Swap slideshows
A friend on my bowling team made a PowerPoint presentation on his PC at work that he wants to show us all. If he emails it to me, will I be able to see it?
Totally! (1) I’m pretty certain you have Microsoft Office for Mac, which means you have PowerPoint, which will open the heck out of that doc.
(2) Now, check this out: Have your friend email you the file. From right in your email, click once on the attachment’s icon, then click the “Quick Look” button — or just hit the space bar. Isn’t that cool? Now, you may not see transitions, and maybe not embedded video, but almost all of the content should be visible.
(Sidenote: Just today, a friend of mine was trying to see previews of some design files, .eps and the like, that Quick Look wouldn’t render. She found a $15 Quick Look plug-in called SneakPeek Pro that fixed that, which made me look up a whole list of Quick Look plug-ins, many of them free. These can really extend your Mac to showing you fast previews of all kinds of stuff. But I digress…)
(3) But wait, there’s more! If you want to make presentations look just a whole lot better than you can in PowerPoint, you should look at the new iWork — it’s just so good. Apple’s Keynote software makes really fine presentations really efficiently. While you’re at it, have you picked up the new iLife, with iPhoto Face Recognition?
(4) I just recently found out about SlideShare, a service on which to store and show your presentations. As far as I can tell, it’s free.
Save a presentation as a PowerPoint Movie [link]
- On the File menu, click Make Movie.
- To adjust PowerPoint Movie options, click Adjust Settings on the dialog box that drops down, and then click Next.
- Choose the options you want, and then click OK.
- In the Save As box, type a name for your movie. If your movie will be viewed by users of Windows-based computers, select Append File Extension.
- Click Save.
Once you do, you can put it on an iPod or iPhone, and watch it on that smaller screen, or…
If he wanted to show it on our big-screen TV, how do we do that?
Ahhhhhh, now that’s an interesting one. The most direct way is to run a monitor cable from your computer to your TV. (Your iMac may not feel as convenient as a laptop to accomplish that, but it wouldn’t be that unwieldy.) Any Mac or Windows computer will know that it has a new display, and will show whatever you put up.
A couple of other options would be:
Connecting your iPod or iPhone to a video dock, such as this or this. Here is some help from Apple on getting video off of your iPod or iPhone.
I have one client who converts his presentations into image files that he can display as a slideshow on his Apple TV, which is an appliance that fits in with your other home stereo components, and let’s you easily play music, movies, and photos that you acquire through iTunes or by other means.
Email not receiving
My Inbox in Apple Mail has a triangle icon with an exclamation point in it, and isn’t receiving emails. I’m having to use my “All Mail” folder below. How do I fix this?
I get this question from time to time. It happens for different reasons, often when either your internet or your email service is interrupted — which has afflicted Gmail recently. Usually the easy fix is, in Apple Mail, clicking on Mailbox > Take All Accounts Online. I’m actually a little surprised that “All Mail” worked; kudos on finding that!
The triangle went away all on its own!!
It does that. Now, what would be great is if they made a big freakin’ sign that said, “If you see a freakin’ triangle over here, this is what you should do…”
Sheesh.
Bookmarklets for your fun and convenience
I’ve come late to the game of public — or “social” — bookmarking using Delicious, but it’s so freaking useful. Instead of adding a bookmark to Safari or Firefox, I post it to Delicious, where I can tag it with multiple categories, and share it. A friend and I are planning a trip, so as I collect relevant pages, I can save them on Delicious, tag ‘em with “triptowherever”, and then me and my pal can always go to http://delicious.com/jjmarcus/triptowherever to see what each other has found.
Now, if I’m surfing in Firefox, I can use the great Delicious plug-in. Safari, however, isn’t as easily extensible as Firefox, and regardless of the browser, one can get some nifty functionality using bookmarklets: little bits of JavaScript that can take information from your current browser page and perform some quick action with it. Adding a bookmark to Delicious is an excellent example.
(I should mention that I do use some fantastic Safari extensions such as SafariStand and Inquisitor; find a full list at PimpMySafari. But I digress…)
In this post, I’m going to forego writing instructions for creating bookmarklets, but I will list the ones I have found useful so far. PimpMySafari has a long list of these, too.
Here are mine (the links contain the code):
- Spreeder.com: Speed-read with spreeder
- Evernote.com: Clip to Evernote
- Post images from Flickr to Facebook (iPhoto ‘09 makes this less necessary).
- Bookmark on Delicious.
- RemembertheMilk.com: Add to Remember the Milk
I put them all in a folder in my Bookmarks Bar, for quick access.
Create a wireless network without a wireless router
We have several Mac minis, all connected to our network with Ethernet. We just got a laptop, but we don’t have a wireless router. Can one of the minis create a wireless network?
Yes, that’s super-easy. In Tiger: On one of the minis, go to System Preferences > Sharing > Internet. In Leopard: System Preferences > Sharing, and turn on “Internet Sharing” in the list of services. In there you can share the Ethernet connection via Airport, which tells the mini to create what’s called an “ad-hoc” wireless network. You can name it what you want and password-protect it, too.
