Welcome to the site. Our most popular posts are a series of video tutorials on How To Use Your Mac As A Server. We also answer your Mac questions. Just Ask FMB Feel free subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The next Leopard patch is said to include about 100 fixes. Details here.

In the meantime, here’s a few nuggets of Leopard-related wisdom for you to digest:

Procata has a nice walkthrough to get you started working with PHP 5 on Leopard. Judging by the relatively large list of comments, many of have found the article to be quite useful.

LeopardTricks posted a simple but helpful little tip on fine-tuning your volume control using volume keys, which you may or may not have known.

If you’ve got other non-mac computers and use Thunderbird for email, you may enjoy this Leopard Mail skin from REO at DeviantArt.

You may have heard that Apple’s stock took a hard drop yesterday.  This is one case however, where analysts are still suggest buying it.

According to Peter Burrows of BusinessWeek, “Wall Street got hung up on Apple’s skimpy forecast for Q2 earnings, despite knowing full well that Apple always offers up skimpy forecasts.”

“Yes, Apple’s forecasted earnings were 15% below consensus estimates, compared to the 9% difference that Apple has typically guided to over the past seven quarters, according to Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster,” added Burows.  “But then, we are heading into a possible recession. It makes sense that a company that routinely lowballs would do so even more at a time of such uncertainty. ”

iPods have been in a sales slump, but are still performing well.  Macs however, have been selling like hot cakes.

A little tweaking and a lot of heat avoidance should allow iPhone owners to prolong the life of the non-owner-replaceable battery inside Apple’s latest gadget.

(more…)

They aren’t supposed to talk about their jobs, but Mac|Life managed to get one former and one current Genius Bar staffer to chat about working with Apple’s customers:

“Well, probably something like 70 percent of the stuff we see - laptops, desktops, iPods - are just things that are very simply physically damaged by the customer,” the anonymous Genius says. (Take a minute, as we did, to inventory your recent history of bad-owner accidents. Ours included dropping laptops, spilling Gatorade into our keyboards, and yanking the headphone cord out of an iPod so carelessly that the plastic input ring chipped off.) “Do people realize that when you buy an electronic device, the warranties don’t cover physical or ‘accidental’ damage? You break your iPod and - I’d never say this to a customer - but the Genius Bar is not for you. Go to the store’s front desk and give it to the iPod recycling program, or go to iPodResQ.com. That’d save a ton of time, because we just can’t help you.”

Via Mac|Life

Tivo allows you to record TV shows whenever you want. There’s also a Tivo product that helps you transfer recordings to your Mac.

But if you have a non-Tivo Tivo (a Digital Video Recorder) like the DVR from Comcast, things aren’t as well integrated. Here is a tutorial on how to get video from your Comcast DVR to your Mac and even burn it as a DVD. It requires the Apple Firewire SDK and a variety of other software but it’s definitely possible.

Transferring video from a Comcast DVR to a Mac

As we’ve gone thru the steps of getting your Mac mini set up as a server, we’ve focused on free software and options that are available with Mac OS X. This sure makes it easy to set up an inexpensive server that you can host at your house of office.

But once the machine is set up and running, you may find that the slow or unreliable connection at home is not enough for you. Power outages, theft or slow upload speeds can be barriers when hosting at home. If you want a more reliable server, you’ll probably want to consider a data center to host your machine.

In a data center, you are paying mostly for the space. It can get quite expensive to host a full server. But with the small size of the Mac mini, you can colocate your server for much less.

I’ve mentioned from the beginning that I work with Macminicolo.net. We host hundreds of Mac minis as servers and that is how I’ve become familiar with the setup of these machines. In this video, I answer the most common questions asked and walk thru the signup process. Hopefully, this will show you hosting in a data center doesn’t need to be intimidating or expensive.

Watch it here: Getting The Mini In A Data Center

Shownotes:
- Macminicolo.net
- Server Video Series

I’ll be happy to answer any more questions here or from the Macminicolo.net contact page.