Spam. It’s those mail messages that we didn’t ask for and don’t want.

As opposed to welcome mail which is something we may or may not have asked for, but want nonetheless.

There is no one, guaranteed way of stopping spam. I wish there was. Actually, there is, but it’s a bigger topic than can be covered in this post. But I digress.

One way we Mac users can start to reduce the amount of spam we get is to use a little known feature in Apple’s Mail program to return emails as if our account doesn’t exist.

But first, some background on spam and those that send it. Spam is sometimes sent to known email addresses, these addresses are sometimes bought from unscrupulous web site owners that sell the list of their subscribers to anyone that will pay for it.

Spam is sometimes sent to addresses that are generated from a script or a program. This script starts with a@a.com, moves to b@a.com and by working through the alphabet to zzzzzzz@zzzzzzz.com one letter at a time, will eventually get every email address on the planet. They then watch for ‘bounces’ which are messages sent from an email server which says “there’s no such address at this organization”. If the spammer is paying attention, they will remove the addresses for which they get a bounce from their list.

In Apple Mail, there’s an easy way to make it look like a message has ‘bounced’.

First, click the offending message, then on the Menu Bar, click Message, then click Bounce. Then in the resulting dialog box, click Bounce again. That’s it.

The message will be returned to the sender saying there’s no such address at this organization.

This isn’t going to work for all spam, but it will work for the human-generated spam messages.

Thanks for reading.

If you know me, you’ll know that I’ve decided to take this VanMacGuy thing on professionally. I’ve started my own company that is focused on supplying Macintosh Technical Support and training to individuals and small businesses in the Lower Mainland area of Vancouver.

Vanmacguy.com has been my own personal blog site for a few years now and has had limited success and a small but growing readership. Vanmacguy.com is no longer just a blog site.

It’s become the home site for my company, VanMacGuy Computer Consulting. There is still a blog component and will always be, there will also be a hints section, like there was before, but it’ll be broken out on to a page of its own.

I know there are a lot of subscribers to vanmacguy.com out there and I hope you’ll continue to subscribe and see the site continue to be as useful as it was before.

We’ve decided to go with WordPress for the company site because we want to keep it fluid and dynamic. My competition have lovely, pretty websites that I’m sure cost them a small fortune, but what’s the point of having a web site if it never changes? We want this to grow and change.

We have the same Twitter presence as before, and we have a FaceBook presence as well.

I’m blogging about this because it’s something that will (or already has) happen to a lot of us.

You’re typing away, creating your proposal or resume or letter or what ever it may be, and you come to run it through the spell checker.

There’s a word in there that’s not recognized in Word’s dictionary but you want to use it anyway (a person’s name or company name), so you try to click Add, to add it to your Custom Dictionary, but Add is greyed out.

Now, when you hit up Google for the reason why you can’t do this, it’ll tell you how to create a Custom dictionary, but you probably already know how to do that. And that’s not the problem anyway (or wasn’t in my case).

I already had a custom dictionary created, but the problem is that the language in my custom dictionary was messing things up.

Think about it though, your custom dictionary doesn’t need a default language, so go to the spell properties, select your custom dictionary, and select None for the language.

Should be all good to go now.

This book was given to me for review purposes.

The digital shoebox is a book that aims to teach digital photographers how to store their photographs on their computer so that they are safe and easily accessible.

In the book, author Sarah Bay Williams teaches that the best way to organise your digital photographs is not by using software but by creating your own catalogue system and sticking to it.

Ms. Williams instructs the reader to create folders or directories for each year, and then folders within the year folders for each month. Then within each year, special folders would be created which would contain copies of photographs that are to be printed, emailed, posted online, or used in some other way. The reason behind these special folders is that your original photographs should remain untouched so if you wanted to reduce the size of a photograph so that you could email it or post it on the Internet somewhere, you would copy the original into a special folder, make your changes to it and email it from there.

