Setting up your OS to your liking can be an art for some. What if you need to set up Snow Leopard to present every user with the same look and settings? By following these steps you can have every user who logs into the machine receive the same look, feel and preferences that you desire. What we’ll be doing is creating a new user, setting it up to look how we want, then copying the settings so every new user will get those preferences. Setting Everything Up Login under your admin account and open up Accounts pane in System Preferences . Click the + to create a new Standard user. As an example, we’ll use the name  testuser. Log off and log back in as testuser. Set everything up the way you want. I customized the Dock, Safari’s home page and the Finder preferences

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How-To: Create a Custom User Template in Snow Leopard

Entertain and educate the most important members of your household with this family-friendly guide to the best Mac software, websites, and iPhone apps for kids. And don’t miss our step-by-step instructions for setting up parental controls on your Mac. Let’s play!   When they’re little, kids want to be just like you–pretending to drive the car, borrowing your shoes for dress-up, and yes, pulling up a booster seat to unwind with the family Mac after a hard day in the sandbox. As fun as some Mac staples are regardless of age (Photo Booth, anyone?), your kids deserve some special software just for them–to help them master basic computer skills, stretch their creative imaginations, reinforce educational concepts, and of course, just have a grand old time no matter how young they are. With that in mind, we test-drove 29 Mac and iPhone apps and 12 activity-packed websites just for kids. Some wound up being a little too dumbed down–on the verge of becoming, well, dumb–and our reviews separate the wheat from that chaff for you. Grab the mouse; it’s time to play!   Computer Skills   KidsMouse   KidsMouse teaches basic mouse skills with 18 learning games like ABC Puzzle, Color Ball, and Shape Puzzle. Each is operated using only the mouse or trackpad, and the brightly colored, charmingly illustrated graphics will delight little ones. Some of the games test your child’s sequencing (letters and numbers), shape recognition, and memory, while others just entertain–a bitmap paint program, for example, lets them draw colorful shapes. Really little kids might need prompting from Mom or Dad–ours had fun driving from our lap. We just wished KidsMouse would lock out keyboard input because those keys sure get banged on. Click matching shapes to hear a sound

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Kidding Around – The Best Software and Websites for Kids

The following how-to video will walk you through the basics of printer sharing on the Mac. You’ll learn both how to set up and how to access printers on a network. We will cover the following points: Setting up Printer Sharing Printing to a Shared Printer Adding a Printer via System Preferences You can watch the embedded video below (lower quality) or watch the full quality version here (28MB).

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Video How-To: Printer Sharing on a Mac

A cool shooter with an even cooler soundtrack, Bullet Candy Perfect resembles the renowned top-down shooter Geometry Wars, only with better graphics. Since you play to the rhythm of the beat, the techno music really sucks you in, and that synchronicity can be helpful when going for a perfect run. You pilot your tiny ship around the space levels, zapping laser-firing enemy ships, clumps of gold rings, and some menacing green orb-like things that follow you around. In some stages, you’ll become so surrounded by the green orbs that you only have two choices: Let them kill you, or commit suicide. As a strategic option, committing suicide results in the loss of two lives, but you get to keep all your perks and power-ups. So if you find yourself trapped but have lots of lives left, it’s in your best interest to right-click to be reborn to fight another day. Everybody dance now! While shooting other ships, of course.   You gain perks by picking up spinning objects that look dangerous, but they’re actually power-ups. Rounder objects resembling planets boost your laser, while others allow you to become invincible for one round, fire triple-shot ammo, pick up an extra life, and rack up bonus points. The fluid controls have you using the normal WASD keys to move your ship around and the mouse to aim and fire. We like the game’s progress bar, which tracks your achievements, high scores, average score, highest level you’ve reached, the amount of games played, play time, and your rank. You can also look at high scores online and compare them to others around the world. Even better, though, is the Radiohead-style “pay what you like” price: Developer Charlie’s Games is selling Bullet Candy Perfect for whatever you think is fair, starting at a minimum of $1.

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Bullet Candy Perfect

I love Time Machine for its simplicity and the fact that it’s free. Apple did the right thing in creating a backup utility that was integrated into the OS and was actually useful. Anyone who has fought with Windows Backup can tell you, this has been needed for a long time. Apple created a beautiful backup  utility and then made money on hardware that seamlessly works with it. For the home user, nothing could be more simple. In the office environment however, users tend to backup to server shares and not local external drives. So, let’s take a look at how to use Time Machine over a network. Setting it Up It’s easy to do this in Leopard Xserve by sharing a backup folder. Under Server Admin, you can check the box “Enable as Time Machine backup destination.” This worked great in Leopard but in Snow Leopard, Time Machine no longer saw this as an available destination. Luckily, changing a property for System Preferences solves this. Enter this command in Terminal: sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 This tells Time Machine to treat network shares as possible backup locations. Now, when I go to select a disk in the Time Machine preferences, I see my mounted AFP share listed

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How-To: Use Time Machine Over a Network

