Articles

Here are some of my top tips for additional OS X functions, most have come from my experience at home and work.

1. Plugging in a TV or Second Monitor

Most Mac models come with an external connector for attaching additional screens (normally a mini DVI connector). From this you need a mini DVI to DVI connector then another cable to plug into your screen, this can be a DVI to VGA cable, DVI to DVI cable or as I have a DVI to HDMI cable. All the cables are very cheap and can normally be picked up from Ebay.

OS X should automatically detect the second screen plugged in and you can open system preferences to adjust the resolution. You may have to play around with the settings, my 26" LG HD TV looks best on 1280 x 720 rather than its native resolution.

I've had my iMac plugged into my TV for the past 6 months and people still think its cool how I can move my mouse from one screen to another.

2. Sharing your Internet over Wireless.

While I was at University our local cable supplier didn't give out free wireless routers so to save buying one I shared the Internet out through my iMac's wireless. In Leopard the Internet can be shared from the Sharing section in System Preferences.

3. Bluetooth Internet Through Your Phone

It usually takes ISP's about two weeks to put ADSL on a phone line. Clearly I couldn't be without Internet for two weeks so I turned to my mobile phone provider (T-Mobile) to hook me up to the net. Now that 3G signal is well established (and I have a 3G phone) I got speeds of around 3mb for £12.50/month.

First you need to sync your phone via Bluetooth in iSync. If your phone isn't supported then check the manufactures website or Google to see if someone has written a plugin. My Sony Ericsson K850i isn't natively supported in iSync however fortunately someone had written what was needed.

Once you have paired the devices click on the Bluetooth icon on the menu bar, select your phone and click connect to network. With 3G you shouldn't need to enter any dialing information and as long as you have good signal you should be online within no time.

4. Watching TV through USB Stick

I was in PC World a couple of months ago and I wanted to buy something, I wasn't really bothered what I just wanted to buy something new to play with at the weekend. I've looked at USB digital TV adapters before but was never convinced to buy one. I ended up with a £25 Hauppauge USB stick for my PC, I brought it and installed it on my PC.

The Hauppauge software was useless and I was considering taking it back until I stumbled upon EyeTV and most importantly that it supported my Hauppauge USB stick. EyeTV works flawlessly and its PVR functions have completely changed how I watch TV. It has everything apart from an automatic advert skipper.

5. Running Windows Applications

There are a couple of different options for running Windows applications on an Intel Mac. If its just the case of needing Internet Explorer 7 for certain websites or for testing purposes then ie4osx is a great application.

Otherwise you have the options of Parallels or VMWare.

6. Using Mail to access your Email Through IMAP

Being able to use IMAP in Mail is nothing new but its still under used. I use Mail to organise my two Google Mail accounts, the main benefit to using IMAP over POP3 is that is can syncronise between the mail on Googles server and on my computer meaning I can view the same emails from at home in Mail and from a Web Browser at work.

7. Recording Internet radio with Audio Hijack Pro

A lot of Internet Radio sites make it very hard to record, fortunately Audio Hijack Pro makes it easy (as easy as using your PVR or tape recorder).

First find the radio show you want to record.

Next open Audio Hijack Pro and drag Firefox/Safari into Audio Hijack (you may have to restart Firefox/Safari) click the hijack button and then hit record. When recording from services such as the BBC you may have to boost the volume because of the poor audio quality (in the Effects bab).

8. Keeping an eye on memory usage with Activity Monitor.

If you find your Mac running slow it might be because you're low on memory. The usual suspects on my Mac are Firefox or Parallels, even with 4gig of memory a lot still gets used.

One easy way to keep an eye on what you're using is to open the activity monitor program and to set the dock icon to show memory usage.

Then just set activity monitor to open at login.

9. Saving You Tube videos with Get Tube.

Occasionally there might be a need to save a YouTube video. There are various programs for OS X but the best one I've found is Get Tube.

First find your favourite video on YouTube.

Next open Get Tube and select which browser you're using. The video will then download. You can use Tube Cart for multiple videos.

10. Take a screen shot

You maybe wondering how I've taken all these pictures for this article. The basic way to take a screen shot on your Mac is by Command+Shift+3, this takes a screen shot of the screen and save it as a file on the desktop, alternatively Command+Shift+4, then drag around the area - takes a screen shot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop.

