Unfortunately for Apple users, all emails prior to that date are unavailable. Here is Apple’s official announcement: “As a first step toward restoring service, we restored web access to a portion of your MobileMe Mail account at 10:00 p.m. PDT, July 25. You can now log into me.com, and use the Mail web application to access all the messages you have received since the July 18 service outage. You can also compose, send, and receive new messages as normal. Please note that this interim solution does not provide access to any email messages received or saved before the outage began on July 18.”

Also as a temporary precaution, Apple doesn’t want anyone changing their MobileMe password, emails, or storage allocation.

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.

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.

Heat is very, very bad for the lifespan of the iPhone battery. Since it’s summer in the US, people should resist the temptation to leave their $600 device in the glovebox or on the dashboard. That would be bad.

Ars Technica said Apple has posted some helpful advice on extending the battery’s life span. Since changing the battery involves sending the iPhone back to Apple and paying $85 for a replacement battery, anything one can do to put that off would be a good idea.

Apple said the lithium battery needs to be used, so use the iPhone regularly (also helps with that revenue sharing Apple has going on with AT&T). Lock the iPhone when it is not in use (this deactivates the touch screen), and optimize settings:

• Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi consumes power even if you are not using its features to connect to a network. You can turn it off to save power. Go to Settings > General > Network > Wi-Fi.

• Bluetooth: Likewise, you can turn off Bluetooth to maximize battery life, as it also consumes power when not in use. Go to Settings > General > Bluetooth.

• Auto-Brightness: Turning on Auto-Brightness allows the brightness to adjust based on current lighting conditions. Go to Settings > Brightness.

• Equalizer: Adding EQs to playback uses more of your processor, since they aren’t encoded in the song. Turn EQ off if you don’t use it. If, however, you’ve added EQ to tracks in iTunes, you’ll need to set EQ to “flat” in order to have the effect of “off,” because iPhone keeps your iTunes settings intact. Go to Settings > iPod > EQ.

Via Apple

“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

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

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.

On the remote (controlled) computer you’ll need a VNC server, such as the free Vine Server, or you can turn on “Apple Remote Desktop” under the System Preferences Sharing pane.

On the local (controlling) computer, you’ll need a VNC client like the free Chicken of the VNC.

To create the SSH tunnel, you’ll need the free application JellyfiSSH (if you don’t want to type the SSH commands in the Terminal yourself.)

Watch it here: How to create an SSH tunnel for a secure VNC connection

For those who don’t know, this command makes your Mac speak. It’s really quite simple to do.

Here are the steps:

1. Open up Terminal.app. This application is located in the your Utilities folder on your Mac.
2. It will start up and have a prompt ready for you. At this point just type “say (insert words or sentence here) and push return.

3. As soon as the sentence is done, another prompt will appear. You can type a new sentence or just hit the up arrow if you want to repeat the last one.

And now for the fun part.

Richard and I both had Macs. We would have my Mac in the living room and be sure that SSH was enabled. (video tutorial here) Richard would have his Mac in the next room within hearing distance of mine. From there, he would log into mine via SSH so he had the prompt on my computer. (This wasn’t visible on my computer.)

We’d then invite a friend (aka, a cute girl to impress) over and tell her how cool Macs are because they can hold conversations with you. We’d then encourage her to “ask the Mac a question.” Richard would than answer the question and keep the conversation going by typing the “say” command from his computer.

One tip to make it more smooth is to let the victim friend know that sometimes the microphone couldn’t pick up the question because it was too soft or slurred. Of course that isn’t the case, but this gave Richard extra time to type the responses.

This is a very fun prank to do. It’s especially interesting to hear what kind of questions the person will ask the computer. If it’s a fella, it’s a given that there will be a question about the “size of his hard disk.”

Once there, you’ll find all kinds of goodies. I thought I’d run thru each one and let you know what it is and what you can do with it.

Activity Monitor – Activity Monitor let’s you know what is going on with your computer. It can let you know where your memory and CPU is being used most.

I think this app is mostly useful when there is an app that won’t quit or a document that can’t be trashed because it is “in use.” Fire up Activity monitor and you can kill that process.

There’s another nice use for Mac users with Intel machines. You can sort all the processes by “Kind” and there you’ll see any apps that are still running as a PowerPC app. The only one left on my list is that darn URLwell. What I wouldn’t do for an update of that app.

More info on Activity Monitor here

Airport Admin Utility – The application will let you configure your Apple Airport products.

I know there are cheaper routers out there, but I encourage all my family members to get the the Airport products because this app makes it so easy to manage these routers. When even my mom has set up a router successfully, you know it’s a good app.

