I just got a MacBook Air and have been enjoying having the world's lightest laptop. It's an amazing piece of engineering and while it appears to have some critical features missing (like a DVD drive or Ethernet port) the fact is that I never used those features on my older MacBook Pro laptop either so it's not anything I miss.

Frankly, with my Corsair 8GB flash drive, it's just a super-modern version of "sneakernet" and was a breeze to jump onto the new device and use it full-time.

Even better, it gave me an opportunity to really pay attention to what I change on a stock Mac laptop to make it work for me. And that's what this article is about. Let's call it Dave's Guide to Critical Mac Software...

I'm running Mac OS X Leopard and the transparent menu bar is slowly but surely driving me batty. Isn't there some way to make it opaque and white again? Man, it's darn hard to read much of the time!

Today I tried to use Mail to send an e-mail to someone. Everything looked fine until I got an alert saying CANNOT SEND MESSAGE USING THE SERVER SMTP.MAC.COM. I have the option to choose another server, however, the drop-box does not have my account as one of the options. What the heck?

My sister and I share a Mac computer and I'm tired of her looking at my files. Is there some way I can protect or hide my folders without downloading any software she'd notice?

Not to sound like a complete chowderhead, but when I have a USB disk drive hooked up to my Mac and then unplug it, I always get a scary warning. How do I avoid that and eject the drive properly before unplugging it?

Every time I copy a music CD out of my collection onto my computer, it shows up with "Track 01", "Track 02", and so on. What the heck? Surely I don't need to manually enter all the track names for each of my hundreds of CDs as I rip them?

After reading about the Gizmodo bloggers wandering CES and flicking off TVs left and right, my company is paranoid someone will do a similar stunt to our displays in our Macworld exhibit booth. That'd would be a huge problem. Short of duct tape, is there some way to prevent this problem?

A friend told me that on the Mac anything that I could send to a printer could also be easily saved as a PDF file on my computer, to examine or even print later. I have no clue how to do that, but it'd sure be useful. How do you print to a PDF on a Mac?

My dashboard is displaying three copies of the weather widget. How can I delete the extra ones and just keep one?

I've been getting into trouble lately for not seeing email that my husband's sending me. I don't get a huge amount of email, but when a wave comes in, his mail does, well, get lost in the shuffle. Is there some way I can change the color of his messages in Microsoft Entourage on Mac OS X so that it stands out more?

I've been using my Mac to record simple audio snippets, pretending I'm a radio announcer, but I want to trim them down to remove my stumbles, stutters, and breathing. How can I do that?

I'm migrating from an old Mac computer to a shiny new MacBook Pro and want to be able to join my brother's network, except we don't remember the password! But my old computer can connect. Is there any way to dredge up that password from Mac OS X so I can enter it anew? I do have Leopard running on both systems...

I'm loving Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, but there's one "feature" that's driving me crazy: when I print anything, the printer application hangs around until I quit it. In the good old days (Panther) the printer would quit and vanish once the queue was empty. Is there some way to restore that behavior?

My parents are always checking up on what Web sites I visit and it's getting really old. Is there some way to have Firefox hide where I go so they can't keep tab on me?

I'm a big fan of Google's Calendar program, but am finding it annoying that I have to always have my Web browser running on my Mac to remember events. Is there some sort of notification system that will let me keep up with my Calendar events without having a page perpetually on Google Calendar?

I just upgraded my G5 mac to the latest Leopard software and am leery about syncing my iPhone with my computer because I'm afraid I'll lose data. However, I really need to get the photos off the phone and don't want to email them to myself, one by one. Your suggestion?

A quick question--I have an administrator in my school district that sends email from her mail program on an osx machine and often gets response from a parent that the email comes w/weird \302 \302 \302 in it. Do you know waz up w/that?

All of a sudden I have an American flag on my Mac menu bar, along with what looks like some sort of tangram puzzle. In fact, when I look at different Macintosh, I find that people have lots of different tiny icons on their menu bar. What the heck are they and how do I trim them down?

Someone switched my default settings so that all my jpegs have graphic converter icons and automatically open in graphic converter. I'd like to switch back to the old photoshop or preview icons, and can't figure out how to do that. I was also worried that if I send these images to a client it might not open for them. Is that true? And how do I switch back?

I don't know what the story is, but sometimes I go to places and my Mac automatically connects to the wireless network, but other times it requires that I select the network. The password to the network is in my "keychain", but something's still missing... ?

Hi Dave. I run a network of Mac computers at a high school in Oregon and find that the kids often leave their computers running after class. This means the next time someone goes to use the computer they're in the wrong account. Lots of lost files! Any way to remedy this?

Given the choice, I'd much rather watch DVDs on my Mac with the great free app VLC rather than the lame "DVD Player" that is included with Mac OS X. How the heck do I do that?

I'm a huge fan of Apple's iChat program and use it all the time with my friends. A couple of my friends also have cool tweaks where they have amusing status messages and one even shows what she's listening to on her computer. How do they do that?

My kids are constantly harassing me about being able to chat with them via instant message, via "AIM". What's AIM and how do I get started?

About 6 months ago I was playing around on my iBook G4 and I found the option to change the format that Apple+Shift+4 saves in. For some odd reason I choose JPG-2000 (picture.jp2). Of course, now I can't find how to change it back!

I want to take a picture (capture) of my screen while running certain programs on my Mac so I can email the screenshot to a friend but have no idea how to do so. Is it even possible?

Dave, I saw your earlier article about how to convert a DVD for your iPhone, but that was written for Windows XP users [see How to put your DVDs onto your iPhone]. Do you have a similar article about how to convert DVDs on a Mac OS X system? I don't have a PC around...

