UK Mac Wizards

Sometimes emails from Windows users contain an attachment called winmail.dat or win.dat which mail applications on the mac do not automatically decode. If you reply asking the sender what is in the attachment they will most often say that they’d not attached anything. This is because their Microsoft email application mostly uses the dat file to store formatting code for the email to make it look nice to other users of the same software. However it is also sometimes a wrapper for attachments the sender does intend you to be able to open.

Why Apple Mail does not automatically decode it I don’t know. The decoding software is open source. So, in the interests of harmony with Windows users, here is a link to what you need to decode the dat files, TNEF’s Enough:

For OS X 10.5 and above

For OS X 10.4

Thanks to Josh Jacob

Apple Macintosh Plus mouse

The Mac mouse has been the almost iconic sidekick to the Mac itself since day one. From the early days until now they have at least appeared to be one button only. Only recently I had a client who couldn’t get away from the mac dashboard whenever he clicked his mouse. It took a few second on the phone to twig that this user had just not fathomed how many buttons the Mac Mighty Mouse had under its skin. It has caused me embarrassment more than once as I grapple with an oddly configured ‘mighty’ mouse, making the screen do anything but what I expect. You can’t just change a user’s settings to suit yourself. So I always bring a nice simple wired mac mouse with me, so I know it won’t make me look silly when I click something.

The new Magic Mouse

But the new Magic Mouse promises to be something else altogether different. Utilising the same finger swiping multi-touch technology as the iPhone and the new MacBooks it promises to be ultimately responsive and configurable.

Multitouch mouse gestures

Somewhat like a trackball, but so much more intuitive. I want one. But I won’t be taking it with me as I make house calls as it is – like all wireless mice – going to be a problem when troubleshooting start-up issues.

And there are only a few other words of caution:

• It won’t work with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger or below. Even Leopard needs to be 10.5.8
• No Windows drivers yet, just right and left click
• No Exposé buttons on the side (a feature really, I think), no middle button

It costs £55 from the Apple Store.

The BBC recently highlighted UK Broadband “Notspots“, i.e. areas of the UK with little or no broadband access. Within a relatively small area the speed of possible broadband connection can vary enormously.

Please use this broadband speed test to see if you are in fact getting what you are paying for. We would like to show the best and the worst – and everything inbetween – so leave a record of your findings in the comments field below. Please let us know what your results are, where you are, and who your provider is. And to be fair, what broadband package you are paying for.

This test can also be used with Mobile Broadband. If you have a mobile contract and move around connecting from different places your imput here might help others to know whether they will really get advertised speeds in an area where it is important for them to have a good connection. Also, having found some of our clients have such truly awful landline broadband connections it would be helpful to know in fact whether they would fair better with a mobile contract.

If your result is disappointing, and below 2 Mb record it here and also at the community project run by thinkbroadband that is campaigning to increase broadband speeds in particularly poorly served areas.

A client’s Mac had a keyboard with an ’s’ key that had stopped working. But we knew it wasn’t the keyboard itself because we tried another one and the same key didn’t work. The client’s password contained the missing key, and it worked on the login screen. Also, ’s’ didn’t work ‘S’ did.

Look in the system preferences. There are a couple of settings that may cause this strange behaviour. The obvious place to look is the keyboard preferences. 
See if the missing key has somehow been assigned to a shortcut.

Keyboard & Mouse pref pane

Another preference pane is the Speech pane, and this is the one where our missing key was found. The client in this case had at some point thought it would be nice to boss the Mac around and had left the pane with the letter ’s’ where the Esc key is indicated in this screen grab.

Speech pref pane

Other panes that can adopt keys for shortcuts include Spotlight, International, and Universal Access.

I hope this helps someone get the use of their keyboard back.

To test your broadband speed please go to my speed testing page and record your results.

I’ve put up this page after coming across so many clients in the Oxfordshire/Berkshire areas with rubbish broadband speed. In particular, one client who has been with BT Business Broadband was getting a maximum of 0.5 Mb, while paying for 10 Mb for 3 years (paying quite a whack).

