Posts Tagged ‘Mac’

Unburden iTunes – Move Your Videos

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

After using iTunes for some years, my library has become too fat even for my ever-growing disk sizes. I decided to move my videos to another drive and found there is an incredibly easy way to achieve this: use the Finder to go to your iTunes library folder and move the “Movies” and “TV Shows” folders to the new drive – done.

iTunes automatically (!) found the new location without any manual re-indexing or re-importing or fiddling with the library preferences. (I have not tested network drives.)

There is a catch, though: downloading new videos – e.g. TV show subscriptions – will recreate the folders in your iTunes library. If you find that confusing, I suggest you only move complete seasons/subfolders.

Migrating Lotus Notes Calendar to iCal

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

This may be a little off topic, but as it took me some hours to work it out and as I could find very few helpful resources describing the procedure, here is how I converted my archived Lotus Notes calendars to iCal. Mind you, this is specific to my settings and might not work for you. But if you have trouble importing Notes-created .ICS files to iCal, read on. (more…)

How To Play DVDs From Harddisk With DVD Player

Monday, January 4th, 2010

There is a number of reasons why it can be useful to have a 1:1 copy of a DVD on your harddisk, e.g. because you want to avoid wasting battery life when travelling, or because you own a MacBook Air and do not want to carry around your external DVD drive. However, there is one problem: Apple’s DVD player and iTunes expect a DVD to be read from an optical drive rather than the file system. I recently discovered an easy solution. (more…)

Snow Leopard Performance Issues – Reinstall And Migrate

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Confession time: I just finished a complete new installation of Snow Leopard. I had thought that this was a thing of the past, a dreaded “standard procedure” from when I was a Windows user. But unfortunately, I had too many problems with the upgrade, mainly performance and compatibility related. Despite the discouragement of Apple’s support line, I managed a pretty smooth transition in a reasonable amount of time. In case you are facing similar issues or want to migrate a user directory without the Migration Assistant, read on.

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MobileMe – No Sync Central

Monday, August 24th, 2009

I love the idea behind MobileMe: to have a virtual desktop with all my addresses, messages and calendar entries up-to-date, when working somewhere else or travelling places: Sync Central with all the right tools whenever and whereever you need them. And most definitely the best design and usability of all. So despite a number of complaints about MobileMe’s sluggish behaviour or other accessability issues the advantages are overwhelming… Or are they?

mobileme-logo

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