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I’ve used parallels for years and never noticed the “Use Multiple Displays” option of Coherence mode. It’s accessible via the Edit > Virtual Machine settings when you shut down your VM, but it’s also hidden away in View > Customize… which you can access during runtime.

Now I can finally drag that word requirements doc or release note onto my second monitor while I code in the first. Sweet! It’s something I’ve missed without realizing I was missing it.

There are some bugs though. My second monitor is taller than the first because I have it rotated 90 degrees; that means the task bar mounts to the bottom of the second monitor and doesn’t display on the first, so I can’t see the start menu. I can click on the parallels icon in the dock to see the start menu, but I still can’t see quick launch. I can turn on “Exclude Dock” for usable work area, but then the task bar floats across the middle of my second monitor and applications cannot be resized past it. My solution in the mean time is to relocate my task bar and start menu to the top of the screen, where it more or less runs along the top of both of my monitors. This is a strange new workflow but I think I like it!

I have my iTunes music library, samples, video files, and more on an external drive, and the 5 second delay of my drive spinning up is annoying at best and prevents me from working at worst. I finally just found the menu that disables the external drive from spinning down. I don’t know how this affects the drive life but it’s worth it for me.

System Preferences > Energy Saver > uncheck Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible

What a dumb sounding title. You’d think something like this would be easy. Sorry, I’m slightly bitter at AT&T after a week’s worth of phone calls to get my DSL up and running and to get a router on the network. Even after threatening to cancel service, after telling them that I don’t know anyone who has broadband and doesn’t have a router, and that I’d tried two routers that wouldn’t work, AT&T still wanted to transfer me to their ‘premium’ tech support service for my third party router to get more money out of me. Netgear? Linksys? Ever heard of these? Deaf ears.

I tried spoofing my computer’s MAC address but it wouldn’t work. I tried using my router to dial the PPPoE connection but that didn’t work either. Yet when I plugged any computer directly into the modem it worked fine.

AT&T told me to ‘bridge’ my modem and have the router dial the PPPoE connection. Fail. It didn’t work at all. The solution is easy enough, if any of them had access to the right information: Keep the modem dialing the PPPoE connection. Then, plug in AT&T’s DNS into the router:

Primary DNS: 68.94.156.1
Secondary DNS: 68.94.157.1

and that’s it! You’re good to go. If you run a computer with a static IP, plug those DNS entries into its network settings as well.

I tried using OpenDNS first, which worked ok, but it was a little slower, it messed with my VPN, and I didn’t like seeing advertisements when I typed in addresses wrong. This solution works best.

I have too many calendars. I’ve managed to consolidate most of them though:

First, I synced my work Outlook calendar (on my PC) to my gcal with the fantastic app Google Calendar Sync. I gave it my info and told it to sync both ways every hour.

Then, I subscribed to my google calendar in iCal: First, in google calendar, click on Settings, Calendar Settings, Calendars, [your calendar], Calendar Address: and click on ICAL. Copy this URL, and then in iCal, paste it into Calendar: Subscribe… and have it update every hour.

And you’re done! My iPhone will only sync when I connect it to the computer, which is fine with me, but you can either subscribe to mobileme for push calendar notifications, set up text messaging alerts with google calendar, or use the web-based iphone version of google calendar in Safari.

-edit-
Edit: The events show up as separate calendars on your iPhone.

It looks like this currently does not work with mobileMe. You can convert the items to your personal calendar in iCal by exporting them and then importing them. See macosxhints workaround here.

There seem to be a variety of ways to import your contacts from your windows mobile phone to your iphone. This is how I did it. You will need: Activesync and Outlook on Windows, and Address Book and iTunes 7.7 on OS X.

1) Sync your windows mobile phone with outlook with activesync.

2) Launch Outlook (I have v. 2006) and click on contacts. Your contacts should be listed.

3) To avoid syncing all 1000+ contacts I had, I scrolled right, and clicked on the ‘Mobile Phone’ column to sort by contacts with a mobile phone number. I then selected only contacts with a mobile phone number and right clicked and chose ‘Send as Business Card’. This step might take a while because it’s creating potentially hundreds of attachments as vCards to a new email.

4) I tried emailing this to my email account on my mac. My server basically said ‘Are you crazy?’ and blocked the entire message - one for having hundreds of attachments and two because .vcf is normally a hostile file format for email attachments (lots of exploit potential in ‘em).

5) However, I still had a copy of my message in my Outlook outbox, and was able to right click on the attachments and choose ‘Save all’. Then I transferred the folder I saved them in to my mac.

6) Simply double clicking on one attachment opened address book and asked me ‘do you want to import 1 contact?’ I clicked yes. Then I selected the rest and dragged them to address book, and it asked me if I wanted to import the rest and I clicked yes.

7) Plug your iphone in, click sync in iTunes and you’re done!

