Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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.
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Reader David d’Angelo has a camcorder and Mac, but can’t make a desired connection between the two. He writes:
I read your recent article about Skype and a crashing camcorder and it reminded me of a problem that’s frustrated me for awhile. Like that reader, I have a FireWire DV camcorder that works great with some video applications, but I can’t make it work with Google Hangout. Any ideas?
After reading your question I gave the setup a try with my Sony DV camcorder, and you’re right. Google Hangout tells me that no such camera is connected even though Skype and Messages sees it. Given that, I’ll lay the blame at the feet of the plug-in necessary to use video in a Google Hangout.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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 Walt Czeka’s iPad has suddenly turned a blind eye to his local network. He writes:
After using my iPad for a short time this morning it suddenly wouldn’t recognize my AirPort network, even after I switched it off and on. I picked up my iPhone and it sees the network perfectly well so I don’t think it’s a network problem. What should I do?
There are a variety of things you can try and they work with any router. The first (and the one most likely to meet with success) is to shut off your iPad, pull the power plug on your AirPort base station to power it down, wait half a minute or so, plug the base station back in, wait for its green light to shine, and then switch on the iPad. This can clear out some funk in the routing portion of the base station, which allows your iPad’s network connection to return.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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
Macworld forum visitor Suenaga reacts to a recent entry regarding ripping audiobook CDs for playback on an iOS device with a question:
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.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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.
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Ted Landau Senior Contributor, Macworld
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.
Locating the Recent Items “database”
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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.
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