The Switch To Mac

Print from a Mac to a Shared Vista Printer

Printing is such a common everyday chore that you really don’t even think about it. You click on File – Print and you’re off. If you use a PC and have a printer attached, printing is easy. On the same token, if you connect a printer to your Mac, you don’t even have to think about it. What if you want the best of both worlds? Let’s say you have a Macbook and you carry it wherever you go. You should be able to just print to existing printers whether at home or at the office. Just connect to the network and you’re done. The office probably won’t be an issue especially if all the printers are already themselves network nodes on the LAN. Macs can find them without a problem. But when you try to print from a Mac to a shared vista printer problems can arise because the printer itself is not networked; the PC is. After spending a few days of trying to figure this whole mess out, I finally got it to work. The strange thing I found is neither Apple nor Microsoft has any easy-to-find instructions on how to print on the ‘other side’. I’m not surprised, just disappointed that nothing is readily available from either side on how to do this. So I put together a procedure that shows you how to set up a shared vista printer to be able to print from a Mac. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the investors.com tech support, they solved the problem of the truncated IBD stock chart. Please
refer to my other post about the IBD stock chart having an issue at firefox and silverlight anomaly
I’m happy to report that Firefox v3.6.8 and Silverlight v4.0 are compatible. Here is a snapshot of my corrected stock chart. It shows the complete right side
of the chart as it should be.

The solution was simple: Once the IBD stock chart is up you have to zoom away from it. Click on View – Zoom – Zoom (minus) until the right side of the
chart appears properly. A shortcut is using the Command + (minus) keys. Voila! Back to normal.

Again I thank the tech support team at Investors.com for helping me with this one. I’m glad it wasn’t a long drawn out solution. By the way, it may seem that
the problem was solved in the same day which would be really fast. But I actually reported this to investors.com a few days ago and they reported back today.
It just so happened that I posted the problem and solution today. So it seemed like it was solved in a matter of hours, but it actually took longer.

I am reaching out to you my readers to see if maybe you have an answer to my problem below.

I have been using Firefox to display IBD stock charts for about a month or so now. So far the charts were appearing fine . . .  until I updated Firefox.

Here’s the problem:  When I display an IBD stock chart from the investors.com website, it gets truncated only on the right side for about 15-20 pixels. It’s almost like someone took a pair of scissors and cut off the right edge of the chart. Here is a screenshot of what the chart looks like now:

The stock volume should appear completely on the far right of the chart.

What is strange is it was working fine last month (July). What I know is I have updated Firefox twice since then. Most likely Firefox is the culprit. To render this chart requires Silverlight 4.0. My version of this plugin did not change since last month.

To my readers who are also subscribers to investors.com: Are you experiencing the same problem?  Or is just me?

By the way, I have a workaround. The problem does not happen with Safari 5.0. I am using the same Silverlight v4.0 plugin and Safari renders the stock chart fine:

It looks like something has definitely changed within Firefox. When the chart was working, I was using Firefox v3.6.6.  Firefox has recently distributed two security updates: v3.6.7 and v3.6.8. I currently have v3.6.8 installed.

If anyone happens to know if there are any Firefox options I can change, it would be appreciated.   Just reply to this post.

Hard Drive Space Getting Low?
So you’ve been using your Mac for a while now since
you got it about a year-and-a-half, maybe two years, maybe longer?
How’s your disk space looking? Yes, I’m talking about you’re hard drive a/k/a your
hard disk or local drive. My Mac started with 320GB. Over time when you
add in programs, data, “free” downloads, trial software, etc. etc. They all add up.
You may be left with 10% or less disk space. That’s what happened to me. Read the rest of this entry »

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.