A few months back, I purchased a pair of Skullcandy Full Metal Jacket earphones. Unfortunately, they’ve stopped working and, what’s worse, the folks at Skullcandy still haven’t replied to any of my emails.

Rather than dwell on the disappointment of my bad Skullcandy buds, I decided to dig out the free headphones I received from Apple with my iPhone 3GS.

My bright white 3GS buds work wonderfully, plus they even feature in-line volume controls and a good quality mic. However the cables, being awkwardly spindly, tend to tangle up at any opportunity.

All the usual anti-tangling techniques involve rolling your wire up tightly — less movement means less potential for tangling. A tight roll can also damage the actual wire in your headphones, though.

I’ve happened upon a three-step technique that solves my tangling issues. There’s nothing to learn, there are no special knots, and there’s absolutely no wrapping, rolling or tying of any sort. It’s the perfect technique for lazy listeners.

It’s worth noting that you could probably use this method with any headphones, but I’ve only tried it using Apple’s iPhone 3GS buds. It’s made possible because of the little clip that’s attached to one of the wires on the 3GS headphones.

Note that I’ve found that one of the buds can get a little tangled occasionally, though most of the time, this trick works almost perfectly and I rarely encounter knots or tangles.

After testing this at home, I searched high and low and haven’t managed to find anyone else sharing this tip online. Please let me know in the comments if it works for you, too.

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A little over ten days ago Apple launched a shiny new Apple and the Environment microsite showcasing the company’s commitment to greener production and business practise. So I thought it would be appropriate to take a leaf (pun intended) from Apple’s book and look at ways to be more energy efficient in my daily computing.

Mac OS X has some great power-saving features for MacBook users, but there are simple things you can do to squeeze those precious extra minutes of useful life out of your battery. And, to prove it to myself, I’m doing all of my writing today on my MacBook Pro in my garden, without the power cord. Oh yes, I’m living life on the edge, people!

Some of these tips are screamingly obvious; others contribute only modest energy savings. In aggregate, though, these tips can help you get significant life out of a single charge. So here they are, presented in no particular order of importance.

1. Dim the screen

Relatively speaking, that LED panel uses a fabulous amount of power, and, most of the time, simply doesn’t need to be so super bright. Turn it down to a comfortable level where you don’t have to squint to see what you’re doing.

2. Dim the Keyboard

The optical fiber backlighting in the keyboard can sometimes be brought to life even when you can see the keys perfectly well. When that happens, you can probably afford to turn it down a bit.

3. Stop Playing DVDs/CDs…

Your optical drive uses a motor. And a laser. They exhaust batteries in no time.

4. …and Stop Playing Video/Music from the HDD

Sorry, I know you stopped using your Optical Drive, but playing music or video is a power-guzzling process irrespective of where the source files happen to be.

5. Spin Down That Disc

Avoid doing anything that requires the hard drive to spin. Be mindful of the applications you run, and avoid those which require lots of read/write activity. Also, pop in to your System Preferences → Energy Saver and select “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible.”

6. Go Easy on Your CPU

You can’t put the CPU to sleep, but you can go easy on it. Cycles spent crunching numbers equals battery drain. Quit anything you absolutely do not need. Mail, iCal, iTunes and goodness knows what else, even when hidden, are claiming CPU cycles.

7. Select the Right Video Card

If you own a late 2008 model MacBook Pro or later, you’ll have two graphic chips at your disposal. There’s the NVIDIA 9600, ideal for web browsing and text editing, or the more powerful 9600M, a better choice for gaming and video editing. In your System Preferences, choose Energy Saver and select Graphics: Better Battery Life. This will tell Mac OS X to use the 9600 chipset rather than its power-crazed big brother.

8. Internal Fans

Your MacBook should do a decent job of managing its own internal cooling, but if you’re competent doing this yourself, you might consider using a tool like smcFanControl to spin those things down. Just don’t blame me if you melt your MacBook as a result. (Seriously, if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t even try this tip!)

9. Switch Off the Radios

Your Wi-Fi and bluetooth radios don’t have to be on all the time, do they? If preserving power matters to you, turn them off.

10. Ditch the Mouse

If your bluetooth radio is turned off, you can pack away that wireless Mighty Mouse. Using a wired Mighty Mouse? You should pack that away, too; that laser is sucking-up the juice.

11. Unplug That iPod!

If you keep your iPod or iPhone connected to your MacBook, remove them. Even if you’re not actively syncing them (and you’re not — if you followed my advice, iTunes is turned off by now) they’re keeping their own batteries topped-up via that good old USB copper. Your MacBook’s battery will thank you for unplugging them.

