MacTricksAndTips.com

The title of this post doesn’t described everything I plan on doing within this post. I am going to show you how you can backup your disk images a disk image from Disk Utilities, then with this disk image migrate it over to a new computer. I effect your are transferring user accounts to a new computer and creating a back up. I have used to to back up disk images of people’s old Mac’s and then used this disk image to transfer there accounts onto a new computer. It has the added bonus of allowing you to use it on many new computers. So if you have a fleet of new Mac’s you can transfer the same user account and files onto the new Mac’s.

This is a quick Terminal trick that I think is quite useful, especially if you are into stocks and shares and want to know the latest price of your portfolio. This tip is going to show you how you can pull a stock/share quote into Terminal. I’ll then go a bit further and show you how you can put the price in a form that is easily read for use in GeekTool or something similar.

A couple of days ago I wrote a post on how to make a PDF file from anything, some one asked the question how do you save multiple images as one PDF. There may be many reasons for adding images into a simple PDF, it is generally useful for email purposes. This post has actually taken me a while to find the best solution. My original solution involved me making an original PDF file and then adding pages into the PDF file and then adding the images. However with a bit (of rather obvious) looking i’ve found a simple way to do it.

I was having a play around with Time Machine and Mail and I was wondering if there was any specific way to archive specific months of email. I know Time Machine backs up every single email address, however Time Machine isn’t that useful if you want to transfer or store these email addresses in another location. So I came up with this rather simple method, it takes a little bit of work, but by using smart folders you can actively back up and archive specific months of email.

Every so often I have PDF files, or have created a PDF file, and it needs slimming down a bit. For a long while I had no idea how to do this and would, for the most part, be stuck with a large PDF file that was always difficult to transfer. After a little digging into Preview I stumbled across two options which allow you to shrink the size of a PDF. Most of the time these two methods may not produce useful result, they may be as tiny as possible. However if you have used a program which isn’t designed for PDF (Word for some reason springs to mind) this trick might be useful. There are two options which you can use, both offer different results.

This trick I randomly came across while playing around with keyboard short cuts in Finder. If anybody has more than one input language with their keyboard, for example a Dvorak keyboard set up and a ‘normal’ keyboard set up, it can be quite useful to switch between the two inputs easily. I normally do this via the little drop down menu present in my menu bar, however there is a short cut which has some cool effects. In this post I am going to show you how this keyboard short cut works, how you can turn off the short cut for changing your input keyboard selection, and how to change it. This post is a small mash up of some small things, some of which may be new, some of which may be the solution to an existing problem of yours, which you may not know how to solve.

With a variety of formats for practically everything imaginable, we will at some point get a clash where one newer format will not work with an older app. In Microsoft’s infinite wisdom they have decided to release a docx format super seeding and as a result not making it work on the old but widely used version of word. Since I am a student, as a result broke, I can’t afford to upgrade to the latest version. I only use it for writing reports and reading files people send me. I then went out on a web hunt for an app or web website that could convert my files from docx to doc format. There is many out there, with some that need a payment of some kind, I eventually found a good app. It’s on the Windows site of all places, and can convert docx, pptx and xlsx files.

I had this little problem happening over the last couple of weeks (as I began to notice it), I initially thought it was due to me installing Snow Leopard, however with a bit of research its seems the problem is far more widespread. In a perfect world you Mac should, when you restart, have the same volume as when you log off and do the restart. This is not the case, I personally have a muted volume when I log on, although it could take any value in between. The solution to this problem is simple however you can easily overlook the problem.