Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Any advice on doing the same with audio cassettes? I have dozens of books on tape I'd like to move over to my old MacBook.
Given the vast number of books-on-tape sets sold in the last years of the 20th century, this is an excellent question. The audio quality of a cassette tape is far worse than that of a CD, but you don’t need pristine quality for an audiobook.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Oliver MacKenzie is tripping out over audiobooks. He writes:
For our daughter’s upcoming Spring Break we’re going on a long road trip. I have some audiobooks on CD that I’d like to listen to during the trip, but the car’s CD player is broken. Ideally I’d like to put the files on my iPod touch but they’re spread over several discs and I want to have just a single file. Any thoughts?
The first thing you’ll need to do is rip the tracks from the CDs. iTunes can help. Insert the CD and iTunes should automatically launch and display the disc's contents. Select all of the tracks and from the Options menu that appears at the top right of the window choose Join CD Tracks.
When you click and hold on an application’s dock icon, its dock menu pops up. It typically includes a list of the application’s recently opened documents (assuming it supports opening documents). I find these lists to be the most convenient way to quickly locate and open such files—preferring it to the Open Recent command in applications’ File menus. Except for one thing: the dock menu lists periodically get messed up. Most especially the lists often don’t update as you open new documents, leaving you with an out-of-date list. In contrast, file lists accessed via the Open Recent command are always correct.
I have been particularly bothered by this dock menu glitch with two of my most frequently used apps: OS X’s TextEdit and Preview. On the surface, the symptom seems quite odd. As I assumed that the two list locations drew from the same data, I figured they should always be in sync. The mystery is why this wasn’t so. I decided to investigate. Focusing on TextEdit as the example applications, here’s what I found.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
A reader who doesn’t wish to provide his name (for reasons that soon will become apparent) has a problem with office etiquette. He writes:
My company has a few different divisions and each division has its own group email list that includes everyone within that division. There’s also a company-wide address. The problem is that every so often we hire a new person or the company softball teams wins a game and these group addresses are used to send out strings of “Welcome” or “Woo-hoo!!!” messages and the endless replies from these things bombard my inbox. I find this really distracting. Any way to stop it?
I’m big on education as a means for short-circuiting problems like these. If you can find a way to politely inform the company’s employees that their email client has both Reply and Reply All buttons and (explain the difference between them and how annoying this kind of public backslapping can be), I’d consider that a good first step.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Dave Eng can’t seem to broadcast his mug over the Internet. He writes:
Every so often I use Skype for multi-participant video conferences and when I do, I use my FireWire DV camcorder rather than my Mac’s built-in camera. I launched Skype the other day and it immediately crashed when I switched on my camera. I restarted my Mac, reinstalled Skype, but the same thing happened every time. What’s going on?
The current version of Skype (at least as I write this) has a bug that causes it to explode (okay, without the fire, smoke, and noise) when you connect a FireWire camcorder to your Mac and switch it on. The folks at Skype are aware of the issue but the most recent updates haven’t fixed the problem.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Kenneth Walsh's Mac has gone strangely quiet. He writes:
I woke my MacBook Pro from sleep today and when I tried to play an iTunes track the Mac made no sound. I then noticed that the sound icon in the menu bar was gray. I went to the Sound system preference and it showed Digital Out in the output area and no listing for the Mac’s internal speakers. What the heck?
The background on the issue is that there’s a small sensor switch inside the headphone port. When you insert a headphone jack, the sensor understands what's what and changes the sound output setting to Headphones. If you insert a jack for digital audio output, the device changes to Digital Out. When you remove the jack completely, it should read Internal Speakers.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Matthew Rotter asks a common question about Apple’s Mail. He writes:
Can you send email to multiple email addresses listed under a single contact’s name?
Pardon me if I assume that what you really mean is whether it’s possible to easily add to an email messages multiple address from a single contact. And the answer is, not really. Regardless of the solution you settle on, it requires a bit of futzing. Now, let’s go over those solutions.
