Category Archives: Apple & Mac

iMac G5 2 GHz Diary – Is It Dead or Alive?

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Mac

iMac G5 2 GHz (Ambient Light Sensor) has been our main machine for the past two and a half years. We have whipped it and made it compress close to a thousand QuickTime and Flash videos. Life is never easy for this iMac. We expected that its life expectancy would be short. So we thought the zero day would come pretty soon.

In the meantime, we use an external FireWire hard disk drive to back up files while the internal drive only contains Mac OS and application files. In this way, we can access important files even when our iMac dies.

Alien Skin Exposure 2 for Mac video tutorial
Screenshot 1 – Network Status		   Alien Skin Exposure 2 for Mac video tutorial
Screenshot 2 – Network Configurations

Day 1

Something unexpected happened yesterday. Suddenly, our iMac refused to connect the Internet. Checking on the Network Status, the light was yellow as opposed to green. (See Screenshot 01.) Instead of 192.168.0.10, the local IP address was shown as 169.254.220.4, according to the Network preference pane (See Screenshot 02.), which could be traced to a private layer through nLayer Communications, an Internet service provider in Illinois, USA. Hmm, bizarre… I could manually enter the local IP address. In fact, the the color of the network status turned into green by doing so except that iMac continued to refuse to connect the Internet.  Continue reading →

Mac Software Review: BetterZip 1.7

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macitbetter.com BetterZip Mac shareware
Mac software review

The Zip format has been around for quite some time even in the Mac community. It was never a popular archive format until 3 or 4 years ago. Those days, people were still using either disk image (.dmg) or StuffIt (.sit) more than Zip (.zip)

Some people still use StuffIt to pack a group of files. How do they pack files in the sit format? They use Smith Micro Software’s StuffIt Deluxe.

There are a few useful features that have made StuffIt Deluxe unique. No. 1, StuffIt Deluxe lets users split large archive files into parts. No. 2, StuffIt Deluxe allows users to preview files packed in archives before they unpack them. No. 3, StuffIt Deluxe allows users to password-protect archive files.

Compared with StuffIt, how far can we go with Zip archives? Actually, using a relatively new Mac shareware title called BetterZip, you can have those 3 useful features that StuffIt Deluxe offers even with Zip archives.  Continue reading →

Microsoft Releasing Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.1 Update, Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.0 Update and More

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Microsoft Office

TOKYO (MacHouse) – Microsoft has released a few files for Mac users. One of the files is Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0, which, according to the company, allows users ‘to convert Open XML files that were created in Office 2008 for Mac or Office 2007 for Windows.’ Such files will be compatible with earlier versions of Microsoft Office.  Continue reading →

Mac Software Review: Dragoman 1.1

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Dare to be Creative Dragoman Mac shareware
Mac software review

Whenever we prepare a software review, we convert two dozen PNG files or more into JPEG all at a time. We find Adobe Fireworks’ Batch Process useful for that end. Adobe Fireworks CS3 is not cheap. If you have to convert a large group of graphic files regularly and frequently, you may want to try out a relatively new Mac shareware title called Dragoman. It’s developed by an Austrian software company called Dare to be Creative. Dragoman comes with a 10-day free tryout period.

Dragoman is more versatile than Adobe Fireworks to some extent. Dragoman supports not just graphic formats but also audio formats (AIFF, WAV…) and archive formats (DMG, ZIP…). So let’s see what Dragoman is designed to do.  Continue reading →