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Watching Hulu (Or If You Want to Hide Your IP Address)

Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, you wanted to watch the latest episode of 30 Rock but didn’t know where to turn because your VCR (VCR? What’s that?) is broken and you haven’t been able to figure out the whole downloading tv shows off iTunes or anywhere else on the internet (*cough*). You’ve heard of this website called Hulu but anytime you go there it gives you this message:

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Best Posts on About This Mac From Nov 2008

• If you can think it, it can happen
  Posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 in Science - Comments: (1)
  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!
• Keep Your Computer Awake!
  Posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 in Basic - Comments: (0)
  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 Adds Video Chat to Gmail
  Posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 in Google - Comments: (0)
  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!
• Which MacBook Should I Buy?
  Posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 in Hardware - Comments: (0)
  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?
• PDF Viewing for Firefox 3
  Posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 in Basic - Comments: (0)
  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.
• Any Document To .pdf
  Posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 in Conversion - Comments: (1)
  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.
• Creating Your Own Shortcuts
  Posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 in iWork - Comments: (1)
  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.
• Loud Fan and Low Battery - What to Do?
  Posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 in Hardware - Comments: (4)
  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).
• Microsoft Publisher for Mac
  Posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 in Conversion - Comments: (2)
  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!
• Customize About This Mac
  Posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2008 in Customizing - Comments: (2)
  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.

Microsoft Publisher for Mac

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!), or you can blame Apple for not trying to support a somewhat popular program on their platform. Either way, you’ve got a file you can’t open now that you’ve switched to your Mac. Here’s a few options:

• If you still have access to the Windows computer with Publisher on it, you export/save as from Publisher as a Word document which will then be able to be opened by various programs on your Mac (i.e. Microsoft Word for Mac, Apple’s Pages, OpenOffice, etc). You’ll most likely lose some formatting but at least the contents of your document are there to be edited.
• Again, assuming you still have access to the Windows computer with Publisher on it - You could take a screenshot on your Windows computer of the various graphic elements (i.e. logos, graphs, funky text) and then copy and paste the text into one of the programs mentioned above and rebuild your document.
• Apparently, though we’ll have to say we haven’t tried this ourselves, using an old version of Adobe’s Pagemaker for Windows you can open the Publisher file, save it as an Adobe InDesign file which will then be useable by Adobe InDesign for Mac. We don’t recommend this route unless you already have the programs as they are quite expensive and unless the document is going to generate or save you a bunch of money (or if your time is worth a lot of money?), it’s not worth pursuing this route.

Unfortunately that’s the best we could come up with. Anyone else have any good suggestions or things that have worked for you?

Loud Fan and Low Battery - What to Do?

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). Change the little box up top to say “All Processes” and then sort the list by the CPU option. Chances are something like Safari or Firefox is running really high and when you’re shutting the lid to put it to sleep, that process is still running even though you think it’s not, which is why the battery isn’t lasting as long as it used to. If it’s a program that you recognize (i.e. Safari, Firefox, iTunes) you can select it and choose the stop sign looking button that says “Quit Process” and it will fully kill that program/application.

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