Creating a small, secure network in your home or office
Note: The recommendations, opinions, and prescriptions are just one man’s view on creating a basic secure network. There are infinite ways to do this dependably, and these are the ones I think are easiest and most cost-effective.
I’m setting up my home network. I would like to allow connections with just one computer from outside the firewall, via VPN, and not allow any other incoming browser or FTP or any other sessions. What hardware can accomplish this?
First of all, it’s worth reading this explanation of home networking.
In many ways, any proper router, including an Apple Airport device, provides a firewall when you don’t open ANY holes in its network configuration. When a router or server manufacturer promotes its “firewall” as a feature, they mean that you can configure those holes more specifically.
Definition: Here, I use “holes” as English for “ports,” which on a network are numerical openings in a firewall, through which network traffic is allowed to pass. We might open those ports using a protocol called NAT (network address translation). With NAT, I can say, just for example, “When I am away from home, I want to securely access my home network with a web browser, to see my security cameras.” So I set my router to direct all traffic on port 443 (the secure web browsing port, or HTTPS) to the network address — the IP address — of my security system.
You might, for example, schedule certain ports to be open at certain times of the day, or direct certain traffic to one IP on your network, in case you did indeed want to have a web or FTP server. A firewall might also let you restrict outgoing traffic to specific ports, and will also keep a log — at a detail level you specify — of incoming and outgoing traffic.
In your case, I’m seeing that you want all holes blocked, except for those that would permit the VPN. A VPN allows you to establish a tunnel through the firewall — a tunnel that encrypts all the traffic going through it.
Can I achieve this with a VPN installed on Mac mini?
Yes, combined with a good router.
If I do not have a dedicated firewall, what is keeping the bad guys out?
See above. One of the most important strategies in security is not to turn services ON. Older Windows machines, especially before XP Service Pack 2, seemed to me to be wide freakin’ open out of the box, advertising their presence on a network and too easily offering basic file sharing, even without requiring a password. Macs are not that open straight off, but their firewall is not on by default, so whenever you turn on a service — iTunes music sharing, for example — it does not request permission to open a port, which does happen when you have the firewall on. The firewall on the Mac also includes logging.
On a laptop or other mobile device, I usually turn almost all services fully off. But It’s nice to have some services turned on on some desktop computers. It would be a shame, for example, to have music or photo sharing turned off on the machine where those things mainly reside.
So here’s the HEADLINE: To maintain good security, the most absolutely crucial technique is to lock down all services with good passwords, and use as many different passwords as you can safely store and readily access.
“Good,” in this case, means letters (some capitalized), numbers, and a special character or two. Learn where and how to change your passwords, and do so regularly. Don’t write them down. Your Mac stores passwords, certificates, and private notes in a well-encrypted file, the keychain, and that’s the best place for them. There’s also software called 1Password that’s worth a look.
Learn to manage passwords and you’ve learned to manage your security.
I am renovating my house, and I want to wire most of the rooms with Ethernet.
That is a fantastic idea, for several reasons: It increases the resale value of your house just like a good electrical or HVAC system does. It’s also important to realize that, while wireless networking is cool and all, there is nothing as reliable as a cable.
I have more information, and a table to help calculate the costs of setting up your network posted at Google Docs, right here.
What email service should I use?
I have an earthlink.net email address, which comes with webmail and 10MB storage. But I’m thinking about changing my internet service provider? And sometimes I run out of storage at earthlink. I just don’t know if it’s worth it to me to convert to a new email address.
May I suggest Google Apps to host your email? It’s free, has a frigton of storage (7.5GB), and has all the bounteous benefit of the Gmail interface, or you can access it from Apple Mail or your email client of choice. There are few comparable alternatives out right now, and none of those are free.
This is important: You can KEEP your current email addresses. In the case of your earthlink.net address, we just start forwarding it to Gmail — either a general @gmail.com address or to your @yourdomain.com. Your correspondents may never have to know that you changed addresses. And for you@ (or whatevertheheckyouwant@) yourdomain.com, Google simply becomes your email host.
You can pay Earthlink a few bucks month to keep the address, but that’s a sucky long-term idea.
Also, the Gmail interface is importantly fantastic. I sometimes switch over to it just to get certain things like automatic organization accomplished. And lemme tell ya, the spam filtering is outta sight. I don’t see spam anymore. One message a month or less, and I can always look in the spam folder in Apple Mail just to double-check I haven’t missed a real message.
One last thing: There was once the perception that a @yahoo.com (or the like) implies an inconstant personality. I can say definitively that, especially since Gmail, that is no longer the case. The service is recognized net-wide as legitimate and unique. I practically insist on my clients using Gmail, unless they are already on Yahoo. If they have any address other than Yahoo, including using their own domain, 7 out of 10 times we get them over to Gmail quick as we can, and they never look back.
