The Mac Admin's Blog

This post is going to be very helpful for the users who don’t have Time Machine and cannot backup data or user accounts on regular basis. For such users, its hard time in case they have to migrate the data on a new drive. Although there are many options available, but this is the simplest ever and would take just few steps to do it (though it might take hours depending on the data you are taking backup of). We are going to perform this with the help of Disk Utility. So lets start: Go to Disk Utility i.e. open Application > Utilities > Disk Utilities from Finder From the Disk Utility application, select ‘New Image’ from the toolbar or Go to File> New> Blank Disk Image Give a name to it and proceed Save this file out, you can add compressing and encryption if you feel like, remembering that it will add to the compressing and decompression time. Compression is useful if you are short of space. This process might take few hours b

Microsoft provided the most extensive look yet into the next version of the Mac version of its popular Office suite on Thursday at Macworld 2010 . The new product, Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, will arrive in time for the 2010 holiday season. Macworld spoke with several representatives of the company’s MacBusiness Unit, who told us the company is focusing on three things with this new release: better compatibility across platforms, improved collaboration tools, and a more refined user interface. Also, as Microsoft announced last August , the suite will include Outlook for Mac, which replaces Entourage as Office’s Email client. And, in keeping with Microsoft’s 2008 promise, the new version of Office will offer renewed support for Visual Basic , which was dropped in the 2008 version of the productivity suite. The new version of Office will incorporate document-collaboration features that take advantage of Microsoft's online storage features. With Office for Mac 2011, Mac

Electronics retailers are revamping their aisles to focus on hand-held gadgets this holiday season to excite consumers who have grown weary of their traditional big-sellers: televisions and personal computers. Handhelds are changing electronics retailing. Above, a Best Buy employee in Chicago delivers iPads in April. Shoppers this Christmas can expect to see more smartphones, electronic readers and touch-screen computers in the most prominent store displays, underscoring a dramatic shift to powerful portable devices that is fast changing the face of consumer electronics retailing. The new priorities are plainly evident in the changing strategy of Best Buy Co., the nation's largest electronics retailer by revenue, which is now morphing into a mobile gadget specialist after decades of promoting the latest in big-screen televisions, desktop computers and high-fidelity stereos. Read more on Wall Street Journal

Apple has decided that now its time to sell refurbished iPads. They have announced a discount of $50 on their online store. Though all the products are not available on Apple online store but they are continuously improving in the availability of numbers of products. According to Apple Insider : Currently, just refurbished Wi-Fi-only iPad models are available, though all capacities can be purchased, with a shipping time of between one and three days. The 16GB model sells for $449, the 32GB offering is $549, and the highest capacity 64GB device is $649. The iPads are available with one year limited warranty from Apple and of course you can get the AppleCare Protection Plan with the product. However, 3G-capable refurbished iPads are not yet available for purchase via Apple's online store. All three models are listed as out of stock, and will also sell for $50, starting at $579 for the 16GB model .

It was on August 20th, 2010 when I completed my Apple Certified Macintosh Technician (ACMT) certification

Apple Inc has entered into the world of social networking with a new service called Ping. There are lots of sign ups going on at this website. The music-oriented service already has a million members.   Apple’s new Ping social network has gotten off with a bang, of course the iPhone guys would love to Ping . They announced their new idea just a few days ago and there have already been over a million people sign up in the first couple of days. Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services, reported “One-third of the people who have downloaded iTunes 10 have joined Ping. As many more people download iTunes 10 in the coming weeks, we expect the Ping community to continue growing.” Since there are 160 million iTunes users, it is likely that Cue’s prediction makes more than just a small amount of sense. The one million that have joined to date are truly a drop in the bucket when compared to the 500 million users of Facebook and the 145 million Twitter members, but a million

iPod nano The completely redesigned iPod nano® features Apple's Multi-Touch™ interface that lets users navigate their music collection by simply tapping or swiping a finger on the display. Nearly half the size and weight of the previous generation, the new iPod nano features a polished aluminum and glass enclosure with a built-in clip, making it instantly wearable. iPod shuffle The redesigned iPod shuffle® features both clickable "ring" buttons and Apple's innovative VoiceOver technology, enabling users to easily navigate their music and playlists without ever looking at their iPod shuffle. The new wearable iPod shuffle has an all-aluminum enclosure with a built-in clip, comes in five brilliant colors (silver, blue, green, orange and pink), and has nearly 50 percent more battery life.

It was no mistake that the wait times for shipping an iPad dropped off from 3 weeks to 24 hours in fairly short order. Apple has just about doubled their production capability for their popular tablet. It is hard to tell whether Apple is just girding its loins for the inevitable tablet wars or if they are simply making an adjustment in iPad production capacity after having been caught with their pants down by the early order rate. Whatever the reason, Apple’s manufacturing partners are now building 2 million iPads per month, up from 1 million capacity on their initial single line. And, according to an AppleInsider article , they have plans to increase their manufacturing capabilities to 3 million in the near future. It is clear that the folks at Apple think that there is a big future in iPads. This news comes through analyst Katy Huberty at Morgan Stanley. Apple admitted that they were caught off guard by the tremendous sales of the iPad right out of the gate. Apple fell behind on

If you have upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard you will not find any major change in the dock. If you want to have a completely different dock, you can try this simple step and can have a dock similar as I have on my Mac in office. Let's try to change it. Open up the terminal, and type the following command, then press the return key defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES Now, you need to reload the dock, to do so, again, in the terminal, type the following. killall Dock   Once done, your dock should look like the following image: Now if your father doesn't like this new dock and you want to change your dock theme back to the original display, open the terminal, and type the following commands. defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO killall Dock That's it, now you can see a smile on your father's face!