Filed under: Audio , Hardware , Multimedia , How-tos , Apple There are, roughly, several billion kinds of microphones and headsets, all of which can theoretically be used on your Macintosh to let you voice chat over iChat or Skype. The problem is that a fair percentage of them fail to work exactly right, just out of the box. Fortunately, there are several tricks that can help you analyze why your audio chats aren’t working quite right. Here’s a quick run-down of the steps you should take. Start in System Preferences. The Sound preferences pane lets you select devices for your sound input and output. And, importantly, it lets you test your input device and adjust its volume. After attaching your mic to your Macintosh, use this pane to set-up and test. Continue reading Mac 101: Adding new microphones to your Mac Mac 101: Adding new microphones to your Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Mac 101: Adding new microphones to your Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds

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Mac 101: Adding new microphones to your Mac

Last year I took a look at a number of Subversion clients for OS X, finally settling on Versions as my client of choice for my personal coding needs. At the time, I was running a Linux server on some old generic hardware from the days before I drank the Apple Koolaid. After deciding to upgrade my wife’s 17″ iMac with the new i5 27″ model, I realized I could ditch the old Linux hardware and get some great power savings (and hence reduced electricity bill) in the process. The first task I had was moving my SVN repository over from the Linux machine (Ubuntu 9.10) to the iMac running OS X 10.6…and this is how I did it. All of the SVN application binaries, including the server, already come pre-installed with OS X 10.6, located in the /usr/bin/ directory, so we just have a few steps to get that running. Create a system user for SVN. Create a new repository to store your code in.

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How-To: Setup a SVN Server Under OS X 10.6

Section: Software + Apps , Audio , Mac + Computers , Peripherals , Reviews Provides: USB mic and Headphones Developer: Samson Minimum Requirements: USB port Price: $89.95 Availability: Now Whether you’re an aspiring podcaster or musician, or you’re just obsessed with the sound of your own voice, Samson’s Q2U USB recording kit might be the perfect fit for you, your voice, and your budget. The kit has all of the essentials you’ll need to start recording audio. It comes standard with a set of DJ style headphones, a very special microphone, a desktop tripod, a USB cable and an XLR to 1/4 inch cable. With a Mac, you also already have most of the software you are likely to use with the mic package. Garageband will support the Q2U as soon as you plug it in. Just go to Garageband’s preferences (or System Preferences) and change the input (and perhaps the output) to the Samson mic. This is actually what makes the mic fairly unique. While on the outside it looks like a standard XLR cardiod microphone with an on and off switch, it’s actually hiding a USB input and output. This means you can plug the mic directly into to your Mac with a USB cable and even plug in a pair of headphones into the mic. Good thing it comes with headphones. There are even volume up and down controls on the mic that work exactly like the buttons on your Mac’s keyboard. These guys, they think of everything… If you’re a podcaster, you might want to give the desktop tripod a go, but don’t expect much. It, like the headphones, is good, but not great. It will hold your mic on your desktop, but not with a ton of confidence.

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Appletell reviews Samson’s Q2U recording kit

Santa may have been generous enough to bring you a new Mac for Christmas, but after firing it up and poking around a bit, you might be overwhelmed and not sure where to begin. Thankfully, MacLife.com is here with some ideas on how to spend Christmas Day (and beyond) with your new friend — just consider us one of Santa’s friendly elves! 5 Things To Do First With Your New Toy 1. Visit Software Update OK, so maybe checking to see if your operating system is up-to-date doesn’t sound like the most fun thing to do with your new computer, but you’d be surprised how many times small problems that crop up even with new systems can be solved by doing so. Under the Apple Menu, select “Software Update…” and install anything that pops up there. Some updates may require a reboot, so be sure you’re not in the middle of something else before you do so. 2. Fire up your own personal Time Machine If you’re a first-time computer owner, you haven’t experienced the horror of losing your valuable files due to a hardware failure or hard drive crash. But you will, someday! It’s better to be safe than sorry, which is why Apple introduced Time Machine with Mac OS X Leopard 10.5, and it’s gotten even better (and faster) with Snow Leopard 10.6

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Setting Up Your New Mac: The First 25 Things You Need To Do

  Many Mac users were wowed by Apple’s Mac mini server package when it was announced, but at $1,000, it’s still a bit too pricey for even the average person to justify shelling out the cash for a home server. Fear not true believers, we’re going to show you how to turn that old Intel Mac you’ve got lying around into a server that can duplicate many of Snow Leopard Server’s features without shelling out another penny. Difficulty Level Hard What You Need > Intel Mac > OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (We recommend the Snow Leopard Family Pack) > MAMP (Free) > OpenFire (Free) > XCode > QuickTime Broadcaster (Free) > Router that supports Port Forwarding (We used the Airport Extreme)     Serving up Web Pages Mac OS X comes with the Apache web server built in, but if you want to easily have access to MySQL (for databases), PHP (web programming language), or Perl (another programming language), then we suggest you install XAMPP or MAMP , which includes Apache, PHP, Perl, and other tools in a lightweight package that you can install with just one download. For this tutorial, we’ll install MAMP, but you could choose XAMPP as well. Instructions on how to install each package are available on both sites. Head to the MAMP download page   and grab MAMP. We’ll be using the free version of MAMP to set up our web server. Once the application is downloaded, extract the .dmg file and drag the MAMP folder to your applications folder.  To start the web server navigate to  Applications > MAMP and launch the MAMP application. After you’ve launched MAMP, click on the Open Start Page button.

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Create a Cheap Server Using the Regular Snow Leopard Install