My Printer Stopped Working: or, how to make me unable to pay my bills
by Michael Miller on April 19, 2012
First, a disclaimer: I hate printers. I mean, I really do. It’s a voodoo industry, full of cheap-yet-secretly-expensive devices, that seem intent only on never working exactly as they should. They are consistent in their inconsistency, and reliably rubbish. Inkjet printers have ink that costs enough to make you think they need harvest unicorn blood, and laser printers are the size of a unicorn stall. Or weird little gears and gizmos go out of whack, like some sort of fiendish goblin contraption, and it literally costs more than a computer to get the part replaced.
All that being said, there are a few, tried and true, reliable things that fix 95% of the problems people call me about when it comes to printers. Theres lots of OTHER things that go wrong, but this little procedure is what I always try first, and it generally does the trick. Read the rest of this entry »
New Mac Trojan variant: on not panicking and checking it out
by Michael Miller on April 9, 2012
There’s been a lot of excitement today about a Trojan targeting Macintosh computers. There is some excellent in depth coverage over at Macworld, but I wanted to hit on some highlights for people who have been asking me about this.
First, don’t panic. Even if the high end estimates are true, about 600,000 macs are infected, which amounts to about 1% of all the Mac users out there. By those percentages, I would still carry on being a great deal more worried about a great deal many more things, such as your backup plan.
That being said, unlike 99% of all the other scares out there, this one is real in the sense that by visiting the wrong website (apparently, a lot of them are ones ending in a .nu domain – which I must admit, I’ve never even seen. Still, a lot of times those incredibly aggravating pop up windows that shady websites pop up for you lead to funkypants domains) you can become infected, and not even know it. The malware does give a few clues that something is up – upon installing itself within your user folder, it will pretend to run Software Update and ask for your administrator password, so it can gain wider access to the rest of the system. Even if you are savvy enough to deny it (and remember, always ask yourself, why is something suddenly asking for my password? Is this what I expected, and a normal part of my computer routine?), it will still install itself and run in a more limited, but still threatening, capacity. Read the rest of this entry »
Safari isn’t saving my password – or, Keychain Access Adventures
by Michael Miller on March 19, 2012
Your Mac, much like, say, a sheepdog, is supposed to make your life easier by fulfilling your commands. And much like a sheepdog, when you give it a clear, distinct command, and it lopes off into the sunset ignoring it completely, it’s apt to raise your blood pressure.
Just to take an example: lets say you’re doing your daily check in on your webmail, and lets say you’re using yahoo mail. You cheerfully plug in your username and password, and when Safari asks you ‘Hey, would you like to save this password for later?’ you say ‘yes.’
The next day, you happily surf back to Yahoo webmail, innocently expecting that there will be no more password typing for you (after all, typing 123456 can get a bit old).
As an unusually perspicacious individual (evidenced by you reading this blog), you’ve probably already guessed the punchline: not only has your Mac NOT remembered the password, but it pretty much refuses to do it even after you go through the entire denial, rage, and piteous begging stages of troubleshooting.
What is up? Read the rest of this entry »
The photos of Richard Murphy
by Michael Miller on February 27, 2012
Richard Murphy, former photo editor of the Anchorage Daily News and current Atwood Chair for Photojournalism and Public Communications for UAA, took all of these photos with an iPhone. You can hear our interview with him tonight on Radio Free Palmer.
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.