Tech on Tour

Adding the Date to the Menubar in Mac OS X 10.4

chevvy — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 07:30:04 +0000

Would you like to see the date on your menubar along with the time?

Well this is how to do it…

Go to…
System Preferences
Date & Time
Open International (towards the bottom)
Choose Formats (middle option)
Go to Customise Dates
Choose how you want the date to look - like July 29 or Jul 29
Select all (CMD+A) and then copy (CMD+C), hit Ok
Choose Customise next to Times
Choose Medium format (this is the one OS X uses to display the clock in the menubar)
Paste (CMD+V) the date in next to the Time and click OK

You may have an additional Day of the week in the menubar - so it may read Mon, Mon - this is another setting… to change this go
System Preferences
Date & Time
untick “Show the day of the week”

Mozy - Free Online Backup Service

chevvy — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 07:24:59 +0000

Here is a great website offering a free 2GB online service totally free
Backup 2GB of files for free and always have a copy away from your laptop and always receoverable!

https://mozy.com/home

Alternatively pay $4.95 per month for an unlimited backup service!

Its very quick and easy to setup and works on Mac and Windows.

The Best EQ Setting on the iPod for Country Music

Bill Hutchison — Sat, 30 May 2009 02:46:22 +0000

Using the default headphones that came with my iPod Touch 2G I did not really notice mich of a difference between the Music EQ settings. My left headphone stopped working recently though so I picked up a much better pair of headphones, and now I notice a difference.

Most of my music on my iPod is Country Music. Unfortunately there is no default setting on the iPod Touch for country music, so I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with the EQ to find the best setting.

Country Music comes in many different flavours from traditional country, to rocking country to country pop. Depending on what style of country music you subscribe to will affect your choice of EQ setting. Most of music leans toward traditional country music and I found that the best EQ setting for me was accoustic.

Usually I find the best setting for country music to be rock, it was the case on my last MP3 player, an iRiver, but that setting on my iPod Touch was too muffled for my liking.

Your own preference may vary, but try the accoustic setting and see how you go, then let us know your own results below in the comments. I’m curious to know if my results are typical or not.

How to reset a Sony Ericsson

dansnell — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:22:52 +0000

My Sony Ericsson K660i crashed on me the other day. For some reason it was freezing on start up. Due to this it also meant I was unable to get through the menu to the Master Reset. Unfortunately there is also no key combination or hidden button that might perform this task. This seemed like the only option to resurrect my phone. So I was a bit stuck in how to get it working again. After a phone call to Sony Ericsson I was presented with an option. By connecting the phone to a PC and running the Update Service (it can be found in the support section of Sony Ericssons web-site) I was able to reinstall the software. Even though there was no actual update for my phone I was able to reinstall the current phone settings. The major downside to this is everything gets wiped so all contacts, apps, images stored on the phone are removed. So make sure you keep a backup of these things in case of a crash like this. I would imagine this will also work with other Sony Ericsson phones where you are unable to get to the menu.

Post Your Facebook Status to Twitter

Bill Hutchison — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:17:32 +0000

There are some great tools out there that let you post your twitter updates to Facebook. But, some people want to go the other way and post their Facebook Status to Twitter.

Here is one way that you can do that quite easily:

Get the address for your Facebook Status RSS feed. To do that you can click on this link, http://www.new.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11, when you are logged into Facebook. Then scroll down the page and on the right side you will see “Subscribe to these Stories” with a link to “My Status” under it. Right click on “My Status” and copy the URL or Link. (UPDATE May 3, 2009) Facebook changed things on us, so check out here to find out how to get your RSS feed from your Facebook Updates. Then come back here to follow the rest of the tutorial.
Go to www.twitterfeed.com and set-up an account there.
Once you have set-up an account click on “go to my twitter feeds (or create a new one)
Click on “Create new feed”
Fill out your relevant Twitter account details and then paste the URL that you copied above into the “RSS Feed URL:” box.
Select the update frequency (depends on how much you update Facebook.
In the “Include” select the option “title only” and remove the check mark next to “Include item link” (unless you want people to link to your Facebook profile with every update, in which case you will want to leave it checked).
Leave the next option set to “pubDate”.
Select a Prefix like “FB Status: ” or something similar. Keep it short.
Leave the other options and click on the “Create” button.

Be aware that Twitter only allows updates that are 140 characters, including the prefix that you selected in step 9. This means that you will need to keep your FaceBook status updates short, or twitterfeed will cut the end off the update.

Incorrect Time on Diary Entries on iTouch

chevvy — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:36:03 +0000

All my calendar entries on my iTouch were coming up about 7 hours incorrectly, the events themselves were correct just wrong time. After checking my computer and Touch had the correct settings I found one other place to change…
I went to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Time Zone Support (Near the bottom) -> and selected my Time Zone rather than “Cupertino.
This solved it for me

Cannot connect to wireless network in Vista

dcouper — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:30:12 +0000

I am at a conference and the guy sitting next to me was trying to connect to a wireless access point in Vista. It was saying that it was connected - but it was not getting an internet connection.
I checked the IP address and it was correct , the wirless zero configuration was also set up correctly- so my solution was to download firefox on my laptop and install it on the other laptop…. it worked a dream.
The moral to this story (like many others), is stay away from IE!!!

iPod Touch - Incorrect date/time after Synchronising

chevvy — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:10:27 +0000

After synchronising my new iPod Touch for the 2nd time it decided to give it a date of about 9 months ago and changed the time to a completly different time of day!

I was using Windows XP and iTunes.

After searching the web I found that there is an issue with XP and synchronising your iTouch if your laptop/computer has been in hibernation.

So I closed iTunes and restarted it and unplugged the USB and then plugged it back in again and hey presto synchronisation worked like a dream and put my iTouch back in the correct year, day and time

So basically - if you are going to hibernate your machine - shut iTunes down before hand to reopen it when you want to synch again

Does Google Index the Content in iFrames?

Bill Hutchison — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:08:31 +0000

Over at an article about Ads on GoDaddy Free Hosting we were asked:

… do you think ifreames effect the indexing of other pages on the site?

While a bot is crawling the page will it see the iframe first and crawl to it rather then crawl the rest of the page? More over, won’t this be harmful on large scale sites while trying to index inner pages?

Please any one let us know your thoughts …

Although I have not had any experience with iFrames on a site containing real content (I have used iFrames to display advertisements, but that’s about it) I got busy doing a bit of research and found that iFrames may not be indexed and displayed in the Google Search Results.

You can read what Google says about here below:

IFrames are sometimes used to display content on web pages. Content displayed via iFrames may not be indexed and available to appear in Google’s search results. We recommend that you avoid the use of iFrames to display content. If you do include iFrames, make sure to provide additional text-based links to the content they display, so that Googlebot can crawl and index this content.

That content is part of the the free help that Google offers to webmasters at their Webmaster Help Centre. You can read that answer, and more about using rich media files on your web-site here.

VOIP client for iPod Touch

Alex Costa — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:21:16 +0000

Truphone is a VOIP client that can save you money on your mobile phone calls. Using Truphone over WiFi (WIreless) connectivity your iPhone can make phone calls to landline and mobile numbers. The BBC technology website comments that the Truphone developers plan to implement the ability to also receive phone calls on iPhones. Wi-Fi calls to other connected Truphone users are completely free of charge.

Truphone is available for a few different devices, the iPod Touch, the iPhone, Nokia and Blackberry. Other devices like LG, Sumsung and so on are on the list for future availability. You can register your interest in having the Truphone on your mobile device on their website - http://truphone.com/devices .

ipod touch, voip, wireless, mobile, wireless