By Christopher Breen

Cures for a crusty keyboard

Reader Marcie Phipps seeks to clean up her act. She writes:

I have an old keyboard that I love, but its keys are sticking due to built up dust and gunk. Is there a way to clean it?

This is a common question and with it come solutions both tried-and-true and controversial. Starting with the tried-and-true:

The first step in cleaning a keyboard is to unplug it, grab a can of compressed air (found at any electronic supply store), and blast air around the base of the keys in the hope of dislodging whatever’s gumming up the works. Do this holding the can of compressed air upright. Flip the can upside down and there’s some danger that you’ll squirt propellant into the keyboard.

Turn the keyboard over and give it a good shake in the hope of removing the gunk you’ve loosened. While in this position, blast it a few more times with the compressed air. If a key remains unresponsive after this treatment, gently pry it up with a small flathead screwdriver and clean its post with a slightly damp cloth.

Now, the controversial:

If the keyboard is so filthy that it appears to be a lost cause–as it might after a major coffee, soda, or Mai Tai spill–put it in the dishwasher. Place it in the top rack, dial the dishwasher to a rinse only setting, don’t put soap in the thing, and run it through. Remove the keyboard and let it drain, with keys down, until it’s completely dry–this could take a couple of days.

This is controversial because some keyboard manufacturers suggest that you not do this as they won’t guarantee that the keyboard will survive the ordeal–particularly if you hit the keyboard with really hot water, detergent, and flying cutlery.

Speaking from personal experience, I’ve done this with a beloved Matias TactilePro keyboard that I’d given up for dead (this is the perfect condition under which to conduct this experiment). I’m happy to report that not only did it survive, it works perfectly (and is a whole lot nicer to look at than it once was).

E-mail and the advantages of deception

Reader Gary Campbell expresses a concern about his privacy along these lines:

When I visit some Web sites I’m asked to provide an e-mail address. I’m concerned that this will lead to more spam. Any suggestions?

A couple, yes.

Despite what you learned in Sunday school, your first best option is to lie. When asked for an e-mail address for no apparent good reason, feel free to enter joeblow@example.net and smack the Return key. With luck, the Web site will take this as the goods and let you get on with your business.

Regrettably, this technique doesn’t work as well as it once did. Increasingly, you’re asked to submit an e-mail address and then the asking body sends you a link to whatever you’ve requested via e-mail. If the address you submit is no good, you don’t receive the message, and you can’t get the thing you were after.

That doesn’t mean, however, that you must offer your primary e-mail address. I’ve created a couple of free Google and Yahoo addresses for exactly this purpose. When asked for an e-mail address that I know will result in an activation message, I plunk in one of these addresses. I then check that account for the activation e-mail and then ignore the account until I next need it. (Meaning I don’t include it in a schedule that automatically checks my e-mail.)

If you want to get very fine with this, you can create a new account for each place you visit. For example, if you must submit your e-mail address to Company X, create a new Google account for joeblowcompanyx125@gmail.com. Should you receive spam at this address, you have a reasonable idea of who’s responsible. At that point you can complain or swear off that company in the future.

If you have a MobileMe account you can create up to five alias addresses. Messages sent to these aliases are forwarded to your primary MobileMe address. So, for example, when dealing with the famed Company X, create an alias for joeblowcompanyx125@me.com. After you’ve received Company X’s activation e-mail, delete the alias. Any future messages sent to this account won’t go through as it’s now a dead address.

Macworld Senior Editor Christopher Breen is the author of “Secrets of the iPod and iTunes (6th edition),” and “The iPod and iTunes Pocket Guide (4th edition)” both from  Peachpit Press

and

“Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Essential Training (video)” from lynda.com

Find Chris’ books at  www.amazon.com and www.peachpit.com. Get special user group pricing on Macworld Magazine! Subscribe today at http://www.macworld.com/useroffer

by Christopher Breen

Speed-up iMovie clips

Andy Milder (aka Dean Hodes on Showtime’s Weeds), sends this question:

While filming Weeds last year, I borrowed a Flip recorder to record my makeup transformation into a Black man (African-American doesn’t seem to fit…who knows what I was…). I wanted to edit it and then speed it up, so you could see me go from lily-white to much darker in mere seconds. One problem: I have no idea how to do it. Help?

iMovie ’09 can do the job. Like so:

Plug your Flip camcorder into your Mac. By default iPhoto will launch and the Flip camcorder will be selected. (The FlipShare software may also launch but choose iPhoto instead.) Select the clip you want to import and click the Import Selected button. The clip will import into iPhoto.

