HMAUS Signal Supporting Macintosh and Apple Users in Hawaii

by Christopher Breen

New year, old business
Before I leap into the business of a new year, it’s time to clean up issues remaining from the year just departed. Along those lines, reader Jim Schoster follows up on last year’s Broken iDisk Syncing with this:

Thank you for your helpful article about iDisk. Where do I find the .sparsebundle file to delete?

If you click on your synced iDisk and press Command-I to bring up the Info window you’ll find the path to this file listed as:

your user folder/Library/FileSync

and then a folder with a cryptic series of letters and numbers. Inside this folder is the sparsebundle file.

Reader Rishi Patel got in touch about a remark from a recent Macworld Podcast.

I was listening to your podcast about Macworld’s holiday gift guide and I heard the guest say he was able to upgrade his laptop’s RAM for $27. I was wondering what site that was, or if you know of a good website to find cheap RAM. I have a PowerBook and am looking to upgrade the RAM.

Take a gander at the Ramseeker website. Here you’ll find RAM prices from a variety of popular memory vendors. Just look in the Ramseeker Mac section and choose your Mac model from the Select Macintosh Model pop-up menu.

Update: Dan Frakes, the guest who performed the upgrade on his laptop, wrote in to also suggest DealRAM, which is where he found the RAM he mentioned.

Finally, in reference to a question regarding incessant prompting for passwords in February’s Mac 911 column, reader N.L.C asks about Keychain Access’ Keychain First Aid:

Lots of my Mac friends have this problem since we started our iPhone service. I was initially elated to see a fix, but I can’t find anything on my PowerMac G5 running 10.5.1 that says “Keychain First Aid.”

Rereading my answer I see that I didn’t tell you where to find that command. My apologies. You’ll find it under the Keychain Access menu (the menu where you traditionally select the About and Preferences commands). Increasingly Apple and other developers are placing helpful commands in this application menu yet many old-time Mac users forget to look there.

While I have your attention, this seems like an opportune time to remind you that if you select Help in an application running under Leopard, type the name of the command you’re looking for, and then select that command’s name in the resulting list under the Help menu (commands are identified by the small menu icon next to them), a floating blue arrow appears that points to the location of that command.

Intel, backup, and drive formats Reader Michael Jones has walked through the fire and emerged a more enlightened soul. He seeks only a tiny bit of additional information to complete his quest for an Intel-compatible Time Machine backup drive. He writes:

I have been a Windows user all my life and my Acer laptop hard drive crashed. I replaced my machine with a new Apple laptop, which I love. DriveSavers recovered my photos to an external hard drive that could work with both a Mac and a PC. I was able to download all my pictures onto my new Apple, but they told me I needed to reformat the drive to be optimal for backing up a Mac. What is the best format for the Mac OS and what resources can I use to help me do it?

I’m going to assume that your new Apple laptop is really a new Apple laptop, meaning that it’s a MacBook or MacBook Pro, both of which contain Intel processors. For a Time Machine drive connected to an Intel Mac, Apple recommends that you use a GUID partition type. (Those with PowerPC Macs should use the Apple Partition Map scheme.)

To impose this partition type on the drive, launch Disk Utility (found at /Applications/Utilities), select the drive in the resulting Disk Utility window, and click the Partition tab.

From the pop-up menu labeled Current, choose the number of partitions you’d like on the drive (1 Partition is perfectly acceptable if you want to create just a single volume). Now click the Options button. In the sheet that appears, choose GUID Partition Table. Click OK to dismiss the sheet. Click Apply and the drive will be reformatted with the GUID partition scheme.

Note: When you reformat that drive, you erase everything on it. Be sure you’ve copied everything you want off that drive before you do this.

Another note: You’ll go through this same process if you’re formatting a drive that was originally used with a PowerPC Mac for use when booting an Intel Mac. For example, I had a FireWire drive that I used with my Power Mac G5. In the early days of Leopard, I wanted to install OS X 10.5 on this drive so I could take the new OS for a spin without committing my Mac Pro’s internal drive to it. Although my Mac Pro could use this drive for external storage, when I attempted to install Leopard on it, I was told that, as it was connected to an Intel Mac, I must use the GUID partition scheme. This I did and the installation proceeded in hitchless fashion.

Converting video for iPod
I have videos on my Mac in QuickTime and WMV formats and I would like to load them onto my iPod touch. Drag and drop doesn’t want to work. The error message says that the videos are not viewable on the iPod. Is there a way to convert these files to an MPEG-4 file?

Sure. For QuickTime movies you’ll find a solution within iTunes. Just drag your QuickTime movie to the Library entry in iTunes’ Source list and it will appear under the Movies heading. Select it there and, from the Advanced menu, choose Convert Selection for iPod/iPhone. Once you’ve invoked the command, iTunes will do exactly as it promises and convert the movie to an H.264-encoded MPEG-4 video file, playable on your iPod.

Windows video files can’t be converted for playback in iTunes. Apple’s $29 QuickTime Player Pro in league with Flip4Mac’s free Windows Media Components for QuickTime can do the job, however. After upgrading QuickTime to the Pro version and installing WMCfQT, open the movie in QuickTime Player, choose File -> Export, and in the Save Exported File As window that appears, choose Movie to iPhone from the Export pop-up menu. Your file will be saved as a .m4v file, suitable for playback on your iPod.

Macworld Senior Editor Christopher Breen is the author of Secrets of the iPod and iTunes, fifth edition, and The iPod and iTunes Pocket Guide (both Peachpit Press, 2005)

Find Chris’ books at www.amazon.com and www.peachpit.com. Get special user group pricing on Macworld Magazine! Subscribe today at http://www.macworld.com/useroffer.

Posted under Mac 911