The Apple Group

Have you ever wanted to print a high-resolution image at a very large size—say, the size of a poster—but you don’t have a wide-format printer (or don’t want to pay for the use of one at your local print shop)? One solution is to print the image in smaller sections, each taking up a sheet of standard paper, and then put those sections together to create the full image. Doing exactly this is the purpose of Alessandro Portale’s PosteRazor 1.5 (; free).

What you may not have known is that you can do the same thing for certain drop-down menus hiding behind buttons—even when those menus aren’t yet visible. To take best advantage of this trick, you must first make sure you’ve got your machine set up such that the Tab key takes you to each available input. To do that, open the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel, and then click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. At the bottom of this panel, make sure Full Keyboard Access is set to All Controls. You can now use the Tab key to select the drop-down menu, which you’ll need to do in order to then use the keyboard to access that drop-down’s menu items.

It is possible to use CMD instead of Control for keyboard shortcuts. Just follow these instructions while GIMP and X11 are closed : Create a .Xmodmap file in your home-folder containing the following: clear Mod2 clear control keycode 63 = Control_L keycode 67 = Control_L add control = Control_L

Then open X11 and change its preferences like this :

Now open GIMP. CMD+C and all the stuff should work.

If Time Machine gets disrupted for any reason during a backup (ie. hard drive unplugged, power failure) it seems to get stuck. Occasionally it gets stuck for reasons only known to Leopard. Its a known bug on the Apple discussion boards. What has worked for me is the following:1. ensure hard drive is powered on and connected to computer2. turn off time machine3. go to your backup volume, backups.backupd, "your computer name", and then select and trash "In Progress" or "Latest" (it will be the last one in your backup folder listing)4. turn Time Machine back on5. either wait for the next backup cycle, or what I do to be sure things are working right is force an immediate backup (control-click on TimeMachine, select "backup now").

To get Time Machine going again, you need to remove the errant files with the following steps: Ensure your backup device is turned on and connected to your computer (wirelessly or wired, it doesn't matter) Turn off Time Machine using the big button in Time Machine preferences. NOTE: I did not execute this step and was still able to fix Time Machine. Make sure the backup volume (which is just part of the backup drive) is mounted to your desktop/Finder. You may have to initiate (and subsequently cancel) a Time Machine backup process in order to see the drive on the desktop or in Finder. Access your backup volume in Finder (it should be named "Backup of your-computer-name..." or something similar) and double-click into the "Backups.backupdb" folder. Next, click into the "your-computer-name" folder. You should see a bunch of folders with dates. These are all the dates corresponding to days you ran a successful backup. At the bottom of the folder listing will be one or two things you need to move to the trash. You may see only one or both of these, but delete the file that starts with a date (it should be the date the backup failure started) and ends in ".inProgress." Also delete a file named "Latest" if it exists. Return to Time Machine preferences and turn Time Machine on. Remember, I was successful without performing this step. Initiate a backup using the Time Machine drop-down in the menu bar or wait until the next scheduled backup run. A final but important step, be patient. Time Machine may sit in "preparing" mode for a while. It's important to at least let it run for an hour or so to see if the process will continue actually writing files to your backup volume.

4. Though Mac OS X ships with a native PDF viewer, it doesn’t do much beyond letting you view a file’s contents. Skim is both a top-notch PDF reader and markup tool designed just for the Mac. Use Skim to preview the internal links of a document, add notes, highlight text and more. You can even use Skim to create presentations and control them-right inside the app-using an Apple Remote. As more corporate documents are transmitted every day as PDF documents, this is one app you can’t do without.

You know you need to change the oil in your car every 3,000 miles, clean your house’s gutters every fall, and brush your teeth at least twice a day—but do you know what’s necessary to keep your Mac in good shape? For the most part, Macs run smoothly. But as with most machines, a little preventative maintenance goes a long way toward keeping things running smoothly.

Disk Utility’s Repair Disk Permissions feature

It means "third generation" and refers to a family of technologies that deliver much faster download and upload speeds for handheld devices and laptops. They work by allowing many cell phones or other wireless devices to communicate on the same frequency without getting confused. Compared with older systems, this allows for the transfer of a larger amount of data by eliminating the need to keep each signal separate.

Download 443 (and counting) free user-contributed AppleScripts for Apple's iTunes that will make maintaining your digital music collection easier and more fun!

If the iPhone and Mac are good enough for the US Army, can IT managers keep saying that these Apple platforms aren’t good enough anymore?

Apple may be working to seed developers with an early build of Mac OS X 10.6 at this year's WWDC. 10.6 will not include any new significant features from 10.5; instead, Apple is focusing solely on "stability and security."

The first Apple logo was a complex picture of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. The logo was inscribed: "Newton … A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone." It was designed by Ronald Wayne, who along with Wozniak and Jobs, actually founded Apple Computer. In 1976, after only working for two weeks at Apple, Wayne relinquished his stock (10% of the company) for a one-time payment of $800 because he thought Apple was too risky! (Had he kept it, Wayne’s stock would be worth billions!)

Macworld Lab has been testing five high-definition, tapeless camcorders, and thus far, the results aren't pleasing. Three out of the five camcorders we tested don't work properly on a Mac. Now, before you drive to One Infinite Loop and camcorder vendors’ buildings crying “This is an outrage!” allow me to explain my definition of "not working on a Mac."

A great little application hit my iPhone installer yesterday called NemusSync. It does one very simple thing and does it well. It syncs your Google Apps calendar with your iCal on your iPhone (and by extension, your iCal or Outlook on the desktop). Over the Air. Like Apple and Google should have done in the first, second, or third place. It works. It will even sync your shared calendars. Not much else to say. Enjoy.