Related

52 Ways to Speed Up OS X
The history of the iPod

I've been developing web sites using Drupal for over 18 months now, for me the flexibility and modules available for Drupal make it the best and quickest way to develop a website. Here are some of my top tips:

1. If you want to edit the layout of the site maintenance page you can find the CSS file in misc/maintenance.css.

2. After I have installed Drupal I first enable clean URLs then enable the path module. This means I can build basic SEO in from the start. If building a blog or articles based site I like to use the path auto module to automatically specify the URL.

3. When designing a site I like to build it in Dreamweaver first, then I copy the PHP template tags in from another template (often bluemarine). In the past I would customise the garland theme however there was a lot of extra CSS that I would often remove.

4. To create a template for an individual node type create a file in your template directory called node-nodetype.tpl.php where nodetype is the node type. (ie node-story.tpl.php for a story node).

This is really useful for customising individual nodes especially when using CCK and the views module. For instance I recently built a ticket support system for a company, by integrating a view into the company node you could immediately see the open tickets for that company.

//load the view by name
$view = views_get_view('view ticket');
//output the top three items in the view with the node title as an argument
print views_build_view('embed', $view, array($node->nid), false, 3);

The above code is for inserting a view into a node - more in the views documentation.

5. When first developing a theme I change the administrative theme to Garland or Bluemarine so that I can still access all the administration sections in order to enable menus, blocks, CCK and other configuration options.

6. In Drupal 5 a top border is added to tables. If this messes up your theme edit modules/system/system.css and comment out or remove line 18 ( border-top: 1px solid #ccc; ).

7. The TinyMCE module allows you to turn a text area into a WYSIWYG editor giving you formatting options such as bold, italic, underline, text direction, links and images. The module IMCE adds image upload and resizing support to TinyMCE.

8. When upgrading from Drupal 4.7x to 5x I often have problems with IMCE not working with TinyMCE, to revolve this remove the TinyMCE profile and recreate it.

9. If you enable a lot of modules you may get php memory errors, to fix this add:
ini_set('memory_limit', '20M');
to the sites/default/settings.php file. You may also have to do this on the pages that have the errors to.

I usually add it after the other ini_set variables in the settings.php file.

10. When developing I like to have the cache disabled, once the site is ready to launch I will set it to normal mode. The same goes for aggregating and compressing CSS files.

11. When having to create user profiles I use the node profile module along with the CCK (content construction kit) module rather than the profile module included with Drupal as default. CCK gives you a lot more flexibility and there are many more customization options. Also by making a profile a node you can theme it easier (see #4).

12. In Drupal 5 you can specify a default front page from the site information page however an easy way to create different front pages for authenticated and non authenticated users it to use the front page module.

13. In Europe we display the date in the format Day/Month/Year though in America they display it at Month/Day/Year fortunately in Drupal this can be changed in Site Configuration - Date and Time.

14. The XML sitemap module (formally gsitemap) allows to you generate a sitemap from your Drupal site to add to Google.

Our recent article - 21 Ways To Develop Cancer has caused quite a stir with a number of sceptics and people with first hand experience with electro magnetic radiation (EMR). A number of comments suggested we talk about how to avoid EMR where possible. Certain people are more sensitive to EMR than others, in a similar sort of way to how pollen effects only certain people. The effects of EMR can be as simple as headaches to life threatening cancer. It is impossible to cut out EMR from our daily lives however we can minimise our exposure to it, with the help from Safe Living Technologies and the guest writer of the previous article - Martin Weatherall I have compiled this list of advice to minimise exposure.

