The Switch To Mac

iPhone 4 Signal Loss

When the iPhone 4′s reception problem (dropped calls) first turned up, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs shrugged it off as a minor problem. Jobs said it was a problem with the signal bars appearing on the phone. The iPhone’s operating system (iOS) has a problem in that it is showing more bars than are available. Apple distributed a fix for the iOS 4 to address the incorrect number of bars.  However, this fix did not
Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction To IBD Newspaper
If you have an Investors Business Daily (IBD) subscription, you probably have used the IBD daily charts. If you are unfamiliar with IBD, it is a financial newspaper that provides investors with price and volume information on stocks, bonds, options, commodities, etc. as well as reporting on various business topics going on in the market place.

IBD Stock Charts
As a subscriber, one of the benefits of Investors.com is being able to view IBD daily and weekly charts. These are graphical charts that give you up-to-date stock information. A typical presentation is the candlestick chart that gives you a high price, a low price and a closing price per day or per week depending on the chart that you are viewing.  Investors.com was built mainly on the Microsoft platform. And as a result, the IBD daily and IBD weekly charts use Microsoft ActiveX controls to display those charts and until recently only Internet Explorer  has been  the only supported browser.  Other browsers such as Firefox and Safari do not normally support the ActiveX controls and hence do not work.

Firefox Can Display IBD Stock Charts
As an IBD subscriber myself,  I was delighted to see that Firefox now works with IBD charts as long as you install Microsoft (MS) Silverlight v40. So what is this? Silverlight is a .Net platform plugin that works with other browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and a few others.  Read the rest of this entry »

Backup Your System Before Applying Update

Be sure to back up your system before applying any new updates. You can use Time Machine to do so. As you know,
if there are any problems with the update, you can revert to the backup.

General Rule of Thumb
Every Mac does not have the same number of upgrade versions applied to it. In general if you are going to apply this
upgrade, you should already be at Mac OS X v10.6.3. If not, when you click on the Apple icon, then on software update…
you may get other updates that Apple suggests you install. If you do, install these first before you install the v10.6.4 update.
The previous updates have to exist before the v10.6.4 update can be applied.  Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been on holiday for the past two weeks, but now I’m back.

iPhone Dropping Calls
There have been lots of buzz on the net about iPhone 4 — the hype, the anticipation, the delivery and the problem — dropped calls. At first blush, it looked like a problem with the hardware of the iPhone 4. But as users have reported in at the Apple Support site, the root of the problem is still not completely clear. It seems to be a combination of the iPhone 4 hardware and the iOS 4. If you palm the lower left corner of the iPhone 4, it ‘shorts’ out the antenna and your call becomes dropped.  Read the rest of this entry »

From the WWDC
Steve Jobs introduced the new iPhone OS 4 at the WWDC, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference
on Monday, June 7, 2010. In a few words, the new iPhone is prettier, slimmer and faster.
What more could you ask for? Read the rest of this entry »

What do I mean by mad? Mad in the sense of crazy over the iPad. iPad fever has now hit areas outside the USA.

According to the Associated Press (AP) and Investors Business Daily (IBD), Apple started selling the iPad in Europe and Asia last Friday (5/28/2010). IBD reported long lines in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Tokyo.
In addition, the iPad was introduced in Australia, Canada, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. It will
arrive in Hong Kong in June, but no date has been set for China as yet. The AP reported that Apple has now
sold 2 million units; 1 million was sold 28 days after its debut in the USA. The iPad will be available
in nine more countries beginning in July and more countries later this year.

Why Do I Need To Know My IP Address?
If you’re doing home networking, you may need to know your IP address. For e.g.
if you want to exchange files between your Mac and windows PCs, you will need to
know your Mac IP address. It’s good to know the command to find out your
IP address. This post is about using the ifconfig Terminal command.
If you are familiar with the windows command ipconfig, the Terminal ifconfig is very similar. Read the rest of this entry »

SAVE A FILE TO A SPECIFIC DIRECTORY – THE EASY WAY

If you create a document say in Textedit and then save it. It’s usually straight-forward to save it. You click on File – Save As – type in the filename then save the file. But did you ever notice that the default in the Save As Dialog box is to *not* show you the directory structure? The Mac OS X assumes you’re going to save it on one of your main directories listed in Finder. If you want to save to a specific directory, you’ll have to tweak something to show you the Finder directories. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunt And Kill A Process

Have you ever run an application for a while and then it just freezes?  So then you try to end the process. You try to do a Command-Q; it doesn’t work. Then you try clicking on the application-name on the menu bar to do a  “Quit <application name>”; it doesn’t work. Last you try doing a control-click or right-click on the application’s icon in the dock and then clicking on Quit only to find this
doesn’t work either. At this point you know you have a hung process — an application just sitting
there in limbo not responding to any of your prompts. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple Will Not Flash Anytime Soon

If you’ve been catching any Apple news lately, you probably heard the commotion over Apple not wanting anything to do with Adobe Flash on their mobile products, iPhone, iPad, or iTouch. Why? What’s the big deal? Are these just unfounded stabs at Adobe? Read the rest of this entry »