imac Archives - Page 6 of 7

July 6, 2008

You’re starting to annoy me…

My Canon MP600r is starting to annoy me.

Every time I try to print from my iMac, the printer can not be found on the wireless network.

If I power cycle the printer, it “magically” appears and I can print!

The same more often then not for scanning.

Now I have no real idea what the problem is, whether it is a wireless, printer or some other issue.

I do need to do some further testing. Things I may do including connecting the printer by wire to a wireless WET54G and see if it is a printer issue.

If it is a wireless issue I may connect the printer direct to the iMac by USB and share it across the network.

Canon MP600r

More soon…

May 17, 2008

Pleaaaasssee be a little faster!

I have no idea why, but my iMac can be so slow at times…

This is a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 2 GB of RAM, so I am guessing that this really should be a fast computer, certainly faster than my old G4 PowerBook!

However at times it slows down to a real crawl, so slow that all I get is the spinning beachball of death!

However all is not lost I know why.

I run too many applications at once and I run them hard.

For example I will usually have three browsers open all with multiple tags. I also visit sites which have lots of javascript and ajax in them (such as WordPress blogs and Jaiku).

I do run a few PowerPC legacy applications (namely Word and Firefox).

I will have iPhoto and iTunes running in the background as well.

I would suspect that running EyeTV and EyeHome in the background also adds to the load.

So it’s not really the iMac’s fault, I know it’s all mine!

In theory what I should do is run a single application only and then open the others as and when I need them.

In theory that is a good idea.

In reality I don’t work that way.

Maybe I need a stack of computers with multiple spaces on a single monitor that allow me to work the way I want to without loading the lot so much so slow it right down to a crawl.

April 28, 2008

iMac revision, will we see Blu-Ray?

This week should see Apple release new versions of the iMac if the rumour sites are to be believed.

I wonder as well as new chips, etc… we will see the first Macs to have Blu-Ray drives?

It was back in 2005 that Apple joined the Blu-Ray consortium. MacWorld at that time said:

Apple did more than just affiliate with a trade group looking to develop and promote a new technology when it announced plans last week to join the Blu-Ray Disc Association’s board of directors. The company also inserted itself right into the middle of a battle over high-definition DVD.

Since joining the association we have not seen a single Mac with a integrated Blu-Ray drive. Third party developers (such as Roxio) have been providing Blu-Ray support for external Blu-Ray drives, however no such Apple drive has been seen.

Of course back in 2005 was the start of the HD format war, which saw HD-DVD lose this war back in February. Blu-Ray had won the format war.

So could now be the time we see Blu-Ray for the first time on the Mac platform?

Of course though Blu-Ray won the war, both Microsoft and Apple seem to be ignoring the physical HD formats and concentrating on the HD download market, with xBox Live and Apple TV.

March 10, 2008

Downloaded iPhone SDK

I have managed to download the iPhone SDK, but so far have left it alone. It does require an Intel Mac running Leopard and my iMac is still running Tiger (for a while).

My Mac mini is running Leopard, but it’s a G4 PPC Mac so no luck there.

Ah well out with the external Leopard drive and boot up the iMac.

February 21, 2008

Now why isn’t it working…

I have been tidying up my office at home, and moving the desk around.

I took the opportunity to unplug everything from the iMac in order to clean the power cables of all the external drives I have – it’s incredible how dusty they get stuck behind the Mac and the desk.

Having moved everything off the desk and moved the desk I put everything back.

Problem, the (somewhat irritating) blue light on my external LaCie DVD burner wasn’t on. Checked the powerstrip (I knew I had plugged it in), checked that the power supply was attached, even checked the firewire cables.

Hmmm.

Okay lets unplug all the other firewire devices; I have three firewire devices daisy-chained together, the DVD burner, an EyeTV 410 and a LaCie external hard drive.

So with just the burner attached, still no luck, wouldn’t even appear in System Profiler.

Had I broken it?

Was there a secret on off switch?

Annoyed, you bet!

Okay maybe it’s a duff socket on the powerstrip, lets change that over…

What’s that…

Ah!

The plug was in the socket, but was not all the way in.

Plug it in, okay so now it works!

Doh.

December 30, 2007

Bluetooth Printing

I have tried to print via Bluetooth from my iMac to my new A618 compact photo printer and have failed, in the main as the driver wasn’t on my iMac.

A618

It can be relatively simple as I found with the PhotoSmart 375 I had previously. This is one of the reasons I create the guides on my website so that when I need to install a new or an existing printer for a second time, I can remember how to do it, likewise by putting them online I can access the guides from anywhere and if required on a separate device (which is useful if you need to reboot or shut other applications down).

Checking my guide it is of course a driver issue, time to find the driver…

In the end I moved the photographs I wanted to print from the iMac to a USB stick and used the printer remotely instead.

December 29, 2007

Hmm, would the EyeTV 410 make a difference?

On my G4 Mac mini which I am using as a media centre under my television I have an EyeTV USB Freeview device for watching, pausing, rewinding and of course recording live television. I have been having a few issues with the quality of the recordings and viewing live television in terms of interference, but also when watching if a live TV window is open. I suspect that part of the problem is the speed of the G4 which is rather slow for a Mac and it only has 512MB of RAM.

I am wondering if I use the EyeTV 410 which is connected to my iMac whether that would make a difference? Whereas the EyeTV USB device is dependent a lot on the Mac for processing the video, the Firewire 410 device has a hardware encoder which in theory takes a lot of the load of video processing off the Mac.

I might give it a go and see how it works out, but will leave it till later as the iMac is going to record the final episode of Robin Hood tonight on BBC One.

December 2, 2007

Duplicate Bookmarks

For some reason when my iMac today synced my bookmarks (via .mac) it added all my bookmarks again to Safari, so I had duplicates of every bookmark both on the menu bar and in the bookmarks themselves.

No idea why .mac decided that I needed to add all my bookmarks again.

This is (I have found) one of the problems with maintaining multiple bookmarks across computers.

I can add a bookmark on the iMac, it will sync, be added to my .mac bookmarks and then be synced to the PowerBook. As it should be.

But there have been times when I have changed as in updated a bookmark on the PowerBook and in theory this should update back, but I have found later that .mac has synced the old book mark back again.

Though what happened today is very weird. I will probably need to do a manual sync to replace all the duplicated bookmarks with a single copy from .mac.

November 26, 2007

Vista Printing Success

The other day I mentioned I was having issues with printing from a Windows Vista PC to a printer on a Mac (running 10.4).

Well you know what I should read my own guides, specifically the guide on Printing to a printer on a Mac running 10.4.x from a Windows XP PC.

In that guide is the clear statement:

Choose the relevant Printer Driver (or click Have Disk and put in the relevant drivers disk). Note that you should only use the Windows driver if you have a Postscript printer

I forgot that you don’t use the Windows Printer Driver, you need to use a Postscript driver.

This only came to light when I decided to use Bonjour for Windows to install the printer and when it came to choosing the correct printer driver, the Bonjour Printer Wizard only gave me the choice of a generic Postscript printer!

And yes it printed, guide coming soon.