Best Posts on About This Mac From Nov 2008

If you’ve seen Star Wars, you’ve no doubt wished that you could move an object just by think­ing about it. Well, mankind is a step closer to this real­ity. 60 min­utes recently broad­cast a story about Brain Con­trol Inter­face (BCI), and I’m still reel­ing from it, just think­ing about the impend­ing fall­out from this tech­nol­ogy. Amaz­ing, inspir­ing, breath-taking… I chal­lenge you to watch this and not be surprised!

I love show­ing my friends YouTube videos when they come to my place, but I hate shak­ing that mouse to keep the screen from dim­ming. Some­times in protest I turn the screen/power sav­ing off, but then I for­get to turn them back on. Headache!!!So I finally got sick of this and installed a slick lit­tle pro­gram called Caf­feine. It’s a menu bar app that keeps your com­puter awake.

Google has (finally?) added video and voice chat capa­bil­i­ties to their gmail ser­vice. To enable the ser­vice, just visit this site and down­load and install the plu­gin. You’ll have to quit your browser once it’s down­loaded before you can install it — but don’t worry, it will prompt you if you acci­dently leave Fire­fox open.Then, it’s just a mat­ter of wait­ing for one of your con­tacts to have installed it them­selves so you can try it out!

Jen­nifer asks:This ol’ lap­top (Dell) of mine is slowly dying (CMOS bat­tery, CD drive is dead, other wonky stuff). So, of course, I’m pon­der­ing get­ting a Mac­Book before I head back to Africa in Feb­ru­ary since I’ll be gone for four months. I guess my biggest ques­tion is Mac­Book vs. Mac­Book Pro (I like the glowy key­board in Pro) … but for a basic/average user, do I need what the Pro ver­sion has to offer and is it worth the extra cost?

I really like Fire­fox 3 and have always used it as my default web browser on both the Mac and PC plat­form. How­ever, the way that Fire­fox han­dles PDF files is some what of an annoy­ance. If you are like me you too will find it rather odd then that when in Fire­fox and you click on a web link to a PDF file it will auto­mat­i­cally down­load the file and then open the PDF up in Apple’s default Preview.

Portable Doc­u­ment For­mat, or .pdf, is my favourite file­type to send to oth­ers when I want to show them a doc­u­ment, and I care about for­mat­ting, file­size and com­pat­i­bil­ity. Your Mac comes with Pre­view, and Win­dows users can down­load a mul­ti­tude of .pdf read­ers like Foxit Reader and Acro­bat to read .pdf’s.

Jared asks:I have been using Pages for a lot of my desk­top pub­lish­ing needs while on my Mac, how­ever, I still need peo­ple in the PC world to view my doc­u­ments. I have been using the Export func­tion quite a lot and noticed that it does not have a short­cut key next to it. What is its short­cut key? This is a great ques­tion and actu­ally a prob­lem that I have encoun­tered when using other programs.

Mikul asks:Hey, our MacBook’s fan has been run­ning really loud lately. It used to not at all, and now it does 100% of the time, even when we’re not run­ning any­thing. Also, the bat­tery has been last­ing for a lot less time than it used to. Any ideas of what it is or what we could do?One thing you can check is the activ­ity mon­i­tor (if you use spot­light and search for Activ­ity Monitor).

Melissa asks:Do you know if there’s a Microsoft Pub­lisher ver­sion for mac? i know they have office.…(working on a newslet­ter that’s done in pub­lisher, for now any­way, but I have my mac)Unfortunately there isn’t any easy way to con­vert a Microsoft Pub­lisher file to some­thing that you can edit on your Mac. You can point fin­gers at Microsoft for releas­ing a pro­gram that is so pro­pri­etary that noth­ing else sup­ports it (our vote!

Cus­tomiza­tion of your Mac is one of the best ways to bring your per­son­al­ity to your Mac. And what bet­ter place for us to start talk­ing about cus­tomiza­tion than with the About This Mac screen. Now some of you might not even know where to find this screen. So to begin click on the Apple logo in the top left, and the first item you will see is About This Mac­This is what you will see before you do any customizing.