This book very strongly emphasises backing up your entire photograph library. This is something that cannot be stressed strongly enough in this reviewers opinion. For most of us, our computer is the only place we have these files. We don’t print them and unlike film, there is no negative that we can safely store away for safe keeping. All hard drives will eventually fail. It’s not a question of if, but when. So following the advice in this book will see each reader have not only a copy of their files on a different hard drive should their usual hard drive fail, but a copy stored outside the house somewhere in the case of an emergency where the computer is lost or destroyed.

While I personally agree that your original photographs should be protected at all times and that good backups are extremely important, I can’t help believing that the filing system the author has readers create is overly complex, leads to much duplication and will be an administrative nightmare as your library grows over the years. Especially the special folders mentioned earlier, these are nothing more than ‘albums’ in most photo management software. The album just stores a link to the original file and not the file itself thereby removing the need for multiple copies of the same file in different locations on your computer.

The instructions for creating the folders and for doing anything else technical are given for both Mac and PC users, so both wold feel at home.

This book will be very useful to those that dislike or distrust photograph management software like iPhoto on the Mac or Windows Photo Gallery on the PC. The author’s style and the size of the book at only 155 pages including the index, makes for an easy read. One thing that I very much liked was that the “screen shots” are actually hand-drawn images, rather than the normal actual screen shots. This was a nice detail and gives the book a bit of a personality and makes it less of a technical manual.

We all know that yesterday Apple revealed it’s much fabled and talked about killer device. The iPad. Twitter is alight with discussion, TV is talking about it, I even heard a discussion of it on our local radio station this morning.

Here are my thoughts.

Firstly, the name. Cue the feminine hygiene product jokes…… There, you all done now? No one initially likes Apple product names at first. Except perhaps for the iPhone. So we’ll all get used to it. I read a blog post this morning here about branding and about how a chance was missed at a good first impression. Poppycock. The fact that this person and everyone else is talking about the name in either a positive or negative light is evidence enough that it worked. Someone once said that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Case in point here I think.

Secondly, for those that say it’s a miss because of no multi-tasking (each application that’s running takes over the full display, like the iPhone does now). Get with the program people. This is not meant to be a multi-tasking powerhouse machine. Did you watch the video (it’s here if you want to see it)? It’s been demonstrated by people sitting in a comfortable chair, not behind a desk. I personally don’t think about multi-tasking when I’m reading a book or a newspaper. Or buying movie tickets. It’s not meant for multi-tasking. It’s a different class of product. Look at where it sits in the Apple lineup. Between iPhone and a laptop. If you want a powerhouse and multi-tasking, there’s a laptop for that.

For those that say it’s crippled because it runs iPhone OS and not Mac OS. It’s not a Mac, people. It’s just not. It’s not supposed to be. It’s not meant to replace your laptop for every day productivity and work. That’s not its place. Apple have created versions of iWork applications for iPad. So you can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations with iPad. And remember when people didn’t buy Macs because there were no applications for it? That took some time, but it’s certainly changed now. There’s nothing you can do on a PC that you can’t do on a Mac. Give it time. Look at all the applications in the iTunes app store. They will come. It’s not even available for three months and this is a generation 1 product. There were no apps for the iPhone when it was gen 1 either.

For those upset at the lack of a camera (I was one of those initially). Where would you put it? There’s only one characteristic of iPad that orients it. And that’s the home button. You can use it in portrait mode or in landscape mode. So it they had put a camera in and had put it opposite the home button, then when you were using it in landscape mode, the camera would have been hidden behind your thumb. This point works for wherever you’d have them put the camera. Also, as the device is designed to be used while you’re holding it, I don’t know about you but watching someone on video when the camera is moving because it’s being held, makes me feel seasick. All these things put together make me realise that there was no good way to have a camera in iPad. And that’s why there isn’t one.