Other options I can think of:

• Take your sim card and put it in the iphone with the sim card ejection tool and go to Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars > Import SIM Contacts. I’m not sure if it will let you get this far if the card is from another network.

• This link says you can click on the ‘MessageSave’ outlook toolbar button and select ‘Save all messages in folder Contacts’ and choose vCard in the format field, but this didn’t work for me (I don’t have that icon).

This weekend I freed up 30 GB of mp3 duplicates using a handy program called iDupe. I’d tried several programs before, including an early version of Corral all Duplicates without much luck, but iDupe was able to process songs via ID3 tags, file size, date modified, and some fuzzy logic I don’t totally understand. I don’t know how it works, but it did.

iDupe is $8 and has a simple 3 step process - selecting, analyzing and deleting. It will optionally remove items from your library and delete them, letting you review them first. Warning - it is only for OS X and windows users who accidentally buy it will not be refunded. My only complaint would be that it can only handle a maximum of 2000 files at a time, meaning even when I subselected iTunes’ ’show duplicates’ view, I still had to manually process chunks of my library at a time. It would be nice if it selected 2000 songs for you at a time, or even automated the processing in 2000 song chunks. But I trust the decisions it made and it worked great. Oh, and it removed all my dead tracks too.

For competition’s sake, Doug’s Scripts has evolved Corral All Duplicates into Dupin, but I haven’t tried it.

I’ve used both the free and pro versions of efax for some time now:
Efax
Efax is a nice service to send and receive PDFs over the internet. When faxes come in they get forwarded to your email. You can sign up for a free account to receive faxes, though it costs money to send faxes or to have a local fax number.
I couldn’t justify paying a monthly fee just to send a couple faxes a year, so I just use the free account and this service:
http://faxzero.com/
Faxzero lets you send PDFs over the internet for free. They are supported by advertisements they put on your cover page. However, the fax does not look like spam because your cover page has your information on it and the rest of the pages are untouched. I have used this service for very professional applications (loan applications, etc.) and have never had a problem. You don’t need to register an account with them but do need to provide a valid email and confirm your address for each fax.

I’ve been filling out PDF forms online for a while now. There’s always something - applications, contracts, leases, etc. I keep my signature as a graphic on my computer. Typically I’d been filling them out using photoshop, but it’s a pain in the butt–import the PDF one page at a time, use the text tool to create lots of text layers on top, print, scale to fit media, and re-save as PDF. Since photoshop doesn’t handle multiple pages, I had to use the free utility joinPDF to join each page together. I got so sick of this that I searched for better alternatives.
And I found one:
FormulatePro
FormulatePro is a free beta program that loads a PDF, lets you easily add text, add images, and print (and save to PDF using OS X’s built in function). It’s way easier than using photoshop.
Other people have suggested using Word to do this, by importing the PDF as a watermark into a document and then writing on top. There is more info here for PC users and others that would like to try it.

My only complaint about formulatepro is in photoshop I could use ‘darken’ blending to have my signature transparently overlay the line it’s supposed to go on, as opposed to a white box behind it. I haven’t tried using a transparent image yet though.

Next up: faxing in your PDF for free over the internet

I have iTunes organize my library automatically, and also copy all imported items to its own music folder on my external drive.

I drag music into iTunes all the time, and then delete the original source, to keep my music organized.

If any of the folders you drag into iTunes are .m3u playlist files, which are common, iTunes will also copy any file they point to into its library. Often, you may have an m3u file in a folder with the same music; selecting all and dragging or dragging the enclosing folder will copy the same music twice. If you have an m3u file in your folder of music, either drag it in, or only drag in the music.

I find this to be a pain when dragging multiple folders worth of music, so I usually search for m3u files first and delete them before dragging them in.

iTunes, you’re on version 7! You should be smarter than this.

I’m surprised that this is still an issue. This is just a reminder that you will drastically slow down your machine if you have a lot of icons on your desktop. I’m running a 2.4 GHZ machine with 4 GB of RAM installed, and applications like Safari 3.1 and Firefox beta 5 would still beachball on almost no CPU load. (I use the wonderful tool MenuMeters to constantly monitor my CPU usage.) This is the latest operating system and some of the newest hardware, and yet it still sometimes feels slower than my old G5.

I had to remind myself that Apple still hasn’t fixed this bug yet, in fact they might have only made it worse with quick look (though I love quick look otherwise). Anyway, drag all of your icons except your hard drive to your documents folder, or at least a new folder on the desktop, and everything will become zippy again.

You’d think with plenty of CPU cycles to spare and memory to use that WindowServer would behave better. I think in the era of multi-core, multithreaded computing, applications that halt the entire system (beachballing) is the number one problem. OS X is rock solid in terms of crashing, but I think it should have better halting management, I guess you would call it.