It's the worst thing I can imagine happening!! I took a trip to Brazil with a group of friends and took my new Canon camera with me. I got home and hooked it up to my Mac to show my parents, except my young daughter somehow monkeyed with it and deleted all the pictures!!!! Is there any way to recover deleted pictures from the flash card (compact flash, if it matters) of my Canon digital camera?

I use Microsoft Word on my Mac every day, and every time I create a new document I change the default typeface from Times 12 point to Papyrus 13 point. Surely there's some way to change the default typeface in a new document and save me this hassle?

Hopefully you can help me. i was in a divorce and the name of my laptop is x y's computer. I have a white apple laptop running os x. unfortunately, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to change it so i won't be reminded that i was married everytime i go to log into my computer or when i poke around my computer... thanks for your help

Kind of a strange query, but I run Parallels extensively and often find that I need to email data files I've created therein -- within Windows XP -- to my colleagues. I don't want to have any mail program running in WinXP, however, I want to just use Apple Mail. Is there an EASY way to do this?

My computer will not play dvd and I dont know if said computer has a dvd player or not.

I have a macbook pro. Recently I installed parallels desktop on it. But the problem i have is when I connect a usb device to my macbook it is not being detected in the windows parallel desktop. Also I have no idea how to get right click options in the parallel windows desktop. Can you please help me. Thank you for your help in advance.

When traveling from home base & I am in a "wirless zone", like the Santa Fe airport, where access is free or visiting a residence that has a wireless system, I am always able to access the wireless to receive messages or use the internet, yet I am UNABLE TO SEND emails. I have talked to Apple & our web host, Crystaltech - but to no avail. Apple says that Crystaltech should support that function and Crystaltech has indicated that the only way I can SEND is to go to their internet site and use the mail system. However, my husband's IBM Think Pad allows him to send by changing the outgoing server designation. I am truly computer "dumb" and can only presume that there is something so simple for me to do to accomplish the SEND task, when away from home.

I have an iPhone and appreciate all its features but one: I can't use the calendar capability because I use Google Calendar, not iCal on my Mac. Is there some way that I can either manually or automatically synchronize Google Calendar with iCal?

Just got a new Apple iPhone and bought a movie from the Apple iTunes Store so I can watch it on the phone, but it fails with "computer is not authorized to watch this movie", even though I bought it and originally downloaded it on my Mac. What the heck? How do I authorize my computer?

I'm stumped. With my iPod I simply drag and drop the music I want to take with me from my library onto the iPod on the left side of iTunes, but my Apple iPhone doesn't allow me to do that. How the heck do I put songs on the iPhone without synchronizing my entire (massive) music library?

Hey Dave - I recently got an iMac. And have signed up on the Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM). How can I delete someone on my list?

I don't know what's going on, but every so often I get an email message in Microsoft Entourage that doesn't have any message body, even though the person who sent it insists that they included a message. Is there some overzealous spam filter in the way, or a virus, or what?

Like you, I am highly impressed with the Creative Labs Zen Vision:W [see my review] but it's darn frustrating that Creative only makes its software available for Windows computers, not Mac. I know about the XNJB application that lets me add photos and audio, but it won't let me work with movies. So is there some sort of solution?

Where do I find the @ sign on a spring Icon. It was at the bottom right of the dock. It took me to the Mac OS X website.I deleted it and would like to restore it to the dock..

I just read about Parallels 3.0 being released which is very cool, but rather than run Windows XP in Parallels, as you've written about, I want to run Microsoft Vista on my Mac instead. I have a MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM: is that enough? And if so, how do I install Vista in Parallels?

I'm trying to figure out how to make a copy of a (yes, legal) DVD disk on my Mac and am stumped. I have Roxio Toast 7 Titanium, and I can see that it has a "Copy" mode and works with DVD data, but I can't figure it out!

I have Microsoft Windows XP running on my Apple MacBook, using Parallels for Mac. When I'm on my VM it does not see the CD/DVD drive. I would like to save my data to a cd. any ideas?

Is there a way to put a shortcut to a URL on the OS X desktop. Used to be able to do this in XP, but can't figure out how to do it in OS X.

Microsoft PowerPoint is driving me a bit crazy right now on my Mac because every time I type in a web site URL it turns it into a hyperlink, complete with different formatting and color. Surely there's some way to turn this feature off??

I have been an avid reader for some time but I have a question. The kids all have computers now (we all have macs) and I was wondering if there was a way to check up on them every once in a while. We all have macs running OS X. and I have read the oriely 'control' your mac from afar. but I was wondering if there was a cool way to login screenshot and logout through SSH, I am the only admin so I can get their passwords, I was just wondering about the process.

A pal of mine showed me how she'd set up her MacBook to allow her to just gently tap on the trackpad to send a "click" to the operating system, as if she'd clicked on the mouse button. Very cool. How do I set up my MacBook Pro to let me do the same thing?

My wife and I share the same laptop and I just learned that we can both be logged in at the same time, yet have separate preference files, separate mailboxes in Apple Mail, separate bookmarks in Safari and even keep our files hidden from each other. Sweet! Someone at the Apple Store told us that we needed to use "fast user switching" but I have no idea what that is and how to use it. Is it an application we need to buy?

I saw your earlier article about how to use a Boot Camp partition as the virtual machine in Parallels on my Mac (see Booting off Boot Camp in Parallels) but I don't want to risk having the same Windows install running in two different environments (Boot Camp and Parallels). Instead, is there a way that I can access my Boot Camp partition while I'm in my Parallels virtual machine?