Now launch iMovie ’09. In the Event Library area select iPhoto Videos. Your Flip clip should appear in the iPhotos Videos section at the bottom of the window. Select the clip and drag it up into the Project pane.

Double-click the clip in the Project pane and in the Clip tab of the Inspector window that appears, click the Convert Entire Clip button. (You have to do this before you’re allowed to adjust the speed of a Flip camcorder’s clips.) When iMovie finishes converting your clip the Inspector will show a speed control slider in the Clip tab. You can drag this as high as 800-percent.

However, you can make the clip even faster than that simply by entering a higher value in the Speed field. Optionally, you can tell iMovie how long you’d like the clip to play by entering a value in the Duration field below the Speed field–2:00, for example, if you’d like the clip to last 2 minutes.

Now just export your project using a command in the Share menu and you’re good to go.

Loved the drawer bit with Kevin Nealon, btw.

Shifting large media libraries

Reader Remo seeks a way to store media files in a location other than a user’s Home folder. He writes:

My brother’s family 24-inch iMac has a hard drive of 500GB and it’s filling up pretty fast with pictures, movies, music, etc. Usually I would just replace the hard drive in a computer with a larger one, but we would be voiding the warranty on his computer, which isn’t something we want to do.

I want to have their home directory or certain folders on their iMac to serve as a representation to where these files are actually being saved to, which is an external hard drive. I have been a long time Mac user, but I don’t see an easy way of doing this. Is there a way within MacOS X (10.6) to accomplish this?

I see several ways to approach this one.

If all you’re after is a larger startup drive for storing files, just use an external hard drive as your boot drive. Find a fast FireWire drive, clone the contents of the internal drive to it using a tool such as Bombich Software’s donation-ware Carbon Copy Cloner (making the external drive bootable in the process), and designate that external drive as the startup drive. Done.

Or, if you simply want to store media files on the external drive, this can be easily done as well. For pictures, copy the iPhoto Library file from your brother’s Pictures folder (found inside his user folder) to the external hard drive. Hold down the Option key and launch iPhoto. A dialog box will appear that asks “What Photo Library Do You Want iPhoto to Use?” Choose the copy of the iPhoto Library file you just copied and click the Choose button. iPhoto will now read and write to this iPhoto Library rather than the one on the internal drive.

For the music and movies that iTunes uses, dig down into your brother’s Music folder (also inside his user folder), open the iTunes folder, and copy the iTunes Music folder to the external drive. Launch iTunes, choose Preferences, click the Advanced tab, and click the Change button in the iTunes Media Folder Location area. Also enable the Copy Files to iTunes Media Folder When Adding to Library option. iTunes will now use this folder as well as add new media to it.

Or, you can place your brother’s user folder on the external drive. My colleague, Dan Frakes, explains how to do that in this tip from Mac OS X Hints. (Note that you no longer need to use -rsrc to do this.)

“Locking” an external hard drive

Reader Dustin Kuo is interested in locking down an external hard drive. He writes:

Is there a software that can lock the external hard drive so if someone got hold of it, they wouldn’t be able to view the data?

I wish that waving a magic wand over your drive and barking “Lock!” could work this minor miracle but, alas, even with such a wand and Christopher Plummer’s commanding voice you’re not going to realize the results you’re after.

What you need to do is create an encrypted space on all or a portion of that drive and then move the files you want to protect into it. You have a number of ways to do that.