1. Avoid living near a mobile phone masts or radio/TV transmitters.
2. Avoid using cordless phones, especially DECT phones as these transmit radiation even when not in use.
3. Avoid using wireless baby monitors or wireless security systems, where possible hard wire them in.
4. Where possible do not use wireless routers - use CAT5 cable.
5. Where possible use your mobile phone on hands free but without a Bluetooth headset. Aviod using a mobile phone in your car without an external antenna as the radio waves will be reflected back at you from the metal chassis. If your phone has poor signal in the car an external antenna should improve your call quality too.
6. Only use a mobile phone or cordless phone for emergency calls only, use a corded phone for all regular conversations. Avoid using a mobile phone if pregnant and do not allow a child under 16 to use a mobile phone at all.
7. Try not to keep your mobile phone in the same pocket all the time, if possible keep it away from the body in a bag or on a desk. Otherwise rotate it around the body.
8. Avoid using the Microwave, it doesn't do anything good for your food anyway and will flood adjacent rooms with radiation.
9. Minimise the number of electronic devices around your bed, this can include lights, alarm clocks, telephones, extension cords and electric blankets. Battery operated devices such as an alarm clock are good replacements.
10. Make sure you don't sleep near your fuse box or distribution box.
11. Avoid living near or under high voltage power lines. The same goes for electric sub-stations and transformers.
12. Avoid all unnecessary exposure to x-rays and CT scans.
13. Drive cars that have low electro magnetic fields.
14. Make sure electronic devices are grounded (this is not such a problem in the UK as we have three pronged plugs unlike the rest of Europe and America).
15. Avoid using a dimmer switch in the house as these emit high magnetic fields and cause dirty electricity.

This article from Safe Living Technologies provides a lot more detail about how to cut down your exposure to EMR.

The following article is by a guest writer Martin Weatherall, an advocate in the harmful effects of electro magnetic radiation (EMR). This article comes from his work detailing sources of EMR from dangerous antennas in the area of Woodstock Ontario. Having being effected by EMR himself Martin put together the following list of cancer causing points.

I was surprised just how many I get exposed to on a daily basis. "Cancer is one of the most popular illnesses at present, why be left out? Why be one of the few that does not develop cancer? Here are a few tips and ideas to ensure that you are also included in the great cancer lottery! RADIATION, RADIATION, RADIATION, it is simple, find a good source of non ionizing radiation, (the so-called 'safe stuff' – not the nuclear) and you have a great chance of getting cancer. You and your family may be lucky enough to develop some of the bonus illnesses, the new designer radiation illnesses, such as: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Autism, Fybromyalgia, Severe Allergies, Diabetes, Leukemia and Alzheimer's. You also may suffer old favorites such as Heart Attack, Stroke and Arthritis.

Here are some simple ideas to assist you to get cancer:

1. Use a CELL (mobile) PHONE, use it long and often, the high level of radiation being delivered to your head will provide you with a good chance of brain cancer.

2. Use a CORDLESS PHONE, another good source of radiation to cause brain cancer.

3. Get a DECT CORDLESS PHONE, this baby will not only radiate you when you are talking on it but will radiate your whole house twenty-four hours a day. This is a great way to get your entire family radiated. If you leave it next to your head while you are sleeping, it will be more effective. If you live in an apartment, you can radiate the people in the next unit. This is a real cheap way to do serious harm, no sign up fees, no monthly charges, and no charge for usage, just leave this in the charger; it will do the rest.

4. Attach a WiFi (wireless) system to your computer, it will radiate anyone using the computers in your home and may spread the radiation throughout the entire house. Just leave it turned on and forget about it, ill health should follow.

5. Cook with a MICROWAVE, you do not even have to stand close to the unit, it will cover the entire kitchen and a few other nearby rooms with radiation. You get the added bonus of destroying food nutrition at the same time, another help to cancer.

6. Drive a nice MODERN CAR with lots of gadgets and computerized equipment; drive it long distances for long periods of time. This will ensure that you are well covered in electro magnetic fields, another form of radiation that will harm your body. To make the car even more unhealthy, get a GPS system. If you then use a cell phone in the car, the radiation will bounce all around the interior and radiate you and the other occupants from all different directions. The cell phone will also power up to high power, in order to get transmission out of this 'metal box'.

7. When you sleep, have a CLOCK RADIO, BEDSIDE LIGHTS, TELEPHONE and EXTENSION CORDS near to the bed. This will ensure that you will be receiving a large amount of Electro Magnetic Radiation from the wiring and the appliances. This is a really good way of getting cancer because your body will not be able to recover and rejuvenate itself, as it should during sleep.

8. Use an ELECTRIC BLANKET, keep it turned on and plugged in. This radiates a very high source of Electro Magnetic Radiation through your entire body and should eventually cause some real damage.