Now that I have Windows XP installed on my Mac via Boot Camp, I'm wondering if there's any way I can use that same partition for a virtual machine in Parallels? I have read your article about how to install WinXP in Parallels (see: How to install Windows XP on your Mac with Parallels Desktop), but I don't really want to have two 8GB Windows installations, so hopefully there's a better way?

Every so often I get an email attachment and double-click it to open it up on my Mac. It opens up fine, I make edits and save the document, but then when I quit Word I can't find the $#@$# document on my system. What's going on and where are the documents I've edited?

Through some stupid moves on my part, I now have a trashed Mac and an iPod that is full of music. Problem is, every time I hook up the iPod to any other computer, iTunes promptly wants to empty it and reformat it, which would stink because i have tons of music and even some movies on the unit. Help!

Already installed Apple's slick Boot Camp system so you can dual boot your Intel-based Mac into Microsoft Windows in addition to Mac OS X? Perhaps you even used my popular tutorial on How to install Windows XP in Apple Boot Camp to get it all working? Either way, you should be aware that Apple just released an update to Boot Camp that, among other things, will let you install the new Windows Vista in the Boot Camp partition.

Other features of this new 1.2 beta release include:

• Updated drivers, including the trackpad, AppleTime (sync), audio, graphics, modem, and the iSight camera
• Support for the Apple Remote
• Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp
• Improved keyboard support for Korean, Chinese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, and French Canadian
• Improved Windows driver installation experience
• Updated documentation and Boot Camp on-line help in Windows
• Apple Software Update (for Windows XP and Vista)

Hey Dave is there anyway we can have the "Computer" icon show up on the desktop, and the Hardsisks mounted within this folder. Much like Windows? Coz I have too many partitions (3 Harddisks with almost 5-6 partitions on each disks)

I've been using iTunes for a while on my computer and now have a pretty darn large music collection. Rather than have it all work with shuffle mode, I'm interested in learning about playlists, and particularly about smart playlists in iTunes. What can you tell me and what smart playlists do you have?

My Mac has a rather flaky lid catch and I'd love to figure out a way that I can disable the "wake on lid open" capability of the MacBook. I understand that there is some sort of solution, but for the life of me I can't find anything!

Dave, I saw your older article on how to disable guest access to your computer (see how to disable guest access on your Mac for wireless users) but it no longer works as the plutil file appears to be in a different format that won't let you edit it. Help!

Dear Dave, how the heck do I copy the harddrive icon onto the taskbar of my mac?

I have been using CD-RW disks on my Apple MacBook Pro, and while I have figured out how to use a Burn Folder to create the disk in the first place, how do I rewrite the disk with newer content without having to buy something expensive like Roxio Toast??

Here's a weird one for you, Dave: How come ImageCapture on my Mac system won't let me specify a destination directory when I'm uploading photographs? I've tried everything, but nothing seems to help?

I'm a big fan of GraphicConverter and love just about everything about it, except that it drives me crazy how I double-click an image and it always opens up at 100% zoom, even if the image is far, far larger than my screen. Effectively it means I can't easily use GraphicConverter with my archived photographs. Is there some way to change settings so images always open up at "Fit To Window" zoom instead of 100% zoom?

I've been using Google Calendar for a while, but would like to have a backup of my calendar in Apple's iCal program so I can dump a copy of it onto my iPod and other iCal-compatible devices. But how the heck do I get data out of Gcal?

Since you seem to be delving into the world of the Blackberry Pearl with your Mac system, I was hoping you could tell me how to use the Pearl as a wireless (bluetooth) modem with my Mac OS X Powerbook system. Didja figure that one out yet, Dave?

I have multiple printers that I use, depending on my location (it's on my Mac laptop) and sometimes I forget to check printing devices before I queue up a print job. Usually I just leave the job to print when I get back to that location, but isn't there some way to move print jobs from one printer to another in Mac OS X?

On my iMac running Mac OS X i downloaded some widgets for the dashboard but i dont like 4 of them i wondered if you know how to delets them not just disable them?

Dave, I have been trying to upload photos to MySpace, however, I keep receiveing an error message saying that the photos are too large. The program recommended for resizing is for Windows... so how can I resize my photos? Thanks!

I'm completely ignorant of mac systems but I'm learning quickly that macs are cool, and mac os x is excellent, but it seems I have to use Windows for a few things (less so over time as I buy mac versions of my normal applications) but I also like to play games (Nothing busts stress like a quick Quake break). Before I bought the macbook on a whim yesterday, I had also bought Neverwinter Nights 2 to play on my PC. I'd like to play this on my new macbook pro - the specs seem to be more than sufficient, but I don't know the best way to do it. Is it possible to run a hardware hungry PC game in a window using the Parallels Desktop software? Or should I forget all about it and play this game on my PC instead?

I just bought a new Apple iPod Shuffle second generation and before I plug it in, want to know how it's going to sync with my Mac and what I should expect. Is there any software I need to download, for example?

I just finished Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger, and think it is an excellent little resource. I'm recently out of school, a school where we weren't taught anything about Unix, just enough to get by. I started work with the data converter team at Agilent labs, and have been able to glean quite a bit off of them (considering many of them were either directly or indirectly responsible for writing many of them commands in common use today). Thus, I'm often embarrassed to ask them questions about exactly some of the stuff you cover in the book.

Okay, now for the question: at work, they have the terminal set up such that the command line works like vi. That is, if I want to search my command history, I simply change mode via escape, type /pattern_to_be_searched, it finds the command, and then I can use other vi commands to change the command a little bit, and then execute it via the shell. How do I set this up in OS X?

