Status-Q

It may seem strange, given that I am so immersed in the IT world, that this morning I did (I think) my first ever installation of Windows XP. I have sat in front of XP machines before, of course, but I switched to the Mac in the Windows 2000 era and have never had to install XP from scratch on a PC. Until today.

Actually, today was an experiment – I have a copy of VirtualPC for the Mac and was interested to try it out. I’ve never had a need for Windows myself, but sometimes it can be useful, if I’m trying to help somebody on the phone, to duplicate their actions on my local screen. This software lets you install Windows within a ‘virtual machine’ on your Mac and run a complete version of Windows and any Windows-only software. It seems to work pretty well, albeit slowly.

But what amused me was the very first thing that popped up on my screen after I installed a nice clean, fresh copy of Windows XP on my Mac.

If I had just paid £170 to upgrade my PC to Windows XP Pro, I’m sure I’d be pleased to see that message. If you ‘Click this balloon to fix this problem’ it takes you to a site which lists the places you can spend more money to buy antivirus software. To me, that’s like buying a shiny new car, sliding happily into the soft leather driver’s seat and discovering a note on the steering wheel: “A helpful tip from Mercedes: The locks on your doors may not work. Here’s a list of local garages who can repair them for you.”

The sad thing is, they’re right. And I was grateful for the reminder. I need to make sure that the virtual Windows machine only has very limited access to the rest of my Mac files…

If you ever need to transcribe audio recordings, I recommend Express Scribe, a lovely utility which is available for Mac and for Windows, and which is now free.

I set it to play back the audio at half-speed, and assigned a couple of global control keys to stop, start, and skip back 5 seconds. Then I could control the audio without ever leaving my wordprocessor and my rather poor typing could just about keep up with it. Very nice.

I almost never use the Sherlock application that ships with Mac OS X, but if I find myself in a U.S. city wondering what movies are playing nearby, it is one of the easiest ways to find out.

I fired it up this evening and found that all the channels seemed to be missing. An empty window – even less inspiring than some of the movies on offer at the moment.

If this happens to you, go to ~/Library/Caches/Sherlock and delete what you find there, then empty the Trash. That fixed it for me. Elementary, my dear…. oh, never mind.

If you’re on a Mac, running Tiger, using OpenOffice or – my recommendation – NeoOffice, then you probably want to install NeoLight to make your documents searchable with Spotlight.

At Foo Camp I wrote about the fact that Mac users seemed to be account for about 50% of the attendees.

I counted here at Our Social World and it’s about 25-30%. The difference is probably partly due to a slightly less techie audience, and partly due to not being on the West Coast, but it’s still well up on the overall Apple market share.

This is just another plug for VoodooPad, one of the Mac apps that has a permanent place in my Dock.

I mentioned it a while ago as a general note-taking utility; I find I haven’t used it very much for that, but there is one situation where it works very well for me; taking notes in conferences. Creating lots of short pages, one for each talk, very easily, finding pictures of the speakers on the net or taking them on a camera as I go along and just dragging them onto the pages, typing in URLs that are mentioned and having them automatically become links. Having just enough text formatting for the task, and so forth – it’s great.

And best of all, it has a Spotlight adaptor which means that I can find any page in any of the documents using Spotlight. This size of page is a good granularity for search results, I find, and yet because I write notes for a whole conference in one file, I don’t need to create lots of little files and think of lots of filenames.

Ever wish someone would come around and tidy your desk from time to time? Someone who would just put away neatly the things you weren’t currently working on, in the same way that you would if you were a little more organised?

Well, Mac users, there’s a neat little utility called SpiritedAway, which hides any applications you have running but haven’t worked on in a while, just as if you’d done a Cmd-H on them. My resolution of the week is to keep my desk a bit tidier…