OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, or the Evolution of the Lion
by Michael Miller on February 22, 2012
With all rumors focused intensely on the upcoming iPad that seems almost certain to drop in March, I felt pretty blindsided by Apple popping up and going “Hey! New version of the Mac OS is here! Guess what comes after Lion? Mountain Lion. Bwa ha ha ha.”
So, 10.6.8 is on the horizon, and in time honored traditions, it adds Stuff to the operating system and Opinions to the Mac nerds out there. Of which I am one. So I have Opinions, and I get to Share! I love capitalizing things.
Mountain Lion continues, not surprisingly, what Lion started: merging what you find on the iPad and iPhone (iOS) into the Mac (Mac OS). I’ve started putting the various OS’s in parentheses so people can ignore them, as I’ve found the minute I utter a phrase like Mac OS eyes begin to glaze. Acronyms are the most powerful eye glazing material known to man.
Aaat any rate, there are a bunch of new features, like moving notes out of Mail and into it’s own application (thank goodness), renaming iCal into Calendar (bittersweet but obvious) and making it be a little less lame at the same time.
I’m going to hit the top 3 points for me: Read the rest of this entry »
Maintaining Your Mac: a Boring Guide
by Michael Miller on February 6, 2012
Recently, I had to buy a new car. Well, a car, as it’s only new if the first ten years of something’s life don’t count. In which case, huzzah! I’m still in my twenties.
Outside of that though, it wasn’t a new car, it wasn’t all that expensive, and boy, was it in great shape. In such great shape, in fact, that my trusty old VW Golf – which had been making horrible sounds that universally caused new passengers about five minutes of alarm and asking ‘No, really, are you sure it’s okay?’ – seemed to rise up, Jacob Marley like, from the metal grave to which it had been consigned to shame me for its ill treatment. It was nearly the same age, after all, and the only reason for the discrepancy (outside of the fact that I drive an absolutely insane amount, I suppose) is that I was much more of the school that as long as I could squeeze the last remaining, clanking, staggering miles out of the vehicle, well then, why take it in for repair?
We don’t really need to go into why that’s dumb. It is. Very. When you own a car, you factor in more than just the cost of purchasing it, but of gas, insurance, tires, and if you’re not a moron, maintenance. Thank you Captain Obvious, yes I know.
But it made me think about similar Total Cost of Ownership considerations for a computer. The obvious ones are there, of course – computer, internet connection, printer, and so on. Then the not-so-obvious but even more critical backups. What about maintenance? Smart people ask me about what they can do for their computers all the time. Read the rest of this entry »
Set your Google privacy settings
by Michael Miller on January 30, 2012
Note: This is a quick and dirty guide. We’ll be improving it a smidge over the up-coming days, to make it easier to understand!
First, log into your google account. You should be able to do that from just about any page with the word ‘google’ in it, including plain old google.com. If you want to make absolutely sure you get there, though, go to www.google.com/accounts
Once you are logged in, go to where your name will be listed, in the upper right hand corner of the screen, in a dark bar. Click on your name, and in the menu that comes down, click on ‘Privacy’.
There’s a lot of useful stuff right there, but to get to the real meat we are going to dig down a little lower. Scroll all the way down and click on ‘Privacy Center’
There’s a bunch of information on that screen that’s really worth reading, but on the right, the first link, Privacy Tools is where the juicy filling is. Clicking on that link brings you a page where you can see information and adjust settings for each of googles services. It’s quite a few, actually.
One of the most useful opt outs comes to what type of information Google collects about you. Click on ‘Ads Preference Manager’ . It’ll probably ask you to log in again, but it might not. Then, click on ‘opt out’ to the left. THEN – yes, this is kind of like going down the rabbit hole – click on ‘Opt Out’ Again. This opts you out of ads in google searches and gmail.
But, you can also click on ‘Ads on the Web’ link that’s there to the left. Under Ads On the Web, you can view profile information about who google thinks you are. Your gender, your age – statistics you can edit, by the way – and the various ad categories that google tracks you on. You can also just click the ‘Opt out’ button on that screen. When you opt out, Google disables this cookie and no longer associates interest and demographic categories with your browser.
Also, many browsers have a privacy mode that eliminates the cookie you get from a website when you close the browser, meaning information won’t be saved from search to search.
