Status-Q

Following on from my earlier post about the VGA output on the Mac Mini, there is at least a partial solution described here - there’s a hidden contrast control buried away on System Preferences under ‘Universal Access’. Tweaking that in conjunction with the monitor brightness & contrast controls certainly seems to help a lot.

In the meantime, we decided to order a Dell 2001FP display for Rose…. Should be here in a few days… but I don’t have any regrets!

Scott Knaster has written a very useful article on the O'Reilly site:iPod Shuffle Tips and Tricks

Recommended for all Shuffle owners.

Mmm. It's too bad. I bought a Mac Mini today for Rose, which is in all respects lovely, except that the text just isn't quite crisp enough on my VGA monitor. There's something about the analog output of the Mini, via the DVI-VGA converter, which is not quite right. And I don't think it's the converter.

I'm far from being the only one with this problem; see this substantial discussion in the Apple forum, for example.

It seems pretty likely to be fixable in firmware, once Apple really acknowledge the problem. Until then I have to decide whether to return it or to get a DVI monitor...

Navigating the file system.

You may know that the icon in the title bar of a document or Finder window represents the file or folder itself. You can drag a document straight to the trash by dragging this icon, for example, or drop it on another app in your dock.

What I hadn't realised was that another trick I've used in the Finder also works in document windows. Cmd-Click on the icon, and it shows you its position in the folder hierarchy.

You can select one of those folders and it will open in the finder for you. This is really handy if you're working in a document and want a quick way to jump to something in the same directory.

A thing I sometimes miss when I'm working in the Finder is the ability quickly to create a new file of a particular type. In Windows you right-click and select "New>Word document" or similar. I don't know why the Mac doesn't do this, but one way to add it is using this handy Applescript in the Finder toolbar. (It was written by someone whose name I can't find but who goes under the pseudonym of PCheese.)

For Mac users: Finder windows normally show you an accurate view of what's in your folders, but occasionally, if something happens behind its back, the Finder doesn't update the window immediately. This is most common on network shares, and happens on Windows as well. Windows has the F5 key to refresh the current view, though, and there isn't a Finder equivalent.

Rainer Brockerhoff's Nudge utility will do the same thing for Mac users.

Apple is to allow you to download your photos straight from your digital camera to your iPod Photo, using the the iPod Camera Connector, due out in late March. CNET:

The camera connector, Joswiak said, is a small white plastic device, similar in appearance to a small docking station, that has a cable for connecting to the iPod and a USB port for connecting to a camera. It will work with both the new iPod Photos and with earlier photo player models, Joswiak said. Pictures loaded onto an iPod directly will be able to display immediately on the iPod.

I've always been impressed with the sound quality from my iPod Shuffle, but today I plugged it into my Sennheiser HD590 headphones instead of the little earbuds, and I was blown away. Amazingly good sound. It depends on the quality of your MP3 files, of course, but if you've got some good headphones, give it a try.

The band that goes across the top of my head is substantially larger than the thing storing and generating the music!

I'm working on a substantial document at present, which involves lots of cross-referencing between sections. It really helps to be able to refer to more than one section of the document at once. Here's the setup I like best:

This is Word 2004, showing three windows onto the same document. The top one, where I do most of the work, also has the document map switched on, for quicker navigation. I've used two separate windows on the lower display, rather than showing two pages side-by-side in one wide window, so that I can scroll them independently.

The other good thing about this arrangement is that it covers up everything else, which helps to reduce distraction!

Pixels are addictive. The more you have of them, the more you want. I'm just waiting for my pals at Newnham Research to produce something for the Mac...

Update: I've posted a new, updated version of wget for OS X which you may want to try instead. If you want to grab files from the web using the command line, the wget utility is great. Recent versions of Mac OS X don't include it. They come with curl instead, which has some good features, but is also missing a great deal. Here's wget.zip, which contains wget built for Mac OS X 10.3. Hope someone finds it useful! Update: If you like this, you might also like my mtr for Mac OS X, or be interested in lots of other Apple-related stuff here.