I am an experienced Mac user but really haven't learned some basic stuff. I need to know about desktop icon management in Mac OS X. I am using OS X.3 on my desktop and OS X.4 on my laptop. How can I keep my harddrive icon in one spot I designate? Every time I shut down and start up again, the icon is in a different place. I like it in the upper right hand corner (I'm old-fashioned, I know). I'm sure there has to be a way, but I haven't found it yet.

I know that there are lots of places where I can get illegal movies, but I'm wondering if there's a place where I can find legal downloads and if so, where, and how do I copy them to my computer so I can watch them on plane flights or while bored at meetings.

I keep trying to download pictures into my RAZR V3 from my Apple Mac but all my pictures are too large. How do I reduce the size and/or quality of the picture so that the phone will accept it?

I'm just curious, is there any list of the most popular shareware for the Mac and Windows platform, and if so, are Windows people more likely to download games or Mac people?

I've been using Microsoft's Entourage program for a while and like it, but just noticed recently that my friend's Entourage looks totally different: instead of having these six huge buttons on the top left of my main view window. How the heck did they do that?

I'm trying to get Microsoft Entourage on my Mac to work with an SSL-based mail server, but every time I try to use it, I get errors about "unverified root certificate" or uninstalled root certificates. I've dug around on my SSL server and can't figure out what the heck Entourage wants. Help!

I live for music and have a ton of different musicians and bands that I want to keep track of. I know I can go to somewhere like Google News + Technorati and create dozens of searches, but, man, it's the 21st century, surely there's an easier way?

Can you please help me? I was told by a friend that if you hit 'F12' on your Mac you will get widgets pop-up. I have pressed 'F12' but nothing is happening. Are the widgets already loaded into your computer, or do you need to download them or something else? I haven't been using Macs for long, so i'd really appreciate your help :)

Just bought a new MacBook and love it, especially the ability to run Windows through the Parallels system, but there's one thing that's driving me totally crazy: every once in a while it randomly shuts down with no warning. It's $#@$#@$@# frustrating! What's going on?

A pal of mine uses a program called Roboform on her PC to keep her site passwords all synchronized between her different Web browsers and as a Mac user I figure there's got to be at least as good a solution, if not better on my new Macintosh. So how do you manage your passwords?

This is driving me wacky! I have a ton of music in iTunes and also have a couple of audio books. All well and good, but when I'm in shuffle mode, everything in the iTunes music library is fair game, which means that every so often my party groove is suddenly interrupted with the fifth track of Harry Potter or something equally wacked. Is there some way to stop this?

I have two computers in my office and unfortunately installed both copies of Microsoft Word using the same serial number. I never thought it'd be a problem, but am constantly finding that when I leave Entourage running on one of them, I can't run Microsoft Word on the other. How the heck can I get Office to ask me for a different serial number so I can fix it?

I'm a huge fan of Apple's iTunes music player and am pretty darn excited to see the new iTunes 7 release that includes movies, games, and so much more. Most interestingly, it now has some new views of the library that are darn reminiscent of a jukebox. But I don't have artwork for any of my albums!

I've been using iCal for quite a while, but finally need to share my calendar with some others on my team but I don't have a ".mac" account, so... so I think I'm going to switch to Google Calendar and live in the Web 2.0 world. My question: how do I export my iCal calendar events and import them all into Google Calendar?

I know that I can go to a Web site to do currency conversions, but that's not always convenient or possible since I'm often in the air traveling back from overseas business trips when I'm filling out the forms that need this data. I could just write the conversion rates later and use Calculator to figure it all out but surely there's a better way on the Mac?

I've been running with Parallels for a while on my new Mac Intel system, and am really happy with it. But I really wish I could cut and paste between the Windows apps and the Mac apps, wish it would sync to the correct time, and so on. Is there some sort of Parallels equivalent to the old VMware "helper apps" that you'd install within the guest operating system? I'm running Windows XP.

I've become paranoid about security on my Mac laptop and just bumped into a story about some hackers who claim that they can break into a Mac laptop via the wifi connection. Yikes! How do I disable the hole so that no-one can use this exploit to get into my computer??

I want to import my yahoo address book to the Mac Address application on my laptop. I am running OSX 10.3.9. In Mac Address book "help" it says: "If you have problems importing a contact into Address Book, make sure it is a vCard or is in LDAP Interchange Format (LDIF). These are the only two formats Address Book recognizes."

I realize that to export my Yahoo address book it must be in the format of ".cvs"

Obviously these formats do not match so I ask you if you know of a work around solution to this?

Can you offer up a better explanation of the new Time Machine capability that Apple has unveiled for its upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 operating system? I've read that it's some sort of automatically backup system, but don't see how that can work without massive reengineering of the entire Mac OS?

I like Spotlight well enough that I find myself using it a few times a week to help dig files out of my huge archives, but it always bugs me that it sees and indexes all my mail messages too. If I wanted to have all my email searched, I'd do so in the program itself. How do I disable this feature of Spotlight?

I've gone ahead and installed Apple's Boot Camp product and Windows XP and I'm totally delighted with the results. Finally, I can pop into Windows as needed without having to drag along a PC on my sales calls. But how the heck do I get back to Mac OS X? It's now automatically booting into Windows each time.

Just read your tutorial on installing and configuring Boot Camp (see Installing Boot Camp and Windows XP on your Intel Mac) and it's great. I notice that at the end you comment about your PC partition showing up on the Mac side when you reboot. That's cool, but how do you find files on that disk?

I read through your splendid tutorial on installing Windows XP with Apple's Boot Camp product (see boot camp help) but that's not for me. I don't want to have to reboot each time I want to try something out with a Windows app on my Mac. I've read about something called the Parallels Desktop and am hoping you can explain how to install it and how to use it so I can run Windows in parallel with Mac OS X? Thanks.