9. Visit your MD, your doctor will probably advise you that there is no danger from these devices. You will probably be told that Health Canada and the World Health Organization think these devices are safe and there is more evidence that shows that they are safe than there is evidence, which shows those are causing cancer and very serious harm to health? This will give you a great false sense of security and you can get cancer without even worrying about it.

10. Get WIRELESS GAMES for the kids. This should keep them happy and radiated for many hours. They may even develop A.D.D. and you get the residue radiation.

11. Have a WIRELESS SECURITY SYSTEM. Radiate any burglars and your family.

12. Use a WIRELESS THERMOMETER and all kinds of other wireless devices.

13. Live near a LARGE TRANSMITTING ANTENNA. You will be well received.

14. If you have lots of property, invite cell phone companies to install a CELL PHONE MAST and antennas on your land, you get the house radiated, all your property and the neighbors too! Cancer and you get paid for it. Does it get any better?

15. Live near to HIGH POWER ELECTRICAL TRANSMISSION LINES, they should give you quite a great buzz.

16. Live near to a TRANSFORMER or an ELECTRICAL SUB-STATION, you can be the 'live-wire' of the area.

17. Work in an OFFICE ENVIRONMENT with WiFi, computers, electronic equipment wireless telephones and electrical wiring close to your body.

18. Work with POWER TOOLS such as power saws and electrical welding equipment. They cause very high electro magnetic fields. A new way of getting a 'buzz cut'.

19. Sleep near to a FUSE PANEL, DISTRIBUTION BOX. This is another great source of very high levels of EMFs. You will be empowered!

20. Spend lots of time at your KITCHEN SINK, you will probable get GROUND CURRENT ELECTRICITY. This may enter your house from the power utilities electrical distribution system and come in through the water pipes. It may pass through your body and deliver lots of dangerous high frequency radiation.

21 Get lots of X-RAYS and CT SCANS, this is the real heavy-duty radiation, known to cause serious damage in just seconds. Don't wait for your doctor to suggest x-rays.

There are lots more sources of Electro Magnetic Radiation that can help you to develop cancer. The best way is to combine several of these sources together. It is very easy to do because most modern homes have all or most of these serious pollutants easily available. Remember! - The more radiation the merrier and more chance of cancer!

You can also add to your chances of getting cancer by the old stand-byes, smoking, and air pollution and chemical pollution. Mixed with the radiation they should work great! Of course the opposite is also true! If you want to protect yourself from these dangers, start taking action to avoid exposure and tell others what they should avoid!" Relevant sites: www.powerwatch.org.uk www.electricalpollution.com www.mastsanity.org www.microwavenews.com www.healthharmemr.net

After Apple recently announced a delay to OS X 10.5 Leopard I had to delay my iMac upgrade until the Autumn. This led me to thinking about how to speed up Tiger to get the most out of my ageing G5. This is what I came up with:

General System

1. Repair Disk Permissions Navigate to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. Select your Macintosh HD and select Verify Disk Permissions. If needed you can then Repair Disk Permissions.

2. Clear out login items Its good to check that unwanted programs are not starting up when you login to your Mac. This can be done from System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items.

3. Clear out unwanted applications Go through your applications folder and see if you can save yourself some disk space by removing any applications you no longer use.

4. Clear out unused system preferences Check in your system preferences if there are any unused system preferences tabs that can be removed. If you do find something you don't use you can either disable it within its menu or remove it from '~/Library/PreferencePanes'. You may have to reboot or do a force empty trash (see #38).

5. Clear Desktop Its been reported numerous times that having a clear desktop can increase the speed of your Mac. So either put your junk in folders or delete it!

6. Empty Trash (if it wont empty see #38) I'm always amazed when I'm looking on someone's Mac and they haven't ever emptied the trash! Check what's in there then save yourself some space and empty it.

7. Turn off Universal Access (if not used) Navigate to System Preferences > Universal Access and turn off anything you're not using.

8. Turn off Bluetooth (if not used) Navigate to System Preferences > Bluetooth.

9. Turn off speech recognition (if not used) Navigate to System Preferences > Speech Recognition.

10. Turn off internet sharing (if not used) Navigate to System Preferences > Sharing > Internet

11. Check there is plenty of disk space on the boot drive. Your Mac uses some of your hard drive space as virtual memory when there is not enough actual memory available. Its good to always keep 10% of your hard drive free for such activity.

