Muskoka Mac User Group

We’ve got a special evening on tap for the last meeting of the year! It’s a joint venture between the Muskoka Mac Users Group and Macs At Work.

The venue is confirmed as the Algonquin Theatre – be there at 7.30 pm.

Meg and the meeting commitee are lining up guest speakers, I’ve got some door prizes coming and we’re hoping for a big turn out.

Stay tuned for more announcements as they firm things up.

Make sure everyone you know that’s interested in the Mac world at all knows about it!

Well that was kind of silly of me ! I didn’t mention the date. It’s December 10th….

Well, I picked something….
Comments anybody?

And hey – I know more members have websites than just these listed on the right. It’s not just for sites we run, but for sites we use or are involved in. What else should be listed over there?

Another idiosyncrasy of Leopard is: when you install it, your printer drivers require updating, and you will become printer-less. The Apple-suggested fix is complicated. But Meg has a simpler one, and it works: just choose Add Printer and you are back in business.
Bill

P.S.: what Apple suggested was that we use a provision on the Installation DVD. I could not find this provision. Apple Help told me to contact the printer companies. i.e. Brother and Canon, and complain that they had not got around to preparing a driver for OS 10.5. However, they had done so, but did not make it easy to download. Meg’s solution worked like a charm.
Bill

During our discussion about backing up our work at MMUG this week, I passed along this tip. Perhaps it is useful and should be available for others who were not there:

For many years I have backed up my computer work onto CDs. I now have quite a collection of these backup discs.

This summer I had the need to recover some work I had done about five-six years ago on an older Mac. I found the backup disc with no problem. When I opened it, I could find both the folder and the documents. However, the computer said they were “locked”. I could not open them.

In discussion with Meg Jordan, she finally suggested I try dragging the locked documents out of the folder and onto the desktop.

Voila: they opened like a charm.

Just a tip, in case you find yourself in a similar frustrating position.

Bill

I recently purchased a dot-Mac account, basically to use for web sites. But I got the bright idea that I could use the iDisc feature to back up my 7,500 pictures from iPhoto. I ran into trouble and jammed the iDisc full. Here is my exchange with Apple’s trouble shooters. FYI:

“I understand you would like to back up your iPhoto files to your iDisk. Unfortunately this type of back up may be backing up more data to your iDisk than what Backup was designed to handle.

The Personal Data & Settings plan is the only plan designed to back up to the iDisk by default. Larger plans–including the Home folder, iLife, and Purchased Music plans–are designed to be used with a local hard disk or removable media, and not with the iDisk.

Backup limits the individual backup files created on iDisk to 90 MB, so if you back up more than 90 MB, the restore files will be split into multiple parts. For example, if you back up 900 MB of data, your backup will be split into ten files of 90 MB each. You may notice that using your iDisk to back up or restore large amounts of data seems slow. Also, restoring from multiple files is sometimes less successful than restoring from a single backup file of less than 90 MB.

Please keep in mind as well that Backup can back up data to other destinations besides iDisk, such as CD, DVD, flash drive, external hard disk, or iPod. You may find these media to be efficient alternatives to backing up to iDisk for large amounts of data like your iPhoto library.

You can purchase media from directly within Backup. Choose Shop for Backup Media from the Backup menu in the menubar while Backup is open.

The typical capacities of these different media are as follows:

CD = 700 MB
DVD = 4.7 GB
USB flash drive = various sizes up to 4 GB typically
External hard disk = often 20 GB and up

In the .Mac Learning Center you’ll find a video and a step-by-step tutorial explaining how to use Backup:

Using Backup 3 to Keep Your Files Safe

For more help getting started with Backup 3, please open Backup and choose Backup Help from the Help menu.

Thank you for being a .Mac customer. We do appreciate your business.

Sincerely,

Ryan
.Mac Support
http://www.apple.com/support/dotmac

http://www.mac.com/learningcenter

Bill

OK, one more post and I’ll shut up

I was just thinking about the question that was asked last night – paraphrasing slightly, it basically was

“What’s Linux Good At?”

The answer is – an awful lot of different things…. Here’s the three ends of the spectrum from this week’s new headllines

1 – Linux Powers 85% of the top 500 super computers in the world

2 – Wal Mart just sold out of it’s new $200 PC

3 – Google and many others are combining on a new Linux based cell phone platform.

The real question might be what is Linux bad at?

I know I rambled on a lot last night but this is the one area I never mentioned I really wanted to.

The One Laptop Per Child project is the kind of thing that makes people proud to be open source enthusiasts. I encourage everybody to read more about this great project.

And, if you decide you’d like one of those laptops for yourself, now you can – with the Give One Get One program.

Hope you find all this interesting.

Many of us remember Daniel Bradbury, a bright young student from Port Sydney who has been a member of MMUG for some years, and operates a successful computer and web design company.

He is a participant in the CBC”s Next Best Prime Minister competition. He is good. He needs our votes of support.

Check him out on youtube.

Bill

As you know, I have entered a contest titled “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister”. It is run by the CBC each year for young people between the age of 18-25.

Here’s how to vote. All you need to do is follow this link to create your account

Then once you are logged in click this following link and scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see the comments box:

After posting your comment just click the “Thumbs Up” icon near your comment and it will add a “+1″.

Feel free to let me know if you have a problem/questions.

You can read more about the contest here

Thank you,
Daniel

I know I’ve been ‘monopolizing the conversation’ around here lately

There’s an easy way to fix that – post something of your own !

For those of you looking for more info on tonight’s meeting, Meg’s post on the topics etc. is right here.

And if you wanted something that I didn’t post – make sure you read Bill’s post about printing from Keynote.

See you tonight!

Looks like the changes to the Leopard firewall have made Skype and World of Warcraft incompatible with Leopard.

The basic problem is Leopard uses code signatures to identify programs, then adds those signatures to the programs. If the programs themselves do ’self signing’ then Apple’s added check information causes that code check to fail.

Hopefully Skype and World of Warcraft release updates soon – it’s possible reinstalling the software might fix the issue…