I've been running Mac OS X Tiger for quite a while now and have only recently begun to explore the capabilities of the Spotlight feature in the OS. It's pretty cool, but sometimes I find that its index of my drive is out of date and I need to have it reindexed. How do I get Spotlight to index or reindex my drive?

I'm thrilled to learn that I can now dual-boot my new Intel-based Mac so that I can live in the warm fuzzy world of Mac OS X or flip over to the business world of Windows XP. I have a shiny new copy of WinXP from my IT people, an Intel-based Mac Mini, and lots of enthusiasm, but that's about it. How the heck do I actually install Windows XP on my Mac so I can work in either operating system?

Every now and then I log in to terminal (in OS X) to mess around and stuff but I logged in this time and I got this message to start...

Last login: Fri Apr 21 19:15:30 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
You have mail.
$

Its all good except for the "you have mail" I dont know what mail this is whether it is linked to OS X's mail program (I dont think it is) or whether it is a standard thing. It's not a huge issue, but I wouldnt mind knowing what it's about.

I don't get it. When i put songs on my ipod nano it lists two album titles (the same titles) for that artist. I can't seem to fix it... thanks

I read your note a few days ago about how to use GraphicConverter to create thumbnail icons for my image folders (see Why don't my pictures have image thumbnail icons?) and I'm using the technique you wrote about, but my icons are fuzzy and have a little turned-down corner and look terrible when I make the icons in my folder larger! What am I doing wrong?

I'm jealous: my buddy has a Mac and when he downloads pictures from his camera onto his computer, they all end up with nifty little preview icons that make it easy to pick out which pictures to view. When I download pictures onto my Mac, however, I get these stupid generic "JPEG" icons instead. What's wrong and how do I fix it?

I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4.5 and it has set me back to being online for only 10 minutes with Earthlink, and then cuts me off. I forgot how I stayed on line! It was simple, but I can't remember. Help!

Hi Dave, I'm really into world of warcraft and i was wondering how i get some of their wallpapers on my G5 also why can't i watch movies from thier website, i have downloaded the sample version of Divx? thanks

I've been trying to copy some files off an FTP archive, but every time I go to do the transfer, it says "Entering Extended Passive Mode" and never gets any further. My conclusion: this passive mode thing is a bust. How can I transfer the files without using passive mode? I'm using ftp from within a Terminal on my Mac, by the way.

I have a pretty new Mac G5 desktop system and just read all the news about Boot Camp. Wow! I would be so psyched if I could actually dual boot Windows XP and Mac OS X on this computer. Can I? And if so, how?

Alright, Dave. I'm darn frustrated. My husband and I both have Macs and he also has an iPod -- that I bought him! -- but when I plug his iPod into my Mac, I can see the music in iTunes and can even listen to it, but I can't copy it into my own iTunes library. What's wrong, and how do I fix it?

I have a Dual 2Gig G5 running the latest version of Mac OS X. I'm having difficulty getting all of the "buttons" on a certain webpage from showing up in Safari. They show up fine when I log in to my account. They used to show up fine when logged in on my wife's account, but now they no longer appear. What could cause something like this to be blocked on one account, but not the other.

Hi Dave, I am running Mac OS X 10.3.9 and recently encountered a strange occurrence. Instead of the usual tag under my main hard drive(74.4 GB, 24.75 GB used) it shows (74.4 GB). After I used "Get Info" it says i have read-only access. Every time i want to move a file to it, it asks for my admin password. I am normally an admin user, and this has never happened before. Is this a major thing? And how can i change it back to what it was before?

Dave, I'm a bit puzzled. How do i find what DNS servers my emac is using at any given time?

I think that the Apple iTunes Music Store is very cool and it's nice to be able to buy episodes of TV shows, but they don't have the shows I like to watch, like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Sopranos and Sex in the City. I have a TiVO unit so I can record them, but how do I get the shows from my TiVO to my iPod? I'm using a Mac, if it matters.

I have two Macs. One is running Mac OS X Panther, the other Mac OS X Tiger. They both have Safari and Explorer. I have kids that want to spent alot of time on myspace.com. I have heard that you can use Unix to redirect URLs by changing the host file. If you could help me I would apreciate it.

I love Apple, and have done since I bought my first Quadra Mac years ago, and I really love wandering around the Apple Store in my neighborhood too, but I gotta say that whenever I need to get help from someone at their Genius Bar it drives me completely crazy. I waste HOURS waiting for my turn. Is there some secret to getting prompt service?

I just got a new Motorola SLVR cellphone from Cingular and it's very cool, but somehow I can't figure out how to use the iPod area of it. How do I hook it up to my Mac and download some songs onto it, and, for that matter, how many songs can it hold anyway?

How do i change my password on my Mac OS X system, Dave? I looked when I was logging in and didn't see any sort of button or configuration option!

Any idea on how to transform Sony Micro MV videos into a version compatible with Mac OSX 10.3.9 so that they can be edited with iMovie?

How can I copy a DVD from my G4 powerbook (I have pocketmac pro) to my I-mate Jam phone which uses windows Pocket PC? I'm familiar with Mac the Ripper but I don't know how I can convert the files to ones that my phone can read, I'm really confused regarding what mp4 setting to use (most available softwares are for ipod conversion eg. MovieToGo)

I'm darn concerned! Every time I start up my Apple Safari browser, I find that the program has remembered every search I've done, whether from the Google search box or when I'm actually on the Google home page. What the heck? How can I disable this "feature" and regain my privacy?

A virus on the Mac. Gadzooks, what's next? Spyware? Ug. Meanwhile, can you tell us a bit more about this code, how it works and how we can avoid being infected?