12. Remove Unwanted Language Packs OS X contains hundreds of languages that you most likely wont use. Monolingual is a free program that can root out these languages and remove them saving you some extra disk space.

*Edit: Warning people have experienced problems with Monolingual so becareful what you remove. Only a reinstall will put the languages back so decide weather you really need the extra space by removing them.

13. Remove any desktop changing programs Until recently I had a nice program that would put a different babe on my desktop each month. It looked great but once I started looking in activity monitor it was taking up lots of memory and processor time.

14. Check dock for unwanted apps. Your dock should only contain your most used applications so take a look through to see if there is anything you can remove or uninstall.

15. Choose suitable applications for files Be sensible when choosing what applications open by default - think do you really need Photoshop to open just to view an image when preview will work fine? Right click on a file then select Get Info.

16. Check Software Build If you have an Intel Mac then check the build of the software is universal - it might be that the application is still running through Rosetta and that a universal update is available.

Eye Candy

17. Remove dock animation Navigate to System Preferences > Dock then un-tick Animate Opening Applications.

18. Avoid animated desktops Navigate to System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver then un-tick Change picture.

Dashboard

19. Remove unused widgets. Each widget takes some memory and processor power even when you're not using the dashboard so only enable the ones you use. Alternatively you can disable the dashboard - see #23.

20. Check to see how much processing power and memory each widget uses. Some widgets are more intensive than others, if there is one that is particularly demanding see if there is one with similar functionality on the Apple website. To do this run Activity Monitor - Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.

As you can see the widgets I have running are all using an acceptable amount of Real Memory.

Tinkertool Tinkertool is a utility that gives you access to additional settings within OS X.

21. Remove animation effects. The animation effects are the eye candy that make OS X look nice but they are not really needed, you can turn them off from the Finder pane within Tinkertool.

22. Disable Dock shadow. From the Dock pane un-tick Enable Dock shadow.

23. Disable Dashboard. If you don't use the Dashboard you can deactivate it from the General pane.

24. Skip checksum verifications when opening DMG files. This will speed up the loading of disk images when opening. This can be found in the Applications pane.

25. Remove or deactivate unwanted login items from the Login Items pane. You might already have done this in #2.

26. Reduce delay time for display of loading pages in Safari. This should speed up your web browsing experience, found within the Safari Pane.

OnyX OynX is similar to Tinkertool however has many more options and preferences.You may have already done some of these in previous tips. Parameters

27. Un-tick Graphic Effects (Finder tab). You may already have done this with Tinkertool #21.

28. Un-tick Animate 'Opening applications' and 'When alert in background' (Dock tab).

29. Disable Dashboard (Dashboard and Expose tab). You may already have done this with Tinkertool #23.

30. Set Safari speed of web page display to fast (Safari Tab). You may already have done this in #26. Maintenance

31. Repair Disk Permissions. You may already have done this in #1.

32. Run Maintenance Scripts.

33. Reset Spotlight Index (it may take over a day to rebuild the index afterwards).

34. Run complete system optimization. Cleaning

35. Clear Internet Settings.

36. Clear User and Font Caches.

37. Clear unused logs.

38. Force Empty Trash Automation

39. Check settings - The default settings should be fine here. Click Execute.

Safari

You can do some of the following by resetting Safari - click Safari > Reset Safari. *Edit: Resetting Safari does not clear Favicons.

40. Clear Cache. To speed up page loading Safari saves a copy of every page in its cache however if the cache gets too large it can actually slow down page loading so its best to empty it occasionally. To do so click Safari > Empty Cache.

41. Clear History. Safari can remember every single site you have visited which can have a negative effect on its performance. You can empty it be selecting History > Clear History.

42. Clear AutoFill. AutoFill is the data is saved in forms such as your username and password on websites. As with the cache and history the AutoFill can mount up over time. To empty select Safari > Preferences then select the AutoFill tab. From here you can go through the three AutoFill sections and clear out data that you no longer want stored.

43. Clear Favicons. Favicons are the little icons you see to the left of the URL in the address bar. These can be cleared by emptying user folder/Library/Safari/Icons.