12. External Drives

If you’re using USB-powered external hard drives for backup/storage, unplug them (but be aware this means your backup routine may be disrupted!) Even if you’re not using your external drive all the time, remember that if you invoke an Open or Save As dialogue, those connected storage devices will spin-up on the off-chance you want to use them. If you don’t, that was power wasted!

13. Close the Lid

If you are going to be inactive for a while, consider putting the machine to sleep (or if you’ll be inactive for a long time, go one better and shut-down completely.)

14. Plan Ahead

If it’s at all practicable, plan what you are going to do before you even power-up your MacBook.

So there you have it. Combine these tips into your daily mobile-compute and you ought to see some serious improvements in productive, working battery life. Also, remember to let your battery fully drain at least once a month.

How well did I do here in the garden today? I squeezed about four hours out of my battery before I had to plug in. Give it a try, you might be surprised at just how much power your little lithium friend can muster.

How do you maximize battery life? Short of actually plugging in to the nearest wall or carrying spare batteries (that’s cheating!), what tips have I missed from this list? Share them in the comments below.

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The greatest strength of iWeb, its ease of use, is also its greatest weakness. Through themes and templates, iWeb rigidly controls the fundamental design of web pages. While you can create custom pages with the use of HTML, iWeb offers templates for essentially two types of web pages: photos and blogs.

Creating a photo page in iWeb is as easy as dragging an iPhoto album from the Media Browser. Creating blog entries is also easy; just start typing over the placeholder text in a new entry template. Adding individual photos to a blog entry is drag-and-drop simple as well, but drag an album into a blog entry and iWeb will only create a separate photo page. What iWeb doesn’t tell you is that’s the first step to adding a photo album to any page in iWeb.

Actually, the first step is to create an Albums Page, a web page that’s acts as a directory of a group of photo albums, and one that’s left out of your web site map. I named mine “Misc” and use it to keep photo albums I use on non-album pages. For the above example, I created a photo page with a few images of an antique desk.

You then create the non-photo page for the album, in this case a blog entry about the antique secretary desk.

Going back to the photo page, select the rectangular frame that is the album and copy it. As you can see, it’s now in the clipboard.

Finally, you simply paste it into another web page, in this case at the bottom of the blog entry. Upon publishing, there is now an inline photo album on a blog page. The inline album can have all the features of the one on the actual photo page, too, including the option of a slideshow and image downloading. You can see the actual page here.

When you want photos in iWeb, but not a photo page, remember that an inline album is only a few steps away.

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My work is a Mac shop. Everyone has a Mac, some people even have two (desktop and laptop). Anyway, I recently decided to do an inventory to see what we had and what was/was not under warranty.

I started by making a Google docs spreadsheet and named it “Office Macs.” (Creative…I know). I then went around to each workstation and recorded the the type of mac, admin username & password, the OS version, GHZ, RAM, and serial number:

1. Click the apple in the finder bar
2. Click “About this Mac” (that will pop up a smaller window that tells you: OS Version, processor, Memory)
3. Click “More Info” (that will pop up another window, which you can get the serial number from)
4. Record all of this information in your Google doc

After you have all your info, you can go to this link, where all you do is input your serial number and country, and then click continue. After a few seconds you will be shown the type of Mac and the type of warranty on it. Have fun!

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I’m generally pretty lazy, so once I use Gypsy Maps to get directions somewhere, I take it to the next level and email it to my iPhone so that I can look at the map on the go. I have developed a pretty good routine:

1. Go to Gypsy Maps
2. Enter your start and end address
3. Click Print



4. Click the “Ink Saver” option



5. Click the print button, or File>Print
6. When the print box comes up, click PDF>Save as PDF



7. Save the PDF to your desktop

At this point you have map, but we want to take it with us. Cue iPhone:

1. Launch your email program and create a new message with you map as the attachment
2. Put the destination as the email’s subject ie “Bryant Park”
3. Put the physical street address in the body of the message
4. Email the message to yourself
5. Create a label “Maps” and apply it to the email



6. Finally, grab your iPhone and open the email and the attachment on your phone. This way it will be cached and you will be able to look at the map even when your on the subway and don’t have reception. (This step is super important, so make sure you do it before you lose reception!!!)

After a few weeks your “maps” label will be full of different subway maps, and you should be able to get around the city a lot easier. I also found a high resolution subway map on the internet and emailed it to myself, so that way I have a full subway map anytime I have my phone. Have fun!

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