Dave, I'm baffled. I have been running Microsoft Entourage for a while, and have grown to like the little bings and bongs of its audio notifications. But all of a sudden Entourage doesn't make any sounds at all. It's mute. What's happened?

I have a bunch of WMA format audio files on my Mac and really want to put them on my RCA Lyra MP3 player but it only supports MP3 format. Somehow, I need to convert the audio from WMA to MP3. How?

For some reason the sound notifications in Entourage have switched themselves off. I was having problems with Pocketmac Pro which I have decided to give up on....the developers in an effort to get it working had me reboot my Powerbook holding down the C key and repairing from the install disk. It didn't help and the sounds in Entourage have not worked since?

I have a Mac OS X iBook G4 ver. 10.3.9. Recently, I don't know what came over me, but I wanted to change my "name" on my computer. So, what I did was open Finder, click on my name (beside the house icon) and clicked File-Get Info. I then simply changed my name in the box that showed up under "Name & Extension". I did not realize what havoc this would cause on my computer (I did not get any "Are you sure?" warning message or anything). Even though I had changed my name, I had NOT created another account. All my old files were then put under my old name, and I eventually found these files. However, all of my programs reset themselves. I lost my emails, all my personal settings, everything. It was as if I was opening the programs up again for the first time. This was still the case even after I had switched my name back to the original name.

Question: What did I do? Why was it so easily done? How can I get my original settings back without having to reset them all manually?

I typed out my Social Security number while chatting on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I immediately knew after I did it that it was a mistake since IM is not secure. My question is, can you show me how to wipe out any trace of my Social Security number from any cookies, logs, or scripts (or anywhere else on my computer and my chat-mate's computer where it may be stored) so that someone cannot get their hands on it? Basically, I'm trying not to be a victim of identity theft. Thanks!

I won a Creative Labs Zen Micro MP3 player and am darn disappointed to find out that it appears to only be compatible with Windows XP, since I'm a Mac guy. It appears to be a problem with the "Plays For Sure" system, but I dunno. Anyway, is there any way I can use this device with my Mac?

Please help me! someone has shut me out from my own apple Mac laptop! They have taken the admin privilages and set-up a guest account for me! I use MacOS 9.

Help! For some reason when I try to use "ssh" to connect to my server from my Mac, it fails and is saying that I might be a victim of a "DNS Spoof"? What's going on, and how do I fix the problem?

I recently backed up my files on USB flash drive for my iMac computer. I had to get system updated. My tech support reformatted drive and put system 10.2.2 on my computer . I went to load my files back onto computer and all files as listed now as UNIX files.

The original programs were loaded back on computer: Appleworks 6 and Quicken 2000, but the applications don't recognize their own files now. I was told that I had to add an extention to each file so it could be recognized by each program . This is 5 years of files and I am not feeling good about this whole mess. Is there any hope to get these files attached back to their programs/ applications?

Dave, I just heard that Apple released some new computers and is touting that its latest release of some of the cool Apple software is built around "Universal Applications" technology, or something like that. I've been a long-time Mac user: what the heck are they talking about?

i need just a little help here im not sure just what happened. i accidently closed my ichat instead of safari so i brought it back up like any other time. but when i brought it back up this time, it asked me for to do a new user config. i shutdown and restarted my mac and my background reverted to default, all my book marks were lost (both in safari and firefox), my icon for ichat changed to the one on my user logon. my iphoto library (where i had my backgound image) shows the outline of the picture but thats all. also, all my stuff on my desktop disappeared. im not sure if this is all that has changed yet.

I am having the reverse of the typical winmail dat problem. I have a mac with microsoft office installed. I am sending an excel template to windows users. The template was dropped/dragged (from my old windows computer) to my excel for mac. When the file is sent to any windows user they receive a winmail dat file. When I send it to myself it works fine. I want to be able to alter the file before sending so the very busy and not highly technical recipients can receive my emails. Hope you find this interesting and even better, find a solution.

I've been running Mac OS X for a few months now and every so often it pops up to tell me that I need to install an update to some program or other. That's nice, but sometimes it indicates that there are updates to install for programs I never use. How do I tell Software Update to ignore certain programs?

So sorry to ask what is I am sure a pretty dumb question, but I have downloaded widgets for my Mac OS X Tiger which don't really work in the part of world that I am (India). e.g. i can't send smses from the sms sender as no carrier here is supported. Now I want to know how to get rid of them, and the 'manage widgets' widget seems to be missing.

I don't know how, but my boot target drive recently changed which I fixed under system preferences. However, everytime I boot my machine now Safari opens. How do I stop this?

Hi Dave. I'm at a conference and have just been told by a fellow attendee that there's an IRC channel for us attendees to chat in while we're here. But I'm on a Mac and have absolutely no clue what IRC is and whether it works with my various instant message clients, so I don't know how to join the discussion. Help!?

How do I get MP3 format files out of my iTunes player on my Macintosh? I want to know because I have a new Sony PSP unit and really want to copy some songs from my computer onto my PSP unit. Thanks!

How do I change the program associated with specific file types and the icons associated with specific file types? For example, I want to change all my PDF icons...

My partner's 12inch Apple iBook no longer sleeps when she puts the lid down. I've never had to fix this kind of problem and hope you can help, hence the email!

I'm new to Mac, last Apple I owned was a IIe in the 80's. This question is related to your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger book, page 41 "Changing the Command Prompt. In this section you give the following command for changing the prompt:

      PS1= "? "

I typed this, but got the following response from the terminal window:

      -bash: ? : command not found

What am I doing wrong?

