Apple Universe with Daniel Brusilovsky

Tuesday, Jun 05, 2007

Apple Universe Episode #14 Part 1- LIVE at Aragon High School

(207 downloads)

Download this episode (16 min)
As an Apple blogger I have seen my fair share of rumors, it is my job to read and report about them after all, though I must admit that I am tired of them. The endless rumormongering is getting a little old, and a little ridiculous. That's why I enjoyed this list of the 10 Biggest Apple Rumors that never came true over at the Apple Blog. All your favorites are there:

* Disney to buy Apple (any day now!)
* Tablet Mac (not going to happen any time soon)
* Apple PDA (the iPhone will have to do)

The list goes on to list seven more perennial favorites on the rumor mill. Let us know your favorite Apple rumor in the comments, and tell us if you enjoy reading these rumors or not. We'd really like to know. Have you heard of Macitt? It is a Digg-like site that concentrates on Apple news only, none of that wacky Linux stuff or distasteful Windows tips to clutter up the site. Our friends at Macitt let us know that they are giving away a MacBook this month, and all you have to do is participate on the site. 3 stories, 3 comments, and 3 Macitts is your formula for getting a new MacBook (or at least being entered into the contest). The contest ends June 30th, so get Macitting while the getting is good.

Don't forget that TUAW is a great source for submissions to a variety of social news sites. I'm just saying. It is an interesting time to be a Mac user. More and more folks are seeing the light and picking up a Mac, perhaps to go with their iPods, and now you can even run Windows on a Mac. Boot Camp is great, but Boot Camp plus AppleScript plus Quicksilver is even better! This tutorial over at MacInstruct (love the logo by the way) shows you how to reboot your Mac into Windows using the awesomeness that is Quicksilver. I thought it only appropriate to feature the MLB Schedule widget. This widget gives you an at a glance look at your favorite team's schedule with a 5 day period. If the game has already played it shows you the score, otherwise you get the start time, the opponent, the location, and who is pitching.

MLB Schedule is a free download (and remember if you like to follow more than one ball club you can run multiple versions of the widget). This news may not excite too many folks out there, but I imagine one or two of you are interested in using a PowerMac or Mac Pro as a server. Doing that correctly means you need at least 2 ethernet ports but sometimes even that isn't enough. Luckily for our server wanting friends Small Tree Communications has just released their Single Port Copper Gigabit Ethernet Desktop Card for PCI Express Power Macs and the Mac Pro. This $99 PCI express card adds a single 10/100/1000 baseT ethernet port to your Power Mac or Mac Pro. Not too shabby. Not long ago Fortune let us know that Apple was the 6th most desirable place for MBAs to work. It would seem that undergrads have the same good taste that their graduate level brethren have. Universum conducted a poll asking undergraduates where they wanted to work after graduation and our favorite computer/electronics company came in at number 3.

Other companies on the top 25 include Google, Disney, and the Peace Corps. Have you ever opened up a Finder window in column view and found yourself confronted with truncated file names? It's quite annoying. Here's a quick fix.

At the bottom of the column, you'll see two short, vertical "pipes" (pictured above). Double click the pipes, and the window will instantly expand to accommodate the longest file name in the window. Hooray!

This is another one of those “secret, buried-in-a-vault” killer tips that addresses something Mac OS X users have complained about: The file sizes of PDFs that Mac OS X creates are sometimes too big (vs. Adobe’s Acrobat PDFs). believe it or not, there’s a way to get smaller PDFs. Here’s how: launch TextEdit, then choose Print from the File menu. From the PDF pop-up menu in the bottom-left corner of the dialog, choose Compress PDF. That’s it. It’ll compress the PDF and call it a day.

However, if you’re charging by the hour, and let’s pretend you are, you have a wonderful time-consuming option: Choose Print from the File menu, and from the second Presets pop-up menu choose ColorSync. From the Quartz Filter menu that appears, choose Add Filters. Click on the three-oval icon in the top-left corner of the dialog that appears, click on the filter named Reduce File Size, and then click-and-hold on the arrow button to the right of the filter and choose Duplicate Filter. This creates an unlocked filter you can edit.

Now click on the triangle to the left of the duplicate filter to show its options; this is where you choose what you want. I recommend clicking on the arrow to the left of Image Compression and dragging the magic slider that lets you control the amount of JPEG compression your PDF images receive. For smaller file sizes, drag the Quality Slider toward Minimum. Now go back to TextEdit and in the Print dialog, choose Colorsync from the second Presets pop-up menu, choose your new filter from the Quartz Filter pop-up menu and click Print. Apple Inc. is looking to patent a design for a handheld device (or iPod) that displays its output on a small front-side display screen but receives input through a larger touch- and force-sensitive back-side interface, I have discovered. Apple Inc. may be faced with an uphill battle in its patent litigation with Burst.com after the courts issued a Markman Claim Construction Memorandum that largely sided with its opponent.