Author: tvalleau

iPod/iPhone apps won’t connect to main Mac?

Here’s my setup: cable modem goes to standalone firewall, which goes to gigabit switch. Plugged into the switch are my wifi unit, as an access point, and my main mac. My wifi iPod has a static IP address. iPod works just fine to access the internet and news sites, etc. Now, there are also a […]

my iPad take

Simple: game changer, if the software arrives.

How TimeMachine works in simple terms, and why you should NEVER….

How TimeMachine works in simple terms, and why you should NEVER….go into it and start deleting files!!! Someone just asked me “how do I delete files from my TimeMachine drive to make more room?” The answer is, you don’t. YOU don’t do anything – TM does it. The issue is that if you go willy-nilly […]

TechTool Pro and how I reclaimed 64 gigs of drive space

Well, I discovered 64 gigs of worthless information on my hard drive today… and I’m passing the discovery along just in case it applies to you. Re: TechTool Pro Directory Backup – it hangs around forever. TechTool Pro offers any number of features, one of which is Directory Backup. It uses this to help recover […]

Magnify your Mac screen

For some people with eyesight problems the menus and other User Interface (UI) presentation is too small to see in comfort. Apple’s “public” solution to this is via the System Prefs, Universal Access and Zoom. But that isn’t very appealing, since it just enlarges all the pixels, making everything blocky. They have had a far […]

“Open With” in Snow Leopard

If you’ve updated to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) then you’ve likely noticed that the binding between documents and the applications that created them is frequently broken. That is, create a document in BBEdit and save it to the desktop. Now double-click that document. It may open in Safari, in Textedit, in Word, or, if you’re lucky […]

resolution, part 4

Part 4, and we’ll begin with Mark’s question. Mark profoundly confuses physical print size with image size. (Which is likely why he asked me to start this missive in the first place…) As pointed out in Part 3 of this Encyclopedic treatise, a graphic image has a fixed size, say 3000 x 4000. The size […]

resolution, part 3

Bruce asked some questions (below) that can easily be answered now, and not really as a detour, either. (The answer to part two of his question, about paper, will come separately.) But, as to how the eye/brain reacts to dpi/ppi… First Dots per Inch is strictly a printing term, and should not be (but often […]

resolution, part 2

OK… continuing (this too will have to be modest, as I’ve just discovered an issue with one of my websites that needs fixing today.) If you were really paying attention last night, you might see something wrong with the definition I signed off with: Meanwhile, here’s a definition: A pixel is a picture element; the […]

resolution, part 1

(This is a four-part series on picture/image, screen, and printer resolution and how they all work together, with the hopes that it will clear up Dots Per Inch (dpi), Pixels Per inch (ppi) and why things look different on your computer monitor than they do when you print them out. Taken from a list I’m […]