Other clients running PCs with anti-virus software find their computers slow down to a crawl as they download the latest anti-virus updates “in the background” at Windows start-up. Admittedly these are slow PCs by many standards, but a slow broadband connection neither helps such machines to perform any better, or encourages their owners to splash-out on anything better.

After you have tested your speed please record the result in the comments section of the page. If the result is really disappointing consider going to thinkbroadband’s broadband-notspot registration page as they campaign for better broadband.

Red=NotSpots
Blue=SlowSpots
Plain=good or no data

Helpful error message

Nasty error message that Apple deals with here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1998

Except that it seems to assume that there are 2 computers being synced and one of them is the more up-to-date. The problem I met with a client was that he had 2000+ contacts that showed up nicely on his iPhone, but none at all on his only Mac.

His iPhone was synced directly from MobileMe, but resetting his Mac’s contacts from the MobileMe copy had produced this error instead of rebuilding his contacts. I was concerned that any fiddling I did might wipe away his contacts on MobileMe with the automatic result that they are deleted from his iPhone too.

Fortunately, though it isn’t mentioned in the knowledge base article, it is possible to export contacts direct from MobileMe webmail to .vcf files. I say, “files” rather than “file” because in the case of over 2000 contacts it was better to break down the list into a few hundred with each export. Just select the contacts and use the cog icon.

After importing them back into Address Book the resetting of MobileMe can continue as per the knowledgebase article.

If YouTube has stopped working on your iPod Touch look to the Date and Time setting. If it is wrong videos might not show.

Up until I realised my son had been running his with the wrong date I was due to do a full restore to try to fix because it worked fine on my iPhone.

UPDATE: I have managed to successfully update my MacBook Nano to OS X Leopard 10.5.7! It really wasn’t worth the time/trouble. I don’t think my little upgrade traumas were the fault of this hackintosh install, though. Many people have reported problems with 10.5.7 – even seasoned Mac tech podcasters – so I should have thought twice before installing it. I will refrain from doing so with my production Mac.

I’m typing this post on a tiny netbook (Advent 4211-B) that thinks it is a MacBook Air. Leopard 10.5.6 is running very nicely in just 1 Gb of RAM, which I will upgrade soon to 2 Gb. I am thoroughly happy with this little beauty which runs OS X so much better than it did Windows XP.

Leopard was installed from an unmodified retail DVD. The installer was initially fooled into installing on the netbook using a bootable CD that prepared the install environment on the netbook for the Leopard DVD. The necessary bootloader was then installed later to the hard disk so normal booting could occur.

I decided upon this course of action with some reluctance. I am the first to recommend to PC owners to get a Mac as a remedy to the numerous ills they suffer daily as they struggle with whatever flavour of Windows they are running. (The PCs I see on callouts are often in need of some TLC as most of those that call me have no maintenance contract in place and have only called because things have got intolerable.) I might recommend they use Linux instead of Windows as an alternative to getting a Mac, as it would at least bypass the crippling vulnerabilities Windows suffers to every virus, spyware, malware, and adware going. But of course supporting Linux in its differing forms is beyond me, though I do mention it to some. However, Apple remains the first and only computer manufacturer that I enthuse about, and their operating system is still my OS of choice.

But I have begun to tire of the price point. The real MacBook Air, though beautiful, was a disappointment as a netbook mostly because of price. I am sure that Apple are unwilling to bring a simpler netbook to the market because the price of these devices is so low, and their build quality is certainly less than that of the various MacBooks. But what seems to be escaping them is the second computer market. I air my grievances about this elsewhere so won’t go over it again. Just to say that if Apple are really serious about not producing a cheap and cheerful netbook because it is beneath them, the least they could do is offer a considerable discount on a second machine – whether a MacBook for Me/wife or a Mini for the kids – so that no one has to even consider getting a cheap netbook running Windows.