Firefox

44. If you use Firefox then you can get specially optimized versions of the browser based on your processor architecture - either G4, G5 or intel.

45. Extensions Firefox has some great extensions but they can slow down the browser so take a serious look to see weather you really need that extra toolbar!

iTunes

46. Smart Playlists These can slow down the operation of iTunes as they reload the contents of the list every time the program loads. If you have a a smart play list that does not change very often then you can either deactivate live updating (by clicking file > edit smart play list) or copy of the contents of the smart play list in to a regular play list.

Other

47. HP Printer drivers can often cause problems and use a lot of processor power so check in the activity monitor for HP Communicator, if it seems to be constantly running at 80% - 100% then try uninstalling it. I had problems on my Mac Mini for my HP PSC 1110 all in one with the HP software on OS X 10.3 maxing out the CPU after printing. I had to remove the software and just use the basic drivers rather than the full suite.

48. Check Classic is not running if not being used. Classic can be disabled from within System Preference.

49. Run Software Update. The latest updates sometimes provide speed increases as well as fix bugs and vulnerabilities.

50. Update other applications. It's always best to run the latest versions of your programs. Websites such as Mac Update and Version Tracker are good places to keep your applications up to date.

51. Add More RAM. There is only so much you can do with software, the cheapest way to give you're Mac a speed boost is to upgrade the memory.

52. Reboot your Mac. After doing all this optimization it might be an idea to reboot your Mac. If your like me and use sleep mode for the majority of the time then a reboot once in a while often helps too!

Update: Interested in seeing how many hits this article has got and how to do it for your blog then read here?

I started writing this as a blog post however as it continued in length it started to sound more like an article so here goes.... For doing IT support at work we had to learn Windows Vista and while we haven't had much interest yet it is inevitable that something will go wrong for us to fix. The majority of other reviews I've read online have not been particularly positive with many people commenting on the DRM restrictions and lack of anything ground breaking.

I wanted to see for myself and of course share it with the wonderful ImAFish fans. To save reinstalling I opted to use Virtual PC 2007, it made sense as it meant I could do XP and Vista support from one computer though it made it hard to see the performance differences. My rig is an Athlon 64 3000+ with 2GB Memory, I gave Virtual PC 1gig of memory and used Vista Business Upgrade. Installation seemed to take forever and wasn't helped by the fact I had to install XP first then install Vista. Three hours later and a couple of restarts I had a Vista desktop. At this point Vista was painfully slow to do anything , I managed to slowly install the Virtual PC additions and reboot the system. This vastly improved things however I tweaked the performance settings a bit more to give maximum performance. At this point i'm sure your all gagging for a screen shot so here we go Windows Vista... (click to enlarge)

As you can see from removing all of the high performance settings you get what looks like Windows 2000! This unfortunately made me lose the "wow" factor so I enabled "Use visual styles on windows and buttons" from the performance options.

This made Vista look like....

You probably recognise this from many of the other Vista screen shots. It's hard not to like the new theme, even without Aero its a lot more polished, smart and has an almost calming effect on what you do. Also in the screen shot is the new start menu, finally they have discarded those annoying nested menus that required pin-point mouse accuracy to follow. Start menu items now simply display below the folder title, more like files in Explorer view. Once you start doing anything you will notice lots of confirmation windows popping up, these tend to be incredibly annoying, I got 3 pop-up boxes just when trying to install Flash Player in IE7.

Fortunately these can be turned off in Control Panel > User Accounts > Turn User Account Control on or off. It will ask you to reboot but its well worth it. You will also need to turn off alerts in the Windows Security Centre to stop Vista from constantly reminding you that account control is disabled.

I tried a couple of common applications, Firefox and SmartFTP both worked fine and didn't look too misplaced within Vista, in fact IE7 looks more out of place with its annoying interface. The majority of Vista can be customised like XP and as you can see from my first screen shot its not hard to pull away the glossy interface though as I said before it is nice.

Most of your favourite tools will be in the same place such as msconfig and the command prompt though incidentally these are now run from the start search box. This can also be used for launching applications, if I was to type in 'Internet' it would launch Internet Explorer, or if I type in 'ass' it launched Remote Assistance. Search has been deeply improved, instead of it taking three minutes to search your hard drive its takes three seconds. Microsoft have redesigned control panel again but give you the option to go back to the classic view.

