB PC100 SDRAM (KVR100X64SC2/128)
I googled it and found one is selling for about $28. How do I know if they still work? Is there really a market for them? Just thought I'd ask.
thanks....kim

I do not know anything when it comes to electricity/adaptors/etc.

I have a Macbook. On it it says: Input 100-240v.
I'm going to Cuba, where they use 220v electricity. (they use 100 and something in the towns, but the resort uses 220)

In my mind, this appears as though I can use my Macbook there without frying it, since 220 is less than 240 (yay math skills!)

However, when I went to ask the people at The Source, they told me that I needed an adaptor and a converter, and that it was $50. Since I don't trust The Source for Mac-related things, I figured I'd ask here.

Do I need anything to use my Macbook when I go there?

I prefer to keep my photos organized in a file-folder structure like Windows uses -- I just couldn't get the hang of iPhoto, although I've tried it a few times.

But then I found out that iPhoto makes copies of all the pics, so that it eats up tons of space, right?

So, I deleted all those to make more space.

Are there any other tricks to know that will help me free up space?

How do I figure out if iTunes is making copies of my music, too?


Thanks!

Where do iTunes playlists go when they're deleted?
Is there a way to get them back?

Somehow I missed knowing about this for about my first six years of using OS X, so I bet a lot of other people don't know it. On OS X's Terminal.app, when a URL appears anywhere (like in text file you cat in an ssh session, etc.) you can easily and automatically open it in your default browser:

• 10.4 : cmd-double-click
• 10.5 : right-click for context menu, select "Open URL

In both versions, you do not select the URL first. Just click anywhere on the URL text, and OS X will attempt to auto-sense where it starts and ends. Sometimes it gets it wrong, but it almost always gets it right when there's no line-wrapping.

Other than /Developer, where does Xcode install files to on your Mac?

i would like to know if anybody here has the experience of upgrading an ibook G4 into mac os 10.5.8? the computer is a 800 MHz; 640 MB.

This post is only applicable to Mac users in Moscow, so I will write the rest of it in Russian.

Моей знакомой p_o_n_y нужно переконвертировать несколько клипов и записать их на DVD. Практически любой человек с Маком и iDVD может сделать это за пару часов.
Вознаграждением может быть упоминание в титрах - клипы поедут на промышленную выставку в США.

Hey all--

In Excel on PC, I can hit "F2" when I'm in a cell to edit the contents.

For the life of me, I can't figure out how to do that in Mac. Every time I want to edit a cell, I can tab & arrow up to it, but then I still have to move the cursor to the cell and click on it.

Thanks, y'all!


ETA: It's Ctrl-U (thanks, jodamiller!), but is there a way to customize it to something else?

Because I used to work with someone who bought things that were shiny and cute instead of things we need (big surprise, she's fired now) we have a Mac Mini for a basic video editing station. Its anemic little internal hard drive chokes like crazy trying to do much of anything in iMovie, but I noticed (also because aforementioned co-worker loved shiny things from LaCie) we had a spare Firewire 800 drive lying around and lo and behold, it runs a lot faster (since there's a real 3.5" drive inside it).

Aside from telling people to save iMovie projects to the larger drive, is there any way to tell iLife in general to use the larger drive to save projects and "Events" by default? Is there any way to influence where iMovie uses for "scratch" space? I've found little of use on other forums (save awesome advice like "buy Final Cut") but thought maybe someone here knew some .plist juju or something. Thanks for any advice.

ETA - this would be 10.5.8 and iLife '09, specifically

My wife and I have our computers shared over the home network. A few weeks ago, her computer, instead of appearing as "Daffodil" (what she named her computer), it started appearing as "Daffodil (2)". The printer is on her desk and I had to change print defaults because we have printer sharing turned on and some other stuff had to be changed.

Any idea what could have caused the computer name to appear with a (2) after it and any way I can revert the name to just the original name?

I hate the new iTunes store. The worst thing is the distracting animated billboard adverts that take up a huge part of the window. It's actually harder to find anything I want to buy. I haven't bought a single tune since they changed it.

Hi. I use a Sony Walkman in the NW-E01x series (I can't afford an ipod) and I need a program to transfer audio files to it. Wikipedia recommended JSymphonic but for some reason, it can't find the device path of the walkman :(. Any help?

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Signs-Bloc Party-Intimacy

My iphone is bound to my work computer because it was the first machine I ever connected it to.

Because of that when I connect my iphone to my home laptop it doesn't sync or allow me to manage my iphone.

How do I un-bind my iphone from the main desktop so that I can bind it to my home laptop??

Oh hai!
Would anybody know of an application that can search images on my local drives (on NAS actually, but mounted as local)
- by color, like Google search does (above)
- by fragment, like TinEye
- by similarity, like stock search engines
I'm already using Aperture to organise images (all "referenced") and some other home-built tools, so I would prefer if this search application would not touch my existing file/folder structure. For every RAW I'm storing low-res JPEG, so searching JPEGs is fine.

Can anyone recommend a good free anti-virus/anti-spyware for Mac?

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: IN THIS MOMENT - Prayers

I'm getting that error when trying to run an rsync script to backup my music folder to an external drive. I've heard that the problem is caused by hidden files and folders (Spotlight, etc), and I can get around it by excluding those folders...but how do I exclude them?

( Here's the script. )