Disable the Caps Lock Key

Did you ever have a problem entering a password, then find your CapsLock key was on?

How about a problem because you accidentally hit ‘caps lock’ instead of ‘a’ or ‘shift’ and now you’re accidentally SHOUTING? Do you ever intentionally use the Caps Lock? No? You probably use the ‘shift’ key, like most people.

I used to accidentally hit that pesky Caps Lock key frequently… until I disabled it! Here is how you can too.

How To Disable that pesky Caps Lock key in Mac OS X Leopard

(you know you don’t need it!)

Go into System Preferences,
-> Keyboard & Mouse,

-> and push the button for “Modifier Keys…”

Then choose “No Action” for the Caps Lock Key.
And OK.

Ok, all set. Now there is one less problem in your world! 

Email In Box Management

If you get a lot of “list mail” or “eGroup” mail, and it’s cluttering up your email InBox, you might like to know how to have those group emails sort themselves into a folder so you can look at them when you’re ready, after reading the jokes & virus warnings your friends and family send you. Here’s how for Apple Mail, other email programs are similar.

How to Automatically file your eGroup email messages with Apple Mail

If you are a member of one or more eGroups, or “mailing lists”, you may have wished that your email “InBox” wouldn’t get so clogged up with these group messages. You may wish to not see them right now, or wish to see them all together later. Some people are organized enough that they make a new folder in their email application and drag the group emails into it to keep things organized. That’s a great idea, but it takes time and life would be simpler if this was automatic. Here’s how to do it in Apple Mail for OSX 10.3, but other versions are pretty much the same.

This is what our “InBox” looks like before we get started. Note that the Group messages are mixed in with the other inbox mail.

In Apple Mail, what we are going to do is called making a “Mail Rule“, it may be called something else in other programs. But first, let’s make a folder to store our eGroup mails.

Pull the File menu to “New“, then to “Folder“.
Or press command shift n
Or command click (right click) the mouse in the folders area.

Give the folder a descriptive name. The eGroup name is probably a good choice.

Pull the “Mail” menu to “Preferences, then Click “Rules” in the toolbar, then click “Add Rule”

In the Rules Window, click the button for “Add Rule”.
Give the Rule a good name, and set it for “Any recipient” contains the group email address to perform the Action of “move message” to the mailbox (or folder, actually) that we want to keep the group messages in.

Ok, so if we got everything right, all future eGroup messages with a “To” address that matches our criteria ought to be automatically filed in the right folder.
But what about all the messages that are already cluttering our email InBox? Let’s get those old Group messages into the Group folder right now as well.
Click into the “In Box” and select all messages. You may need to click one message, then choose “Select All” from the Edit menu.
Then, Pull the Message Menu to “Apply Rules“.

Pow! All the Group messages are now in their own folder. From now on, they will jump in there themselves.
Notice that when you have new, unread mail in a folder, the folder is BOLD, so you can easily tell without even having to open it.

Hope this helps,

Dave Nathanson

Receiving Faxes with your computer – the easy way

Yes it is possible to send & receive faxes through the computer. There are several ways to do it. One is even built in to Mac OS X. Of course, to send a regular fax requires a phone line connected to the computer. Until recently all Macs had a built in modem port.

For sending a fax; basically anything you can print, you can fax. The sending fax machine can show up as if it was a printer. This usually looks a lot better than a regular fax machine too. It turns out the the crappy fax quality is not to fax printer, but the fax scanner.

When I send faxes, I usually use a 3rd party program because I like it better, and I was sending a lot of faxes way back then, so the $40 was worth it at the time. That software is “Page Sender” from smileonmymac.com

Another more expensive, but networkable software is 4-Sight Fax. It works pretty well if the modem supports all the necessary stuff. The Zoom USB modems do.

For receiving, I don’t use my own computer. Just like with a regular fax machine. too many things can go wrong, and I don’t have a dedicated fax line here at the home office. I do have an eFax account which includes my own dedicated free fax number. They offer a free 30 day trial, so you can check it out for free.

Anyway, when anybody sends me a fax to my fax number, EFax receives it for me, then emails it to me as an attachment. That works pretty well. I can use either their eFax Messenger, or GraphiConverter to open those. No problem.

