The first few hours with iPad

Well... I couldn't resist and was pleasantly surprised to find that our local Apple reseller had more than enough stock for everyone to go around (before 9:00am at least!) It is very good. All the built-in apps are very fast on both WiFi and using Telstra's iPad 3G coverage. Watching movies is easy and I think will fit right into my lifestyle just fine. The larger keyboard is big enough that you can just about touch type on it if you remember that not all the keys are where your fingers rem...

Using Preview to merge and create multi-page PDFs

The Preview.app in 10.5 and newer has many new features. One that appears to be undocumented, however, is the creation (merging) of multi-page PDF documents. It's simple: Use Preview to open up the two PDFs you would like to merge. Choose View » Show Sidebar (or click the Sidebar button). Make sure both PDFs are visible on the screen at the same time. When the Sidebar pops out, you will see a graphical representation of the pages in your PDF document. Simply drag the page, or pages (use Coma...

WordPress and SlideDeck

When using SlideDeck with WordPress, you might find that you can't get the SlideDeck to correctly insert as per the instructions. The hint: make sure you are using the Visual Editor in WordPress, not the static HTML editor. One of my hosting customers spent half the weekend with various browsers, version and test SlideDecks in his new WordPress blog, and yet everytime it was working for me! Turns out he had selected "Disable the visual editor when writing" in the User options for his ac...

Importing Movable Type to WordPress

When importing into WordPress, the importer doesn't seem to like accents and umlauts. One of my hosting customers is now going through the entries now and finding that where there is a word with an accent or umlaut in it (e.g. the first "a" in Trollhättan), the importer will stop at that letter and does not import the rest of the post. Thankfully, he didn't write the full Swedish version of words that often. Fun and games!

Issues with WP eDegrees° theme and FCG

If you are using the latest release of the eDegree° WordPress theme and you can't get the Featured Content Gallery to work on the front page, welcome to my world! After a lot of searching, I finally found the solution here. The secret is to comment-out the second line of the wp-content/themes/edegree/js/functions.js.

Printer Control in a Managed Network Environment

One of my customers recently complained of having to go out to the receptionist's computer and type in an administrator password everytime her local USB printer ran out of paper or got a paper jam. I think I have a fix: Create a new group in Workgroup Manager on the server. Add the user to the new group. Follow these instructions on the local computer with the USB printer attached: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3511 Has worked a treat - the user can pause and resume the printer witho...