SOPA Strike
by Michael Miller on January 19, 2012
Yesterday, I opted into taking our business site down for yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA strike, a decidedly political move. It’s not like outofajam.net being down is going to affect anyone or anything. I mean, the Google bot might be miffed as it crawls the web, but that’s about it.
For me (who wields no political power whatsoever), it boiled down to this: while it’s a political move, it’s not one of party affiliation. I’m not taking a stance on something liberal, or conservative, or communist, or freecoffeeist (free the beans!). It’s one of affiliation to our stated goal: to make technology work for you. The foundation of the internet is the free flow of information, and the fact that we have that today is one of the more staggering achievements in human history. It has changed your life already, and can do so in even more ways that haven’t been imagined yet. Curtailing and censoring that information at will is the equivalent of turning the river by your house into a kiddie pool. Safer, and stupid. The reality is, what those bills would have ended up doing is crippling the very things I work so hard to provide for my clients.
I have strong political views. Actually, scratch that – I have strong views. Shocking, I know, you do too! On everything – politics, religion, restaurants, didgeridoo performances, the list goes on and on. And further, I believe pretty strongly that a healthy society lets many different views be voiced all the time.
All that being said, I work hard to keep my views to myself while working, and Out of a Jam as apolitical as it can be. The reason has less to do with not trying to offend people than it does with my firm belief that that’s how things need to be if I’m to do my job well at all.
People trust me. And not just me – all IT people, everywhere, are invested daily with an insane amount of trust. Credit card numbers, passwords, private information, the list goes on and on.
Amazingly, most people never ask me anything about this, but I have a strict set of rules anyway. I don’t write down passwords (unless it’s part of a pre-agreed service between the client and me), I never touch any portion of the computer I absolutely don’t have to to fulfill the job, and so on. But part of that is also a desire to let my clients know that I will provide them with high quality service regardless of their beliefs or personality quirks. If I believe that technology can make your life better (and so help me, I do), and it’s my mission to bring that to fruition in your life, then I don’t want you worrying that I’m going to make off with some compromising political information. Doctors have a code, Priests have a code, and IT should have one too.
Outside of the fact that IT people often don’t (I’ve talked to more than one person who’s worked in a computer shop that bragged of the dirt they’ve uncovered), there’s also the consideration that this needs to extend to more than just privacy (although I gotta tell ya, that one time that a man pulled out a giant wad of cash, waved it under my nose and suggested we go to Vegas for the weekend, I had to wonder what he and his friends were up to in that trailer), but how we do the rest of our job.
We should make it more useful.
Not ‘better’ – far too often, people in my position get caught up in insisting that someone use a piece of software that’s the ‘best.’ Or, man, you really should have THIS installed. No no, configure it this way. Oh, let me just set up you up with this account real quick.
If the net result is that things are no different, then it was a waste of time. If it makes things less productive for the user, then it was worse than a waste of time.
And for me, this applies to how safe people feel in bringing me their problems. It’s important that they know that regardless of their lifestyle, political affiliations, or even my personal views on them, I will give them the best, most useful, advice that I can.
And in this case, my advice is this: if you like the internet, or see it as useful, laws like SOPA and PIPA will make it less useful, not more.
Converting PDF to Word Documents
by Michael Miller on January 9, 2012
It might not be helpful to start out by making this point, but I can’t help myself: the trick to converting a PDF into a Word document is that it’s not a Word document.
By which I mean that it’s not a text document, and it’s entirely possible that it never was one. It’s the equivalent of asking, “Hey, I took a picture of the Declaration of Independence, can I turn that into a Word document?” It’s true, it has words in it, but that’s not the same thing.
I mention this not because it’s impossible, but because it helps illustrate that there are hurdles to be overcome, the result may not be perfect and, in the end, it may not be possible at all.
Then again, it might be incredibly easy.
It all depends as how your particular PDF started it’s life. PDF stands for Portable Document Format, and was developed by Adobe, a company responsible for bringing us a number of other equally indispensable tools such as Photoshop and printed text that isn’t jaggy. Its magic lies in that it can take virtually any document you have on your computer and take everything that makes it what it is into one package: fonts, pictures, links, movies, everything and anything. It’s great in that it insures that even if you made a picture in MacPaint 3.0 back in the ’90s, someone using Microsoft Office can open and view it today.