Upon attempting a Software Update, I was told I didn't have enough memory and was to remove unnecessary items from my Start Up Disk, I seem to have my HD in my Start Up Disk (is that normal?).

I simply restarted my machine to find that there was a flashing square box with a globe in the centre. After about a couple of minuets of this flashing an old OS 9 emblem (two faces) in a folder flashing up along with a question mark.

It now does this all the time. Could you tell what is going on here.

I love dashboard widgets! I access them by moving my cursor to the bottom left corner of my screen. Since I use my laptop for school, it would benefit me to have a third desktop layer besides the ones presented by the regular desktop and the widgets layer. Is there a way to have a third "desktop" that I can access the same way I access the widget layer?

I wrote all of my web site's code using SimpleText in MacOS 9. Recently I made the step up to OS X and I've transferred all of my data from my old G-4 to the new system. When I open the html pages in TextEdit on OS X I am unable to go in and edit the code. Instead I get a screen that reads the the html and presents a page like one would see on the web. Is it possible to edit the html that was written in SimpleText and still keep it as a text file?

I have been working on a PowerPoint (Mac OS X 2004) quiz for quite some time and have inserted sound files which work fine. However i have been working on a new slide and it seems all my sound files (not movie) only play for about a second. This is throughout the whole presentation. I must have clicked on a setting but i have no idea how and how it would effect the whole presentation.

I've been running Mac OS X Tiger for a while now, and when I encounter Web sites that have RSS feeds available, I've noticed that a blue "RSS" graphic appears in the address bar, but I haven't figured out how to actually subscribe to RSS feeds and use Safari as an RSS / syndication reader.

I am currently living with my Dad, have about 1700 songs in iTunes and don't want to lose them when I move to my Mother's house! How could I somehow transfer the songs to my computer at my Mom's house? Is there a way where I could burn the data to a CD or something? If you could please let me know, it'd be very appreciated.

I'm running iTunes v 4.9 on my Mac (running Mac OS X 10.2.8). I screwed up somehow and deleted my old music library trying to fix a diiferent problem. I learned my lesson on that. I have on older v 1.5 iPod with all my music on it. Can I transfer those songs into my library?

Mail is set as the default email program on our Mac, so when we happen to click on an email link in anything (say, our browser), the Mail app automatically opens up and creates an email message. We don't want that, we'd like to be able to designate our chosen email apps (I use Thunderbird, she uses Entourage). How do you change this?

I am new to the Mac world and I have started with Tiger. When I use the textedit program to type HTML code and save it as an HTML document all I see is the code when I open the file in any of the browsers that I use. Unlike Notepad in Window, why can't I see the results of my code in a web page? I am completely lost and have combed the Internet. The simple Text Editor program in the older versions of the Mac OSs' seemed to work just like Notepad in Windows. Please let me know what I am doing wrong.

Dave, how do I get rid of all these stupid America Online pop-ups that plague me when I use my AOL account? I checked my AOL preferences and don't see anything that lets me turn them off!

I have recently bought a new computer and want to move my Itunes from my old one, onto my new one without having to download all the songs again. Some say it can be done, other say it can't - what do you say???

Dave, I've been reading and hearing about Google's mythical PageRank for quite a while, but what bugs me is that I haven't figured out how to ascertain my PageRank on a Mac. I know that Google has their Google Toolbar for Windows, but I don't want to have Windows just for that purpose! Sheesh. What's a guy to do?

Dave, I've read lots of news about how iTunes now supports podcasts directly, but even now that I've downloaded the latest version of iTunes, I can't see how to browse podcasts and subscribe. Help?

Is there some arcane magic required to get signatures to automatically appear on an account?

Some of my accounts work fine; some simply refuse to auto insert the signature when I open a new message, even if I completely delete and recreate the signature.

Annoyingly, it's my main business account which it doesn't like :-(

I have a powerbook g4 titanium , 60 GB HD, 512 MB ram, 1Ghz processor. I use the program DVD Backup to put dvd's on my desktop as TS folders. It has served me well on business trips, bored meetings, etc. I recently upgraded to Tiger and now I can not watch the created VIDEO_TS folders on the DVD player. What is the deal?

Dave, I'm completely clueless when it comes to programming, so I have a question that hopefully has an easy answer. Can I get the contacts in Palm's software into the Mac OS X Address Book without too much difficulty?

Dave, I'd really like to learn more about how to work with the Unix operating system that's buried in my Macintosh, now that I have Mac OS X Tiger on my G5. What do you recommend as a resource? And how easy is it to learn Unix anyway?

Hi Dave, I run Pro Tools Digidesign 002 6.7. Have recently booted RAM from 512mgb to 1gig. The issue is CPU, as mid session I will get error message that I am running out of CPU. The problem is this; there are many duplicate files and folders which are playing havoc with the CPU. How do I find all these files and folders and remove them from the system?

I presume there is a download or product that finds these files and deletes them forever. I am very new to computers and after more than 30yrs as a musician I would like my system to run like my tiny old Sony walkman did for many years.

Boot up, catch the song idea and develop quickly and without any bother. I have a Mac G4 8oomhz, play many instuments straight into the system ( I don't use Midi) in my enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge have found that I don't need too much (STuff) to create and deliver my music. A couple of nice reverbs etc. I use disk utility to help, but this is not the complete or practical way to start/stop/start/f f f f-forgetit, lose the moment.

Can you help with ideas on removing all files etc that aren't needed? I am half way through my new album and am loosing the plot rapidly...just need to focus on the music...

Dave, what's on your PowerBook? What cool apps do you have that I should know about? What Dashboard widgets? Etc. etc etc.