Take the device for what it is, or don’t take it at all, it’s up to you. But complaining because it’s not a laptop is like complaining that you can’t see video from your copy of the morning paper. It’s not meant for that. It’s a new class of device.

I feel that Apple have done it again and have defined a new space that everyone is going to rush to fill but no one will do it as well.

You read it here first.

A few weeks ago, my iPhone started to exhibit strange, non-typical behaviour.

I would press the Home button on the front to wake it up and nothing happened. I’d have to press it a few times to get it to wake up. Then, once awake, I’d swipe to start using it and I’d have to do that a few times too. I did the usual, restart, power down and back on things that we all do when something doesn’t work (damn you Microsoft for teaching us that we have to re-boot all the time) but it didn’t make any difference. Once I was up and running, it was still slow, but the slowness didn’t look like a performance issue, instead it looked like a touchscreen issue. Like my input was being ignored or worse still, not recognized in the first place.

That was my biggest fear. That my touchscreen was failing.

So I turned to Google to try and find other poor souls that had the same problem. No one else seemed to have the exact same symptoms that I did. Others had faulty buttons, some had faulty touch screens but no one else’s problems were the same as mine.

I decided to try a restore from backup, because I have backups of my iPhone, as do you right? You have it backed up through iTunes? Right?

Anyway, I restored from the most recent backup and was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t have to reinstall all my Applications or wait while all my Mobile Me content was downloaded, everything was the same as before I’d done the restore.

Except the performance of old had returned. No touch screen issues, no delay, no hanging. All back to near-perfect.

To perform a complete restore from a backup, connect your iPhone to your computer, open iTunes if it’s not already open, wait for your iPhone to finish synchronizing, right-click your phone in the Devices list and select Restore from backup. It’ll probably take 20-30 minutes so go read a book.

Cheers.

O’Reilly supplied this book for review purposes.

I like to think that I know my way around my Mac pretty well. I use all kinds of shortcuts that help me get things done more smoothly and efficiently.

At least I thought I knew a lot of shortcuts, until I read this book.

At 884 pages including the index, there is so much information here that it’s pretty much impossible to learn it all. There are tips for using the Finder, the dock, for all the applications that ship with OS X as well as some of the freeware and shareware utilities that can be used to tweak the OS X interface.

David Pogue is one of my favourite technical authors. He’s unashamedly a Macintosh devotee. And he takes a lot of opportunities to poke fun at that other operating system, you know, that one that apparently runs on 90-odd percent of the world’s PCs.

The book contains many, many screen shots showing you exactly what is being presented and what the outcome of various commands and changes should be.

Pogue takes some of the more sticky problems and addresses them so that you can finally get to the bottom of things like Bluetooth and connecting to Windows machines (if you really, really need to do such a thing). He discusses Mobile Me, what it does, and why you might want it, networking, what to do and what not to do, file sharing, fonts, speech recognition, iChat, TextEdit… you name it, if you have it on your Mac, it’s discussed in this book.

There’s even a detailed section on Unix (the rock that OS X is built on top of).

If I had to pick a favourite topic in the book, I’d pick the chapter on the Finder. For example, did you know that you can attach anything to the strip of icons that runs across the top of the Finder window? Neither did I. Here’s a real world example. Say you have a file of passwords (which you shouldn’t have, but never mind) that you use all the time. Instead of scurrying through volumes and folders to find the file when you need it multiple times each day, or, heaven forbid, leaving it on your desktop for the whole world to see, you can drag that single file to the icon bar at the top of the Finder window, and it will be right there whenever you open Finder. That tip alone is worth the price of the book for me.

Speaking of price, at a penny short of $44 Canadian, there are certainly cheaper books out there on this topic, but there’s not a single one that even comes close to matching Pogue’s humour or style, never mind the abundance of gems of tips and tricks.

Get this book. Your friends will think you’re a Mac wizard, hey, you’ll think you’re a Mac wizard. You’ll get things done in the way that Apple meant for you to get them done, quickly, efficiently and easily.