But, since you can include anything and everything, what the document might have included is only a picture.
All right, all right, stop being the nabob of negativity, you say! You happen to know that not only was this PDF a text document, it was one you created yea, this very year yourself. What then?
Well in that case, you have a host of options from free to… well, not so free and ranging up. To start with!
Free options:
Preview is the swiss army knife of document viewing on the Mac, provided by Apple on every Mac that runs OS X. One of the greatest unsung features of OS X is native support for PDF. This means that the operating system itself can open and save documents in PDF to your hearts content. This also means that Preview can easily let you simply select text in your PDF and copy it out, formatting and all. You can find Preview in your Applications folder. For a great run-down of some other things Preview can do, check out this article.
You can also use Apple’s built-in Automator program to do a more thorough job, but some people might find that a smidge more complex. Macworld has a nice write-up of that.
Nitro makes software that does a number of things with PDF documents, and they have a website that lets you do free one-off conversions. It’s called PDFtoWord.com.
Cheap (ish) options:
PDFpen is an all purpose PDF tool that a lot of people swear by. It lets you do any number of things with PDFs, along with, you guessed it, converting them to Word documents. $59.
Boku Bucks:
Almost everyone is familiar with Acrobat Reader, the free reader from Adobe that exists expressly to read PDF documents and endlessly remind us that we need to update it. It makes sense, of course, that the 900 pound gorilla of PDF creation and editing would be Adobe’s own Acrobat Pro. Weighing in at $199, that’s either a lot of money or a trivial part of your budget for you. If the latter, and you deal with PDF documents a lot in a publishing sense – books, magazines, etc – it’s sort of a no brainer. For most of us though, it’s serious overkill. Still, there have been times when a client needed just a few things tweaked in a PDF document they couldn’t get the original of, and Acrobat Pro was the only thing that would do it in a seamless fashion.
But what about documents that aren’t text?
All right, so that’s assuming your PDF was a text document to begin with. What if it was a scanned document, or even a picture of a document with text? In those cases, there isn’t any actual text in the PDF – just a picture.
In cases like those, you need OCR software (Optical Character Recognition, and why yes, being admitted to the geek club DOES involve loving acronyms, it’s true). OCR will scan your image and do it’s computing magic to translate whatever it recognizes into text. Back in the day, this mean comically bad translations, but these days it’s actually quite good – you’ll generally have the to tweak the finished result, but it will be a sight better than trying to type it all up by hand.
The aforementioned PDFpen will do the job, and Acrobat Pro will try as well (although I haven’t tested that feature in quite a while), but in this case you can also do the job with an even cheaper tool:
PDF OCR X by Web Lite Solutions, a.k.a. We Won’t Win Any Awards for Clever Names but We Make Our Point By Golly
They actually advertise themselves as ‘free’ but they will only do a single page in the free version. A paid for, ‘enterprise’ version, however, costs a mere 29.99, in the budget of most people, and it does quite a passable job. As an added bonus, it works on both Windows and Macs, so no one is left out.
PowerPC applications for the defiant among us
by Michael Miller on December 21, 2011
There is a certain sense of accepted outrage that everyone seems to have about computers, and it can roughly be summed up as this: I bought my computer last year and it’s already obsolete!
Well, that’s true. I doubt it even took a year for that to happen; it could have been days (handy-dandy tip: Apple has a 14 day return policy, and even if you’re past that, they are often quite receptive to helping out folks who just shelled out a ton of cash on a machine that has been freshly discontinued). Of course, being obsolete is very different from “not able to do what it did when you bought it,” which is a situation that is going to go on for years. After all, technically, car models are rendered obsolete every year also, but no one has a spasm and insists their car is now worthless.
Curiously enough, one of the most significant ways that your computer is eventually going to show its age is internet access. While most websites, at their heart, are simple amalgamations of text and images, the technologies they use to provide services get constantly updated, and have heavier and heavier system requirements. For many of my clients, the biggest reason Facebook won’t work on their older computers is because newer versions of Flash won’t run on older Macs with a PowerPC chip. It’s not that these new flash videos are any more awesome than they were a year ago; it’s just that you won’t be able to play them.
