Month: April 2008

Video Conferencing with Messenger

Video conferencing with Windows Live Messenger was always a great way to keep in touch with family spread far and wide. It was a bit of a pain hooking up the webcam though, so it didn’t really happen as often as it should.

So my new Macbook has a built-in webcam. Handy! Time to get back to using video.

Except everyone I know uses Windows Live Messenger.

I had Adium installed – a great little IM (Instant Messaging) program that you can use to type notes to people with Live Messenger (among others). But no video.

So I tried Yahoo Messenger. Yep, it has video. Yep, you can message people using Live Messenger. But you can’t video conference with people using Live messenger. Sigh.

Microsoft even make a version of Messenger for the Mac. But would you guess? No video!

It was actually while writing this post that i found aMSN – a Live messenger clone that actually supports video! So instead of signing off this post with despair, I have a glimmer of hope. About to download it and try it out now…

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New MacBook

Well, the bug bit.

Having to share the iMac became too much. My new MacBook arrived today!

It’s a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM, with OSX Leopard (10.5).

And of course, it has the cool little Apple logo that lights up on the lid when it’s on, too!

One of the things I miss the most is the old right-click – but I’m pleased to say that’s been taken care of on this new machine.

Go to System Preferences and choose Keyboard & Mouse. You’ll see this:

The bit that says “Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click” basically lets you tap the trackpad with 2 fingers for a right-click. Easy!

And the 2 finger scrolling is pretty cool too. That saves trying to line the mouse up on the scrollbars.

Now, back to playing,,,!

Printing from Open Office

Had some trouble printing from Open Office Writer (an open-source word processor). Didn’t seem to matter what setting I changed, it didn’t fit on the page properly.

I even contacted Canon who emailed me some steps to follow. It was around then that I figured out it was printing fine from other applications, just not from Open Office!

Fortunately, Open Office lets you “Save as a PDF” – so that’s my temporary solution… Save the document as a PDF, and then print that.

Hopefully the next update will fix that little bug.

The end of the line

I was playing around in Aptana (a code editor) and was desperately trying to get the cursor to the end of the line. In Windows, pressing then End key does that (and Ctrl + End takes you to the end of the document).

Not in OSX though. 

I tried Command + End, Control + End, Option, Shift, and just about everything else I could think of. 

The trick?

Command + Right Arrow!

And obviously (once you know that) Command +  Left Arrow takes you to the start of the line.