I still keep a stand-alone fax machine around, although I don’t use it much. It can come in handy if I need to fax a piece of paper, rather than fax something I can print.

When I am sending a fax, I do it as a “print to fax” where the fax software shows up as if it was a real printer. And it wort of is, if you think of it as a real printer that is far away.

That’s how I do it, there are other ways too. Here’s a button to push for your FREE FAX TRIAL. If you are interested in an easy way to receive (& send) faxes, give it a try.

How To Combine PDFs on Mac

If you have two or more different documents that you’d like to combine inbto a single PDF, that’s not unreasonable. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be difficult. There are several easy ways to combine several separate PDFs into a single file.

1) If you have Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.x) use “Preview“. Easy and included in Leopard. It’s easy to view the document’s pages in the sidebar, then drag pages from one PDF to the other.

1b) Upgrade to Leopard OSX 10.5 which also includes a lot of new features.

1c) Upgrade to Leopard and get new iLife! The whole Box Set includes latest versions of iLife, Mac OS X Leopard, and iWork. This is a real deal!

2) Acrobat Pro – expensive & mostly unnecessary features. I’m not recommending for this usage.

3) CombinePDFs from
http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml
Has a free trial for up to 1000 pages of PDFs, then $30.

4) PDF Pen. In addition to combining/splitting, pdfs, PDF Pen also lets you type, draw, & paste directly into any PDF. $49 from
http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/index.html
I’ve used PDF Pen for years, mostly just to type and fill in PDF forms. It’s a lot more stable now – I no longer cringe when showing it to a client or friend.

5) PDF Lab – I have not tried it, but some people like it, and it is free.
http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/products/pleng/pleng.html

6) Combine PDFs – I have not tried this, but it’s $14 and there is a free trial.
http://gotoes.org/sales/Join_Combine_PDF/

7) PDF Merge – Free ($5 donation requested). Note that newest version requires Leopard, so  you might need the older version 1.01.
http://www.malcom-mac.com/blog/pdfmergex/

My favorites?
1st) I would give those free ones a try.
2nd) PDF Pen – also great for typing, drawing & pasting onto a PDF.
3rd) The Leopard or Leopard box set with new iLife will add value (& fun!) as well as solve this issue.

How to upload Photos to Gallery from iPhoto

Mac users can upload photos to the photo Gallery directly from iPhoto.

Note: if you are a SBAMUG member, please substitute SBAMUG.com instead of RoughWheelers.com – and this How-To will work for you too.

REGISTER

If you haven’t made an account for yourself already here’s how;
Go to the RW photo Gallery.
http://www.roughwheelers.com/pix/main.php
and click on “Register” at the top right corner. This is free and only for RoughWheelers members & friends.

For UserName & FullName please put your Handle or nickname. We do NOT need your real name! (We already know who you are).
Choose a good password, enter your email, and you’re all set.

Download & Install the iPhoto plug-in

The other one-time thing you need to do is download the free iPhoto to Gallery plug-in for iPhoto. Download from zwily
Then just double click the installer to install.

Upload photos from iPhoto

Select your photos, and/or make an album of them.
Choose “Export” from “File” menu (or “Share” menu)

Click the “Gallery” tab. And click “Add Gallery” from that menu.

Your Gallery URL is

http://Roughwheelers.com/pix/v/YOUR-USERNAME

(substitute your own username, of course!)

Choose what album you want to add to, and/or Create a new album. It’s perfectly OK to create a new album inside another album – for organization. For example, you might make an album for a Vacation, and them create an album inside for each place/family you visit. Or something like that. Albums are like folders and you can put other albums inside of them.

Export titles & comments if you want to. Actually that is a great feature, I just type my comments for each photo into my iPhoto, then they show up on my Gallery with captions!

To upload faster; choose to scale your photos no larger than 1024×1024. That’s the max size that this photo gallery is allowed to display anyway. Click Export and let it rip!

Ok, that’s it! Check your new web photo gallery & see how it looks!

Share

To share with friends, just tell them the URL (substitute your own username, of course!). That’s all they need to know:

http://Roughwheelers.com/gallery/v/YOUR-USERNAME

Hope this helps,
Dave

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