I almost chickened out of installing OS X on my new netbook. Aside from my conscience about the legality of this installation, the wide variety of methods that have been developed to do this are both daunting and confusing. I was anxious that I might fail and have to deal with feelings of stupidity for having tried and failed. Worse, I might not know how to put Windows back again (came without installer)! As it happened it was all pretty simple once I had decided on which of the three main methods to use, and then ignored blogs/forums that talked about the others.

Using the “Retail Leopard Method” appealed because it meant I had to get a retail version of OS X Leopard – this salved my conscience a bit – rather than download a hacked version. Also it seems the method less likely to be broken by updates from Apple. I am now going to update to OS X 10.5.7, which will put this theory to the test.

My thanks to Cybergreg for making this install possible. Leopard is running on this little machine with ease, and everything I need is working well. I have yet to get the video cam to work and haven’t tested the external monitor port or the sound-in. For the latter I would use a USB headset anyway so don’t see any problem with getting Skype working.

Meanwhile I hope Apple come up with a sub £300-400 netbook/pad soon. Before someone finds a really simple install method that you don’t have to be a geek to use. And the cat is out the bag: OS X runs just dandy on cheap hardware, so no OS X Lite or iPhone OS Pro, please.

I gave GMX a fair trial. The webmail service is certainly easier to use than the google, yahoo or msn/hotmail webmail interfaces, being uncluttered by ads and clear and clean. In fact I would say it is better to look at and use than Apple’s MobileMe webmail.

But a few things cripple it and mean I can no longer use it myself or recommend it to others. It boils down to restrictive policies supposedly to prevent spam actually disrupting normal emailing behaviour.

1) When I used it as my own main account several clients had emails bounced back to them. Usually yahoo addresses triggered this. It turned out emails were being rejected by GMX servers because they had gone via too many third party servers between sender and GMX. Nothing the sender could do, and nothing I could do either. Not good losing hard earned leads like this.

2) Sending becomes disabled too quickly if GMX think you are sending too many emails and possibly spamming. Address your email to more than 10 recipients and this may also trigger this effect. If you use a desktop email client, the error message is cryptic:
“4.3.2 and see (http://portal.gmx.net/serverrules)” or similar:

gmx error

On the webmail interface the error message is in plain speech:

gmx webmail error

In this case my client was trying to announce his new email address to his colleagues and clients. He had sent four emails, one with eleven recipients, and the result was a suspension of service.

3) Looking at the screenshot above you may just see that he already has 99 spam emails. I had set up the account a couple of days before. So despite restrictive rules the new account attracted a lot of spam already. This makes the situation just laughable.

So, it leaves me needing to recommend a good free email service, but finding that my preferred candidate just sucks. Not sure what to champion next. Recommendations please!…

Usually this is a breeze if you know anything about networking and are careful with typing in your wireless key.

I did however think I was going a bit potty recently wirelessly networking three Macs and a PC to a BT HomeHub (BT HomeHub2 to be precise). Two of the Macs and the PC took to to the hub straight away, but the third – a G4 Cube running OS X 10.4 Tiger – kept coming up with an error after putting in the key. I tried every encryption permutation available; did it really mean WPA Personal or did it mean WPA2? Even trying to install using the BT CD-ROM, which I usually just put to one side, did not bring any joy – despite its initial enthusiasm on encountering the wireless signal from the hub. This made me realise that my fussing with the Apple networking dialog box had been in vain, because the BT installer ought to know the answer.

To the solution, then, for future reference:
Using one of the other computers that does work with the hub, navigate to the HomeHub’s own webpage (type in the router’s IP address into your browser) put in the admin password (it is on the hub itself) and find your way to its wireless settings. See where it says its signal is B/G/N and change it to B/G. And confirm.

I guess I might have been able to configure the Cube to use the N protocol. Though I doubt it having been inside this particular one I know its Airport card to be the B/G sort.

This may also help with PCs running Windows with a B/G only wireless card.