Airport Setup Assistant – This app is used when you first set up your Airport product. It’s an easy wizard for setup.

Audio MIDI Setup – You can use Audio MIDI Setup to configure the audio input and output devices you use with your computer, such as microphones and audio playback equipment. If you need this app, you probably already know how to use it.

Bluetooth File Exchange – If you have a cell phone or PDA with bluetooth, this application makes it very easy to send files back and forth. This is a great way to take your photos off of your phone, or to add ringtones to your phone.

Colorsync Utility – This app gives you access to to Apple’s Colorsync specs. In this app you can set different profiles. There is also a nifty calculator that can convert between RGB and CMYK. This is another of those apps that isn’t useful to most people.

Console – Console gives you a “behind the scenes” look at your Mac. While you see all the pretty pictures and graphics of Mac OS X, there is a ton happening in the background. Console lets you watch that. It’s especially helpful to see error or status messages.

Digitalcolor Meter – If you are preparing your work for professional printing and you have an Apple monitor, you can use DigitalColor Meter to match the color on your screen against several industry standards.

Directory Access – Directory Access lists the different kinds of services that Mac OS X can access. The list includes directory services, which give Mac OS X access to user information and other administrative data stored in directory domains. The list also includes kinds of network services that Mac OS X can discover on the network.

You can enable or disable access to each kind of service. If you disable a kind of service in Directory Access, Mac OS X no longer accesses services of the disabled kind. The different services can be found here.

Disk Utility – There is all kinds of power in the Disk Utility. Here you can reformat a disk, check and fix permissions, and so many other things.
One of my favorite uses is to create encrypted disk images. That way you can keep sensitive documents on your Mac (e.g., scanned social security card, bank records) and they are safe if your Mac was ever stolen.

Grab – Grab will let you “grab” screenshots of your Mac. Of course, you can already do this with key combinations, but Grab does have one nice feature. You can do a timed grab. Start the timer and ten second later the Mac will grab a screenshot.

Grapher – Grapher lets you create 2D and 3D graphs from equations.
OS 9 came with a graphing calculator. OS X versions before Tiger had no graphing options. But, with Mac OS X Tiger, we now have Grapher.

Installer – You’ve probably used Installed a hundred times and didn’t know it. Whenever you download a new application that comes in a package or a metapackage, Installer makes it possible to install that application.

Keychain Access – Keychain Access gives you access to the keychain. Duh.

Anytime you save a password to a site or a server or anything on the Mac, it is stored in the keychain. If you forget one of those passwords and it isn’t filling in automatically, you can access keychain with this application and find your password.

Migration Assistant – This is simply one of the most amazing applications. If you’ve ever purchased a new Mac and migrated from your old one, this is the app you used. You can also use it to get a use from a different machine. I’ve used this application about 10 times and have had perfect and problem-free migrations each time.

Netinfo Manager – Netinfo is the built-in Mac OS X directory system. It stores information about users and resources and makes it available to Mac OS X processes that want to use it. This application helps you manage it. But I wouldn’t “manage” it unless you know what you’re doing.

Network Utility – Since I run a fairly large network of Macs this app is great. It makes it easy to ping machines, lookup name server and DNS, do traceroutes, port scans, etc. It also is a quick way to find info on your Network interfaces. (e.g., ethernet, airport, etc)

ODBC Administrtator – This will give you access to database management systems using Open Database Connectivity standards. (At least as far as I can tell. I’ve never used this app.)

Printer Setup Utility – When you get that new printer and hook it to your Mac, this app comes to the rescue. It will lead you along to get the printer working.

System Profiler – If you need information about your Mac, here is the place to come. It will tell you about your RAM and your drives and your processors and anything thing else you’d need.

Terminal – This is the gateway to the true power of Mac OS X. It is a terminal emulator that will let you use the Unix base of Mac OS X. I use this most often to connect via SSH and to set the crontab of my machine, but there are thousands more reason to use it.

You can learn more about how to use Terminal at our sister site, FreeMacUnix.com. Start from the earliest post and work right on thru to learn the basics.

VoiceOver Utility – Voiceover is a Mac OS X feature that lets you interact with your Mac via voice. It will read the text of websites, email, and documents. It also allows you to control your Mac using audible commands.

Voiceover Utility lets you determine how Voiceover will behave.

Well, that’s all of them.

I’m familiar with most of these apps, but some of them I’m not too experienced with. If you have any tips about any of these apps, I’d love to read them. You can leave them in the comments for me and for the other readers.