Firstname Surname <firstname@domain.com>

This is pretty annoying and to be honest it is hard to understand why Apple decided that this was a necessary change to the original Mail app behaviour. Fortunately there is a fix to restore the default behaviour. Fire up a Terminal window and copy and paste the command below to restore normality !

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO

This is a real benefit and means I can now maintain a single library on the network and a backup on a removable drive. Not sure as yet what the performance will be like and it may be that it is not really practical to use a shared network drive for this ( on 100Mb network anyway ). I will have a go and report back on my findings later, meanwhile if you had already spotted this and have tried it out I would be interested to hear how you got on.

This is a real benefit and means I can now maintain a single library on the network and a backup on a removable drive. Not sure as yet what the performance will be like and it may be that it is not really practical to use a shared network drive for this ( on 100Mb network anyway ). I will have a go and report back on my findings later, meanwhile if you had already spotted this and have tried it out I would be interested to hear how you got on.

A quick fix to make switchers feel more at home is to download Right Zoom from BlazingTools.com. This small utility changes the default behavior of the green button to mimic the Windows way of expanding the current window.

Tunatic allows you to do the same thing on your Mac. It is a free download which when run displays a small purple search badge indicating that it is ready to identify a song. By default it will use the in-built microphone on the Mac to record the playing music but this can be changed to the line-input through the application preferences if preferred. Clicking the Search icon will start Tunatic identification and it will record and upload any playing music to the Tunatic servers for identification. Normally within about 30 seconds the Tunatic window will change to display the track name and artist. Recognition in my experience was very good with it only failing to recognize a few more obscure tracks.

A fun application that is both impressive and on occasion very useful.

One developer, Paul Battley from London, has come up with a neat solution to this problem though. When the BBC launched the iPlayer for iPhone site they had to provide a way of displaying videos on a device that did not have Adobes Flash Player, and so re-encoded the videos into MP4 files for display on the Jesus Phone. Paul used this site to create a small Ruby script that allows you to download the iPod playable videos and save them to your computer.

To use the script you first download and extract the tarball, then run two commands to install the libraries and command line script

ruby setup.rb config
sudo ruby setup.rb install

Once you have done this a script called iplayer-dl will be created in the bin directory. To run this you just enter the command :-

ruby iplayer-dl programcode

Where programcode is the last portion of the URL of the program you wish to download. To find this code go to the BBC iPlayer site and click on the program you wish to download. The url will be something like :-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dyhs1/Jack_A_Soldiers_Story/

The programcode you require in the example above is the portion b00dyhs1. Once you have entered the command line the script will go away and download the file and by default save it in the same directory as the script. There are a number of commandline options you can use to download multiple files, specify the destination filename and directory and more. To find out more about the options available type :-

ruby iplayer-dl -help

The downloaded files are un-DRM’d and can be played and stored indefinately, which at the end of the day is what the Beeb should have allowed us ( BBC Licence payers ) to do in the first place. After all if I wanted to I could record the program onto my video/DVD recorder and keep that forever couldn’t I ?

Enjoy.

You can use dry for removing settled dust particles but if you have got any other sorts of marks on the screen you will need to VERY lightly dampen with clean water ( a few drops will do, the cloth should not get wet ). Gently buff the area with the damp part of the cloth being careful not to press too hard ( newer iMac owners with glass screens don’t have to worry so much about pressure but I do still recommend the same approach otherwise ).

Once you have cleaned the area change to a dry part of the cloth and light buff again. Any streaks caused by the water will clean entirely and you will be left with a screen that looks as good as new !