One is built into Mac OS X. Open Disk Utility, choose File -> New -> Blank Disk Image and in the resulting window choose Sparse Disk Image from the Image Format pop-up menu and either 128-bit AES Encryption or 256-bit AES Encryption from the Encryption pop-up menu. Then choose a size from the Size pop-up menu (select Custom and then enter a size if the preconfigured sizes don’t suit you). Name the image, choose to save it on your external drive, and click the Create button. You’ll be prompted for a password. Enter and verify that password and click OK and you have a protected image that can be opened only with your password. Move your files into this image and you’re good to go.

Note that you should choose to not store this password in your keychain if you’re all that concerned about security. Also, this image will take up only as much space as the accumulated content inside it. So, even if you’ve asked for a 5GB image file, if you put 1GB worth of files in it, the image will be only 1GB. You can then add files until you reach that 5GB limit, at which point, the image is full.

Another free option is the open-source TrueCrypt. This is a cross- platform encryption tool that you can use to encrypt folders and volumes. Again, if you intend to encrypt an entire external hard drive you’ll first have to move the files off that drive, format it with TrueCrypt, create an encrypted volume, and then copy your files to that volume. TrueCrypt features more encryption schemes than does Disk Utility.

And then there’s the $35 Knox, which our resident Gemeister Dan Frakes tells me is the goods. Like Disk Utility, it creates images using either the 128- or 256-bit AES standard. Unlike with Disk Utility or TrueCrypt, you can use Spotlight to search the contents of a Knox image (termed a “vault”). (You can search the image only when it’s open.) And Knox includes a backup feature.

Macworld Senior Editor Christopher Breen is the author of “Secrets of the iPod and iTunes (6th edition),” and “The iPod and iTunes Pocket Guide (4th edition)” both from  Peachpit Press

and

“Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Essential Training (video)” from lynda.com

Find Chris’ books at  www.amazon.com and www.peachpit.com. Get special user group pricing on Macworld Magazine! Subscribe today at http://www.macworld.com/useroffer

By Christopher Breen

Dealing with a full hard drive

Reader Matthew Mitchell feels the walls closing in. He writes:

I have a 17-inch MacBook Pro with a 320GB hard drive. (Formatted it has 297GB, but who’s counting?) I’m down to 70GB and I heard that a full hard drive is a slow hard drive. I went looking for files to delete and found a fair few that were either hardly ever used or never used. Are there any secret locations on my hard drive that large and disposable files could be hidden?

There’s lots to talk about here.

Let’s start with the capacity of your hard drive. For just about ever, hard drive manufacturers have defined a megabyte as 1,000KB. The Mac OS defines a megabyte as 1,024KB. It’s for this reason that a 320GB drive (using the 1,000KB measurement convention) appears to have much less capacity, because it’s being measured by the OS using the 1,024KB definition. It’s been reported that this behavior will change in Snow Leopard so that OS X 10.6 will show a 320GB hard drive having exactly that capacity.

As for a full hard drive slowing down your Mac, it’s true. OS X uses your hard drive to swap files out of RAM and if there’s very little room to do that, your Mac needs to work harder at the job and therefore slows down. Note, however, that at 70GB your 320GB isn’t there yet. Continue to leave 10 to 15-percent of your hard drive free and you should be in fine shape.

Now, let’s turn to lurking files and folders. In this regard it’s worth your while to download a copy of The Omni Group’s free OmniDiskSweeper. This utility will tell you how much space is consumed by folders and files on your Mac. When you find something you believe you can do without, simply highlight it and click on the Delete button in the bottom-left corner of the window.

Good places to start looking are in the /Library and ~/Library folders. For example, look in the Audio folder within the /Library folder and you’ll find an Apple Loops folder that holds GarageBand’s audio files, which take up many gigabytes of storage. If you don’t use GarageBand, this folder can go. Similarly, iDVD’s themes (found in /Library/Application Support/iDVD) take up a couple of gigabytes of storage that you can free up if you never touch iDVD.