The majority of items within control panel are unchanged, though there are a few new additions such as the option to upgrade your copy of Vista online. The networking section has the most changes and is now branded under the Network and Sharing Center (even though I set my language to English they still cant spell centre right). At first this is a little confusing however it ends up being a nice way of organising various connections. The system tray now only shows one network icon for all your connections making it easier to forget if you keep a VPN connected by accident. The network map is also a nice tool as it shows other Vista computers and how they are connected. Useful stats such as IP address and computer name are also displayed.

Here you can see many more of the tools common in XP have not changed greatly for Vista. I could fill another four pages with Vista comments but its not really worth it, on the surface Vista is not hugely different. It's stable, has working applications and looks nice. If I brought a new PC having Vista would not put me off however I wouldn't upgrade my current desktop. Vista might be a lot different deep down but on the surface its not and for the price of £80 just for the Home Basic edition upgrade (£152 for Business Upgrade) it doesn't feel value for money. What's worse is that we pay in £'s for Vista editions what the Americans pay in $'s, considering £1 is almost worth $2 we are being ripped off beyond belief. The system requirements are too high for many older computers so if you intend to buy a new computer over the next year that might be the best time to experience Vista. I will leave Vista for now and go get the majority of features elsewhere.

Google Pack () is a collection of free software packaged together with one simple installer distributed by Google. The pack includes a mixture of software including some of Googles own products such as Picasa and Google Desktop, and other programs such as Adobe reader and Norton Antivirus 2005 SE. The pack revolves around the updater that acts a package manager for downloading programs and updates. A full list of the programs available: Google Earth Google Desktop Picasa Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer Google Pack Screensaver Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbad Ad-Ware SE Personal Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition Adobe Reader 7 Google Talk Google Video Player RealPlayer GalleryPlayer HD Images When first launching Google Pack it will start downloading and installing software, you can however choose which programs you want. For instance I cancelled Google Desktop as it’s a bit intrusive on my desktop and start bar. The Google website makes it easy to install programs as they are added to the pack. Within the installed programs list it is easy to remove programs you don’t need. Google Pack is a good collection of free software, it does a nice job of keeping them up to date and can integrate with your Google account. I found it especially useful when first installing a new PC as the software included with the pack is often what I find myself installing anyway. The pack has plenty of room to expand in the future and I would like to see an audio manager, video player and maybe even an office suite such as Open Office. Currently Google Pack is Windows XP only.

I get paranoid when it comes to data backup and anything that makes it easier and cheaper is always welcome. Currently I backup to external hard drive by simply syncing my home directory to the drive. This is great unless my house is burnt down or the drive is stolen and there is always the risk of it failing. I’ve looked into online backup but for any sort of reasonable space it will cost hundreds of £££ per year. Then Amazon launched s3, mainly meant as a development platform for web services it offered large amounts of cheap disk space and bandwidth. It didn’t take long for JungleDisk to start exploiting this as a data storage service.

As a price comparison each 1gig of data costs $.15 (8p)/month to store on S3 making it far cheaper then Xdrive, Box.net and .Mac (price comparison). Also unlike some other services JungleDisk allowed for unlimited storage. The client comes for Windows, Mac and Linux so it is easy to access your data and with it being online you can install the client as many machines as you want in order to access your data. JungleDisk currently makes no money from the service while they are developing it which does make u wonder how they intend to make it profitable in the future, I’m guessing either through charging for a premium client or somehow taking a cut of the disk space and bandwidth usage. I can see the service being popular but its uptake will be hampered because of slow Internet connections, while most of us in the UK can get between 8-10mb download our upload link has barely changed and still averages at 256kb. To upload 600mb of data it took 18hours, now just think if you say wanted to backup your mp3 collection and soon TV shows and films. Syncing to my external hard drive takes about 10minutes per week but a similar backup to S3 could take hours possibly even days. Online backup is affordable its just not quite accessible and it wont be until the ISPs start increasing upload bandwidth for ADSL and Cable users.

JungleDisk is great for documents but for any sort of multimedia unless you have an SDSL service or a higher upload bandwidth on normal connections it makes uploading a slow process.

