Creating iTunes account without a credit card

This tip is an excellent from Chris Breen of Macworld. Great if you don't want you children to spend off your credit card while still allowing you the ability to buy apps or music for them when you need to.

"Parent and reader Karen Haas has a new iPod touch owner in the family. She writes

We recently gave our daughter an iPod touch for her birthday. She naturally wants to be able to download music and apps but she doesn’t have a credit card and we’re not prepared to give her access to ours. Is there a way she can have an account that isn’t tied to a credit card?

There is. Here’s how to set it up on your Mac..."

Read more on Macworld...

Take control of your email by creating a 'Today' smart mailbox

If you are handling a busy inbox with swathes of emails, one device to make it easier to deal with is to create a Smart Mailbox. Smart mailboxes don't file your emails, but give you a filtered view of what they contain. Much better than filing, as many emails can't be accurately filed under just one heading. Fortunately, smart mailboxes 'look' in every mailbox, so it doesn't matter if you have already filed things, they still get found.

To create a Today smart mailbox, go to Mailbox... New Smart Mailbox and set it up similar to this, by choosing from the popup criteria, and then adding extra criteria to filter more precisely. Name the mailbox"Today" and click OK.

Your results should look similar to mine. You can right-click on the Today smart mailbox to fine-tune the criteria until it shows just what you need.
You can have Mail display the result in a nice compact window by choosing View... Hide Mailboxes (you can customise your view and have this as a button if preferred) and then resize the window.

Remember too that you can have multiple Message viewing windows open, and they can display different smart mailboxes (say, emails from an important client). Your mailbox settings are retained after quitting, for the next session.

Time Capsule death and resurrection

Just like the experience of many others round the internet (see here), my 500GB Time Capsule expired yesterday. Lights out. The failure is usually due to some capacitors in the power supply overheating and expiring as a result.

I took it to pieces with instructions from iFixit,found the blown capacitors and replaced them with ones near the same spec—I used 1000uF instead of 1500uF. Watch out though... I got a nasty shock from one of the other capacitors on the board—follow the instructions in red at the following link if you want to avoid the same!

Capacitor replacement instructions

Now it's all back up and running fine again; pleasant surprise to see the green light—I half expected it to be a complete dud. I decided to leave the rubber base panel off so the base could breathe and am using it upside down to its normal orientation. At least now there is some chance that it will run somewhat cooler.

As it runs 24 hours a day, I'm adding a simple plug-in timer to shut it off at night when it's not needed, which should extend its life considerably.

If your TimeCapsule fails, you'll likely find that Apple's repair extension program won't apply (not very generous in this instance), but your data should be safe. If you are in the UK, you could contact me on 01255 672701 for help...

Easily add attachments in Apple Mail

Using Exposé (on the F11 key on a regular Apple keyboard) makes it a doddle to add attachments to an email:

Let's assume that the attachment you want to add is on the desktop...

• With the new email open, press F11 to view the desktop
• Locate and start to drag the attachment
• Press F11 again and Mail reappears
• Release the mouse and the attachment drops into the Mail window.

This works with multiple attachments too.

More on yesterday's data loss

It took a long time to bring all the data back, about 5 hours in the end. TimeMachine did an excellent job, but with one or two minor problems: it doesn't actually back up everything. In this case it didn't back up the Logs folder from the user account, which I needed for tracking remote support. I'll create an Automator script to send that to my DropBox account.

Also after a complete restoration of the data to the reformatted main drive, the hard drive wouldn't boot without reinstalling 10.6. After the reinstallation was complete, everything was back as it should have been, except for the logs folder.

I think it would be best to use Carbon Copy Cloner as well as Time Machine to have a sturdy backup system. TimeMachine is great for background backup and retrieval of damaged, lost or altered files. The fastest way to get back up and running though would be to have a continuous clone made of the whole drive, which Carbon Copy Cloner can do as a regular daily or hourly task. If this is stored on a FireWire drive then any Mac from G4 onwards can boot from it. If you use a USB drive though, only Intel Macs can boot from that. CCC warns you of this as you set up the clone process.

Data lost, but thank goodness for TimeMachine

Yesterday I wanted to add another partition to my Mac’s boot drive. OS X Disk Utility can do this without losing existing partitions, in both 10.5 and 10.6; no need to hive off the data and reformat first.

However, in this instance, Disk Utility wasn't that keen to do it mainly because the small amount of free space was so fragmented. So I updated my two TimeMachine backups and then ran Drive Genius 2 which seemed quite happy to defragment the drive. I left it running overnight.

In the morning the Mac had an error on the screen telling me the main hard drive was damaged! Looks like Drive Genius wasn't that great after all, it would have been nice if it had flagged up that there might be a problem.

Thank goodness that I had followed my own preaching and used TimeMachine to look after my backups. I had taken the precaution of using two different TimeMachine backups to two different drives, so that if one drive were to fail at any time I would have another backup.

I use DropBox to sync important data between my Macs, so I know all the data there was safe—Dropbox data also gets backed up by TimeMachine, which makes it better than iDisk. Its data is also both remote and local, rather than being online only.

Slightly nervous time while I waited for the restore to take place.

Everything (though see newer post) arrived back just as it had been before yesterday's calamity. I dread to think where I would have even started to try and get all the data back. Lots of it had no great value but interspersed among all the bits and pieces were a variety of important documents which I could really do with keeping!

Read more: Why should I bother backing up?

"Send Again" option disappeared in Outlook for Mac 2011?

An annoyance in Outlook 2011 for Mac is the omission of the option to re-send an email. All is not lost—visit this page for an excellent solution

Barry says: "This restores the ‘resend’ function that was in Entourage, but didn’t make it to Outlook at first release. When run with a sent message selected or already open, it will create a complete copy of that message that can be sent again. The copy will have all the original recipients, attachments and the original account."