Because it doesn’t go without saying for everyone, allow me to offer a couple of safety tips. First, don’t throw out items in the System folder unless you really, really, really know what you’re doing. And, more generally, don’t toss out files and folders stored elsewhere on your Mac unless you know the purpose they serve. Doing so could land you knee-deep in the soup.

Streaming large movies

Reader Michael Quinn has a lot of questions regarding a single movie. He writes:

I have a 1.75GB MPEG-4 Quicktime Movie file. If I subscribe to MobileMe and upload it using iDisk, will friends and family be able to see it? If so, could they stream it, or would they have to download it? Or, is this file too large for them to access at all? If MobileMe can’t do this, is there any other movie/video hosting app that could?

If you dropped it in you iDisk’s Public folder your friends and family would be able to download it but not stream it. But let’s back up a second. That’s a honkin’ big movie and one that, in its current form, I wouldn’t advise streaming. First of all, it could take a long time to start streaming to your viewers. And, perhaps more importantly, if a lot of people access the thing, you could easily run over your MobileMe monthly data transfer limit (that limit is 200GB of data transfer for a standard MobileMe account).

If you want to go with MobileMe I’d severely slim down that movie. One good way to do that is to import it into iMovie ’09, pull it into a project, and then choose Share -> MobileMe Gallery. In the sheet that appears you can choose a size that will work better for streaming–Tiny (176 x 144), Mobile (480 x 272), Medium (640 x 360), or Large (960 x 540) for a 720p HD movie.

From the sound of your question, you don’t yet have a MobileMe account. If the MobileMe Gallery feature is the single thing that’s pushing you toward this $99-per-annum service, perhaps you could save some money by creating a YouTube account and posting your video to that fine free service using the Share -> YouTube command. As with MobileMe Gallery you have options for creating movies of different sizes and you needn’t grant the general public access to your movie. Just make it a personal movie and then grant access to your family and friends.

No, you’re not infected

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous is concerned about a very scary looking website. I attempt to calm the waters.

I used Yahoo to search for something and was sent immediately to the following [redacted] site. I believe my Mac was invaded and don’t know what to do!

First, relax. Your Mac wasn’t invaded, infected, compromised, co-opted, or conquered. If you’d clicked through a few of those dire pop-up warnings you might have been as amused as I was to see a phony Windows Security Alert appear on a Macintosh. What you’ve encountered is termed “scareware”–a scam that attempts to frighten those confronted with these pages into downloading a hunk of software that will allegedly deal with the problem.

The chain of events goes like this: A perfectly legitimate URL is hijacked by the scammers and you’re redirected to the scareware page. That page is designed in such a way that several dialog boxes pop-up, warning you that your computer is infected. Click Cancel and you’ll just get more warnings and an interface that makes it appear like your computer is being scanned. If you fall for the trick and click the buttons necessary to download the offered antivirus software, you’ll pay for a product that is likely a hunk of malware (and I hate to think what happens to your credit card information.) This malware is bad for Windows PCs but has no effect on Macs.

Regrettably, these pages are sometimes difficult to dismiss because the constant pop-up warnings prevent you from leaving. Clicking OK may get rid of the pop-ups so that you can close the window or tab (and no, doing so won’t automatically download the software to your Mac), but I faced a situation with my wife’s Mac (who was just concerned as you were) where I had to force-quit Safari to get away from the scareware page.

You can take some comfort in knowing that the search engine folks do their best to weed out this junk and that those who promote it have been–and will continue to be–prosecuted for engaging in such malicious and scammy activities.

Macworld Senior Editor Christopher Breen is the author of “Secrets of the iPodand iTunes (6th edition),” and “The iPod and iTunes Pocket Guide (4th edition)” both from  Peachpit Press

and

“Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Essential Training (video)” from lynda.com
Find Chris’ books at  www.amazon.com and www.peachpit.com. Get special user group pricing on Macworld Magazine! Subscribe today at http://www.macworld.com/useroffer

Read the story here.

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Todd Ogaswara, editor of Mobile Apps Today, makes a few predictions.

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