Digital photography has become so easy and cheap that if you’re like me I have hundreds if not thousands of photos on my computer. While Windows offers some basic photo viewing and editing options it doesn’t really allow you to touch up your photos to make them even better. One option is Google’s free photo editing program – Picasa 2 (). When first installed it scans either your documents folder or hard drive for pictures. This can be annoying if you have graphics in your documents folder as you then have to remove them from Picasa. Unfortunately as many pictures and photos share the same file types it is very hard to distinguish them. Picasa allows you to do all the basic photo editing fixes such as removing red eye, straightening the photo, cropping and altering the colour/contrast. 

As well as these there are more advanced options for tuning the light, highlights, shadows and temperatures as well as a range of effects including sepia, black & white and tint. Editing photos is simple in Picasa, I usually use Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks but these can be complicated especially with the range of options available for advanced users. While Photoshop gives you more control over the photo Picasa is easier for the average user.

Apart from the editing functions in Picasa, it makes a good photo viewer allowing you to zoom in and out of photos as well as setting up slideshows and timelines. Picasa is similar to iPhoto on OS X while I prefer the interface in iPhoto, Picasa is more responsive when moving through a large library. Picasa provides easy ways to share your photos as well as print them. There are also options for setting pictures as desktop and screensaver.

 

 

I found the batch operations to be very useful. With my cheap Kodak camera being able to correct the colour and contrast makes such a difference to the quality of my photos. If you don’t like any of the changes made by Picasa you can revert back to the original. Picasa will work with the majority of digital cameras and is available for Windows 2000/XP and now Linux. Overall Picasa is a feature rich program that is free and will cover all the basic needs for managing photos. .

"Source Radio has been the starting point for many rising stars but one show has stood out this year for its creative content and unique features. The Monday Night Show with Pete White, Ben Powell and Chris White has been on air since October every Monday night between 6pm and 8pm. The almost famous tag line “Power Pumping Passion” is one the defining points of the show."

 

We started the show simply out of curiosity for Source Radio and it was an instant hit because of the humour and entertainment we brought to the station. From early on we made an effort to discuss student issues on air where appropriate. In November we debuted our version of on air dating, people would send in profiles and we would read them out on air making the occasional joke. It worked really well and people found it really entertaining and we even matched some people up!

 

 

By December we had edited out our best bits and put them on the Internet for others to listen. The feedback we had was great, allowing people who hadn’t been able to listen to the show experience it as well giving our regulars some of the funniest moments again. The editing wasn’t easy and took hours to shift through our previous shows but it was well worth it just for the exposure it gave us.

 

January came and we wanted to promote the show even more as well as cover more student issues. This is when I came up with the idea to invite the Vice Chancellor Madeline Atkins on the show for an interview. She accepted our invitation and we started to plan questions and features. When we told the rest of the stations members about the VC interview we had planned there was almost a sense of shock but they realised a great opportunity for the station. This VC interview was not the only planned content for the show we also had an exciting new game show. Being a student station we thought we could push the boundaries slightly more than other stations, which is why we thought of “Feed Chris”, each week we would ask Chris three questions and a bonus question, for each question he got right he got a meal on Tuesday. If he got none of the questions right he didn’t get to eat! While of course he never went through with it and the questions were rigged against him it provided a lot of spontaneous entertainment.

Our first Interview that we mocked up was with Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer from 24), being heavy 24 fans and the new series about to start we made a very funny interview with some sound clips from 24, the interview is still available online. We were also fortunate with the help of Bill Bennett to get an interview with Tim Westwood for the show when he was DJing in the SU. Bill got Westwood to “pimp” a toy car as well as asking him about Coventry and the Students, the Westwood interview is also available online. In February our Vice Chancellor interview came round, we spoke for about an hour covering a range of topics including the new student centre, crime on campus and the future of the University. We had some great feedback about the interview from students and staff as well as over 600 downloads for listen again of the show. The show still continues on a Monday Night and has recently played sets from this year’s Trance Energy Festival in Holland. You can listen in between 6-8 on www.sourceradio.co.uk, if you want to listen again to any of the interviews or best bit segments visit www.imafish.co.uk.

 

*This article was featured in Coventry University's Source Newspaper in the March Issue.