A few weeks ago, I purchased an Airport Express at the local Apple Store. I wanted the ability to print to my Epson R320 wirelessly from any Mac. The setup was incredibly easy as with most Apple products:
Connect the ethernet cable (from the wall) and the USB printer cable into the AirPort Express.
After that, load up AirPort Setup Assistant in Applications >Utilities.
Once the window shows up, click on continue.
Then click on Setup A New AirPort Base Station.
Make settings for your AirPort Express and that’s it.
To edit the settings later, open up the AirPort Admin Utility in Applications >Utilities.
The picture quality was very good considering that it’s wireless printing.
If you notice that your picture quality isn’t that good, then check the maker of the printer’s website for driverupdates.
Every night before I am about to go to bed, I usually connect my iPod to my speakers and enable my iPod to be an alarm clock. Well, sometimes I forget to charge my iPod when it’s battery is low, so then I can’t use it as an alarm clock anymore. Instead I use my Mac to wake myself up. The creative folks over at Metaquark have an app for the Mac called Aurora. Aurora enables you to chose a time, playlist, and volume, for your alarm clock. A very useful feature with Aurora, is that it will wake up your Mac even if it’s asleep. Another terrific feature in Aurora, is that it will play your alarm in Front Row. You can be well assured that you will be awaken with Aurora!
Whenever I am watching a DVD on my Mac, I like to skip through the previews and other commercials so I can spend more time watching the movie. With most fast-forwarding controls you get normal fast-forward and a superfast fast-forward. I noticed with DVD Player, you get 5 different types of speeds: 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, and 32x. To change the rate at which DVD Player will fast-forward:
Ever since Mac OS X has been out, there has been a consistent theme throughout each OS. In the Aqua interface you get the “brushed” metal look, shiny buttons, and those “horizontal lines”. After a year or so of using Mac OS X Tiger, you may get tired of the “brushed” metal look. Thankfully, there is a way to change this look and “unify” the interface. UNO will change your interface to UNO (looks like Mail’s interface), Shaded UNO, and the Default (Aqua). The nice feature is the ability to change which applications use UNO. For instance, you can set it up to make the “brushed” metal windows to look like the Shaded UNO texture. Another nice feature, is the ability to change the Application’s Skin. An example would be iTunes, with the new Aqua-grey interface, iTunes looks very different and somewhat inconsistent with the Mac OS X Aqua interface. UNO will enable you to revert iTunes back to the original Aqua-blue interface. That puts it all in a nutshell for you, now you just need to try it out.
Besides backing up my files, I figured it might also be important to maintain my Mac. When I searched for the best possible solution for maintaining Macs, I got many different answers. Some people said they only use Disk Utility to repair permissions. Others said they use applications like MainMenu and Yasu. I tried both of these apps and I liked MainMenu over Yasu for the ease of use. Still, I wasn’t sure that MainMenu was the best possible solution, so I kept looking. Then, I came across a miraculous utility called OnyX. It performs every possible maintenance task on your Mac. By using OnyX, I have increased the speed of my Mac, prevented a complete re-installation of Mac OS X Tiger, saved a trip from going to the Genius Bar, and saved a call to AppleCare. With OnyX you can: perform maintenance scripts, repair permissions, clear caches, rebuild Spotlight index, change your login screen, put the dock anywhere, change the screen capture format, edit the number of pages in Safari’s history, and a whole lot more. OnyX is an application that I can’t live without.