Dave, I'm now running the slick new Mac OS X Tiger operating system from Apple, and amy trying to get up to speed with the RSS reader built into the new version of Safari. Very nice, but... it doesn't seem to know that my Weblogs have RSS feeds! How do I tweak my blog so Safari can see the feed and offer a one-button subscription for Tiger users?

Dave, as far as I know, I get a new IP address every time I connect to the Internet with my Apple PowerBook. How do I figure out what address I've been assigned?

Dave, do tell, when are we unwashed masses going to be able to enjoy the goodness that will be Mac OS X 10.4, aka "Tiger"?

Dave, I'm thrilled, I just got a new Mac Mini to dip my toe into the world of Macintosh (I'm a long-time Windows user) and I'm wondering what applications you recommend I add to the unit to make it maximally useful?

Dave, there are a couple of people who send me email, and, consistently, their attachments don't show up as neat "foo.doc" or "report.xls" but as the generic attachment winmail.dat. They don't know why and I don't know why. Worse, as a Mac user, I can't figure out what to do with them. What's causing these "winmail.dat" files and how do I decode 'em?

Dave, I have a problem which I know that many other users have, certainly of Macs, and maybe of other machines as well: Sometimes when I look at an email which has been sent to me which is clearly *supposed* to be rendered in html in my reader, all I actually see is a bunch of html code gobbledygook.

As you can imagine, the email is completely unreadable.

I have searched and searched for a way to clean this sort of email up so it's readable, but to no avail. I have been told that the problem is that the email sender does not have some sort of code set correctly, and that some mail programs will overlook this (which I guess explains why they keep sending this garbage, maybe not enough people complain), but that some, such as my Mac's, will not. Help!

Hello Dave, I work on Mac OS X and I have been trying to add a favicon.ico to my website's address bar, only to find that it only shows when I open it with Netscape or Firefox, all the other browsers like Safari and Explorer don't seem to recognize it.... Can you help?? It is driving me mad...

Dave, I was talking with my ISP and he suggested that I use an "ssh tunnnel" when I use my email program, Microsoft Entourage, on any public wireless networks to avoid exposing my account and password to anyone who might be sniffing the wi-fi network. Problem is, I have no idea what they're talking about, but I'm definitely paranoid about security and the idea of point-to-point encryption sounds wonderful. Can you tell me how to set this up?

Dave, how can I flatten a directory structure? I've got a directory "foo", with many more sub-directories and files within. I want to take all the files from all levels beneath foo and put them in foo itself.

I've tried this: find . *.mp3 -print0 | xargs -0 mv . but I get an error on the mv command that I can't figure out. Help!

Dave, I have just installed a new DVD burner in my computer (a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-105 internal drive) and am trying to figure out what kind of blank disks I should be using. There are apparently five different blank DVD formats. Do I want DVD-R? DVD-RW? or ??

Also, if I just want to burn lots of data onto a DVD disk, can I use my Roxio Toast Titanium to do so, or do I need to use a special DVD-friendly app like iDVD?

Hi Dave! I'm running a 500 MHz Titanium Powerbook with 512MB of memory, Mac OSX 10.3.7. I recently had to do a clean install on my powerbook and my shell is defaulting to the tcsh instead of the bash. First question... Why did it do that? Second question... How do I fix it?

I have a Snow iMac G3 800MHz, with both OS9.2.2 and OS10.1.5 on it, and for jollies, I put 10.3 on my external firewire hard drive, and just boot off the external drive. I wanted to see how well that works, and it works wonderfully. (it is up to 10.3.7 right now)

Anyway, this is my question: I've been itching to buy an external firewire DVD drive, to play movies or anything else a DVD drive can be used for. I've tried to figure out if this is possible, and whether I would run into problems concerning encoding or decoding movies, software vs hardware decoding, which external DVD drives have the decoding ability built in, and... I'm not sure what else to think.

So I was wondering what your thoughts are and how to tell if external DVD drives have hardware decoding built into them, or if I could just buy any ol' external DVD drive as long as I had the proper software.

I haven't yet read through your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther, but I realize now that I probably need to! Here's what happened: I typed this command "ping www.yahoo.com -f -1 1492" into terminal from a website saying it might help me determine my ideal MTU settings. I believe they mislabeled the instructions and this command should have been for Windows... not Mac.

Did I screw anything up? Here's what I typed and the results I received:

Last login: Sun Oct 17 22:06:55 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
Wiamea:~ mike$ ping www.yahoo.com -f -1 1492
usage: ping [-Rdfnqrv] [-c count] [-i wait] [-l preload]
       [-p pattern] [-s packetsize] host
Wiamea:~ mike$

I have a Mac running OS 10.3.5, and I am trying to use TextEdit to write HTML code in your example. However, it will not let me save the file with an .html extension, as you specify needs to happen for the browsers to properly read it. And I tried it anyway using both .rtf and .txt extensions (the only options it will allow), and Explorer says "it doesn't know how to handle the type of file you've selected." Of course, I didn't expect it to work, because your book said it wouldn't. What can I do? And will I continue encountering problems as I go through your book since I'm working on a Mac, and the book is written from the perspective of PC users? Thanks

Help! I read about some sort of major security hole where people can exploit the Safari help system and drop junk onto my computer? What's that all about? How can I avoid it being a danger on my computer?

As I'm now working through your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Jaguar, I can't get the commands "alias" and "grep" to work. Has been there a change in the command definition from Jaguar to Panther?

Security Update 2003-11-04 addresses a potential vulnerability with the Terminal application in Mac OS X v10.3 and Mac OS X Server v10.3 that could allow unauthorized access to a system.

"I figured that this would be right up your alley. If I want to move any document that contains "agreen" to another folder, what commands would I use on the command line?"