Step 1

First go to your gmail settings and enable POP.

Step 2

Now, on your phone go to Messages>Settings>Email and add a new account

Step 3

Once there use these settings

Account Name: Use anything you want here

Email Address: Enter your Gmail address

My Name: Enter what you want to be displayed as your name


Incoming Mail Server: pop.googlemail.com

User Name: recent:username@gmail.com (make sure you put "recent:" before your address this link explains what it does http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47948)

Password: Your Gmail password

Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.googlemail.com

Outgoing Mail Authentication: ON

Outgoing Server ID: Your Gmail address

Outgoing Server Password: Your Gmail password again

Step 4

Now click “Advanced” and make sure these settings are right (the rest of the settings are up to you)

Protocol Type: POP3

Incoming Port Number: 995

Outgoing Port Number: 465

Incoming Uses SSL: ON

Outgoing Uses SSL: ON

Step 5

Now go to Messages>Email box and select your newly made account and click “Retrieve New” and it should start downloading your emails from the past 30 days (if your wondering why check out the link in step 3)

Step 1:

Download the Firmware from the Alesis website.
http://www.alesis.com/micron

Step 2:

Download and Install SysEx Librarian.

http://www.snoize.com/SysExLibrarian/

SysEx Librarian is what we shall be using to send the updated firmware to the Micron.

Step 3:

Now connect your Micron to your computer (I connected my Microns midi-In to my Edirol UA-25’s midi-Out) and turn it on while holding the Programms and Setups buttons.  You should see the Microns current firmware version appear on the LCD screen shortly followed by “Ready to recieve OS through MIDI”

Step 4:

Load up SysEx Librarian then drag and drop the firmware .syx file onto the SysEx Librarian window. And choose where you want the firmware to be sent (In my case I want it to be sent to the audio interface I attached the Micron to, so I chose EDIROL UA-25).

Step 5:

Now just press the play button and wait for it to play the .syx file.  While this happens you should see the LCD onthe micron display the progress of the update.

Step 6:

Once the update is complete the Micron’s LCD should say it’s ready to restart, your ready to switch off and then switch on the Micron.  Once you’ve done this you should be all done.

Now that Firefox 3 has fixed the majority of the problems that Firefox 2 had,  I’ve decided to go back to it.  The only problem with Firefox for me now is that I’ve gotten so use to some of the features in Safari I simply can’t live without them.  So I went on a hunt around the firefox add-on site to try and find some add-ons that will get me some of Safari’s functionality in Firefox.

GrApple Theme

http://www.takebacktheweb.org/

First thing I wanted was the look of Safari because quite frankly the new Firefox Mac theme is appalling, so I installed the awesome GrApple theme.

Quartz PDF Plugin

http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/

This add-on will allow you to open PDF’s in firefox.  It’s still in early development from what I can gather but it hasn’t failed on me yet.

The Fission progress bar

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1951

Fission adds a progress bar behind the address bar like in Safari.

Smart Stop/Reload

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7401
(Experimental requires login)

This add-on merges the Stop and Reload button into one.

URL Link

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/403

The feature I liked most in Safari was being able to highlight a text URL link and open it up in a new tab without having to copy and paste it into the address bar.  This add-on lets you do that in Firefox.

Open With QuickTime

Open the movie with QuickTime Player.  If the movie is on two seperate files go ahead and open the second file so both parts of the movie
are now open in QuickTime Player.

Skip To The End

Now what you need to do is skip to the end of the first part of the movie in QuickTime Player.

Select All

Next, go to the second part of the movie thats open in QuickTime Player and choose Edit > Select All.

Copy The Movie

Now choose Edit > Copy to copy all of the second part of the movie.

Paste Onto The End

Now go back to the first part of the movie and choose Edit > Paste from the menu so that we now have both parts of the film together.

Save Movie

Staying with the full movie we now made choose File > Save As from the menu.  Give the movie whatever name you want and then choose “Save as a reference movie” from the two options at the bottom of the window, then click Save.

Import The Movie

Now we need to import the newly made film into iTunes, to do this simply drag the (the-name-you-saved-the-film-as).mov file onto “Movies” in the iTunes sidebar.  You should then see iTunes say its importing it and once thats finished the movie should be in iTunes, HOORAY!

You Might Want To…

What you might want to do now is edit the movies tags so it has all the correct information and artwork to go with the movie.  To do this right click the movie in the list and choose “Get Info”.

Add Info

Select “Info” from the tabs and then put in all the details about the film you want (you can find all this information by searching http://www.imdb.com).

Add Artwork

To add the artwork click the “Artwork” tab and simply drag the image you want to use onto the window and then click “OK” and your finished.  For movie posters I use http://www.impawards.com/.

Download MiddleClickClose here.

Firstly the site has had a facelift  courtesy of me and a few hours of work Secondly I’ve ditched the blog I made using Ruby on Rails and instead am using Wordpress.

Hope you like the changes,
b0bd0gz

1. Download and install CocoaThumbX
2. Load it up and check “Remove Thumbnail”
3. Drag the files that are blurry in Coverflow onto CocoaThumbX
4. Wait a second or two for Coverflow to reload the thumbnail, and hey presto you should have lovely crisp thumbnails.

Useful Mac Sites

• UsingMac.com
• OS X Daily
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog
• LifeHacker Mac Tip Articles

Mac Customization

• IconFactory
• MacThemes 2.0
• Leopard Docks

Mac Icons/Wallpaper

• MacThemes 2.0 Releases and Updates Forum
• McDo Design
• Pixel Resort
• Jonas Rak Design
• Louie Mantia

Quicklook Plugins

• QuickLook Plugins List
• hrmpf.com QuickLook Plugin List

How on earth do you type #?

I do some CSS and the # symbol is kinda vital so when I looked down and searched my new keyboard for this symbol it shocked me somewhat to find it not there. After looking around I found it was there, it was just hiding. To get him to appear simply press the option + 3 and # should appear on your screen, YAY!.

Growl not working

Growl was one of the things I was looking forward to using when I switched to Mac, so I was quite annoyed when it didn’t work. After looking around I found out that it was the Logitech drivers for my Mouse, that for some unknown reason stopped growl from display notifications.

So next I hunted around for an alternative to the Logitech drivers and found SteerMouse which is an “Advanced driver for USB and Bluetooth mouse.”

After uninstalling the Logitech drivers and installing SteerMouse Growl started working and had an added bonus of Leopard booting a bit faster, WOOPEY!

MainMenu

Last thing I want to share is this brilliant bit of software MainMenu which does lots of neat things (e.g. Repair Disk Permissions, Clear User/System cahce) all from the menu bar. Go check it out.