And if your computer happens to be satisfying you in every other way – which is entirely possible, because many computers running PowerPC G5 chips are still very capable machines – that can be really, well, lame.
But rather than drown our sorrows in digital pity, we have options! Many of them, but here are some internet options that are frequently overlooked: Read the rest of this entry »
Should I get an iPad?
by Michael Miller on December 12, 2011
This certainly falls under the category of ‘has been covered elsewhere a thousand times,’ but it also falls under the category ‘top ten questions to ask Michael.’ So here’s my answer:
Depends!
And you thought this was going to be short and sweet.
First, if you love gadgets and are made of money, there’s no point in waiting around. Get one today, and buy an extra for me as well.
On the other hand, if you aren’t made of money, you have some questions to answer about yourself. How do you primarily use a computer? People tend to fall into two broad categories:
1) Write email, check email, surf the web, view Microsoft Office documents, play music, look at pictures.
2) Creating relatively (or very) complex documents, editing files of all types, five bajillion songs, six bajillion photos, and simply must use program X. Read the rest of this entry »
Steve Jobs, bicycles, and other things I get cranky about.
by Michael Miller on December 2, 2011
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you live under a rock. Or perhaps you are a particularly happy person in a particularly remote portion of Borneo. If that is the case, then you probably don’t know that a fellow by the name of Steve Jobs has died. Otherwise, you would know.
Because of that (knowing), and because my interactions with Borneo Rock Dwellers are limited, I didn’t see a reason to write anything about it. He was dead, you knew that, and chances are all the topics would be covered five or six times over.
As it stands, I feel there’s a topic that hasn’t been covered.
This thought was inspired by reading an article by Maria Bustillos over on The Awl titled ‘Less Human than Human: The Design Philosophy of Apple.’ Ms. Bustillos’s point seems to be that Apple’s design aesthetic – and by extension, that of Jobs – isn’t human. It’s impersonal, it’s cold, it lacks good human values. This dovetails into other things that frequently start to crop up whenever people talk about Apple’s former CEO: Apple is trying control us, the machines are our enemies, there is no soul in this technology, and the only thing of value that Apple has brought to our lives is, well, nothing. They make expensive crap that has turned us all into zombies. Zombies, man! Zombies that don’t even like brains, but just shiny things! And oh, Steve Jobs was a jerk! And didn’t give money to charity! And I’m a unique flower who doesn’t buy into the hype!
On a personal level, I feel that there are so many logical inconsistencies in the article that my toes start to curl just reading it, but I found myself wondering why I cared. After all, people aren’t logical all the time and you don’t see me walking around with curled toes. I disagree with most of the human race on one topic or another, and don’t feel compelled to write anything about it. What was the difference?
Being misunderstood, cliche though it may be, is a trigger point for most of us. When someone starts saying things about us that just aren’t true, that, then, is what gets our goat. I don’t mind that you disagree, it’s that you are making up the topic of disagreement!
So, before I can start frothing at the article in question, it might be helpful to explain a few things about those of us who do like Steve Jobs, to clear up misunderstanding. Why do I care? And not just I, but a great many people in the same position as me; people working in the technology field, passionate about technology? At the end of the day, the reason is really simple:
We agreed with him. Read the rest of this entry »
Why is my Mac slow?
by Michael Miller on November 8, 2011
What is the number one technological hurdle of computing? What problem plagues people more than anything else, despite massive leaps in hardware and software in the past twenty years?
“My computer is just so sloooooow.”
Ironic, really. Think about it – the one thing that vendors incessantly bombard us with is how fast their new product is. That alone is a clue, I suppose, that something is amiss – if someone is constantly yelling at you that the reason it’s better is because it’s faster, obviously being slow was a problem in the first place. And the more people are yelling about it, the bigger a problem it probably is.
The catch, though, the great reveal to this particular magic trick, is that the reason our computers never seem any faster is because they aren’t actually slow in the first place.
Nope, I’m not about to pull some zen mystical “it is what you want it to be,” although if you can pull that off, more power to you – go do that and stop reading this. For those of us who can’t do that (raises hand) we’ll be better suited by applying a staple of troubleshooting: if a problem hasn’t been solved by trying the same thing 500 times, perhaps we should try something else. Read the rest of this entry »