The Mac Admin's Blog

How to stop auto complete address suggestion in Entourage? If you want you Entourage to stop giving you suggestions of old Email addresses while typing the name, then you can follow the steps mentioned below. This is really useful when someone who is in your address list and you have sent him/her mail earlier but now their Email address is changed. In this case Entourage will keep suggesting you the old address which is cached in the memory. You can clear the address cache by following this small step: Go to Preferences under Entourage menu.     Select Compose and under Recent Addresses , click on the button “ Clear List ”. Doing this will make Entourage forget all the addresses saved in cache.  If you want to disable this feature entirely and have Entourage only offer auto-complete for addresses in your address book, simply uncheck the option "Display a list of recently used addresses when address messages".

This problem might happen with any MS Office file. Some of the Mac users noticed that many of my Excel documents were not indexed as part of the Spotlight database; Spotlight search results for obviously-known content was coming up empty. The reason for this invisibility was that I still had Microsoft Office 2004 installed (some of the users keep this for macro compatibility), and when this happens, the old PowerPC version of Microsoft Office.mdimporter still sits in your ~/Library/Spotlight folder. Many mdworker console messages were indicating that only a PowerPC importer plug-in was found , thus many Office documents weren't getting indexed. The solution to this is to trash the PowerPC version of this file, and trash the /.Spotlight-V100 file, which forced a total re-indexing. The system then used the Intel version of the Spotlight importer, and all my Office documents are once again indexed.

How to change the login screen background in Snow Leopard? Since the time you have bought your Mac, you might have been seeing the same boring background of login screen. There is a small trick that can help you to change it. Here are the steps: 1. Go to Finder and open ‘Go to Folder’ or you can also hit Command+Shift+G to open the same screen. 2. Now in the path, type / System/Library/CoreServices/ and click ‘Go’. 3. Once done, find the image file in the name of ‘DefaultDesktop.jpg’ and replace it with the image or file of your choice. I would suggest to make a backup of the original file. Also see the resolution of the image so that you can replace it accordingly and the new image looks perfectly fit to the screen. That was all! Now you can reboot and try this hack, its wonderful. This trick works to change the login background in Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 only. I know you are smart enough to find the file in Leopard also.

Simple way to give a new transparent look to your Terminal Some of us guys might be working on Terminal a lot and might have been boring seeing the same dark black screen. This is a very simple way to give a transparent look to your Terminal window. They call it a hack, but I call it a cool trendy method and is quite useful. First of all you have to enable the tab bar, this can be done by going to View > Show Tab Bar . This usually enables the feature to have more than one tab opened simultaneously. Once you enable the tab bar, you can select the tab at the top of the Terminal window and slightly drag it. This usually moves a tab around, however in the process it makes it invisible. This might need some practice and soon you will be perfect in moving the window in such a way that it will go invisible. If you want modify Terminal even more there is plenty of preferences go to Terminal > Preferences > Settings, here you can change how Terminal looks and behaves.

How to create a basic website on Mac? Interested in designing a webpage for yourself and are not even aware of the spelling of HTML, then Mac has a solution for you. This application has multiple web-designs like basic page, photo gallery, podcast etc. All you have to do is arrange all the images that you need to be used in this website and you are ready to go.   iWeb This is an application which is pre-installed on every Mac since iWeb 1.0 was released in 2006. If you have been ignoring it since it first came out because it had some issues then, I recommend giving it another try. This is especially true if you don’t plan to get too elaborate with your web site ambitions. iWeb is a great basic web designing tool, integrated into the Mac OS system and it uses various native Mac applications like iPhoto and iMovie and helps you to create a fully featured web sites. If you do want to host your iWeb site yourself, you need to save the site to a folder from iWeb’s interface (not to

How to expand the movie display size in Mac? This is a small tip that might help you once a while if you receive a clip recorded on a mobile phone that is comparatively of a smaller frame size. In order to get rid of this restriction, you can drag it into a new Mail message. This should be done only in Mail in Mac and not on any other Email client.  The reason behind this is that the player used in Mail still has the classis old type controller at the bottom, and this plays the movies at the correct size.

  If by any chance you have missed the admin password for your OS X, you can reset it (the original account you created) with the help of a Mac OS X installation DVD. Here are the steps to how: Insert the Mac OS X DVD & restart your Mac and hold down the ‘C’. This key helps to boot from the DVD. On the next screen select your language and continue. Go to the ‘Utilities’ menu, select the option “Reset Password”. Select the Mac OS X boot drive. Check & select the original user account (for which you need the password to be reset) and choose a new password of your choice. Reboot your Mac & the administrator password is now reset.

Few special key commands while start up. This can be of great use while troubleshooting start up issues in Mac. Action/Explanation Keystroke Eject CD on boot Hold Mouse button down immediately after powering on OS X Safe boot Press Shift during startup Start up in FireWire Target Disk mode Press T during startup Startup from a CD Press C during startup Bypass primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume Press Cmd-Opt-Shift-Delete during startup Choose Startup disk before booting Press Option during startup Start up in Verbose mode Press Cmd-V during startup Start up in Single-User mode (command line) Press Cmd-S during startup Force Powerbook screen reset Press R during startup Force OS X startup Press X during startup

If you want to set your Mac so that it turns ON exactly on the time you want, you can do that I used this command syntax: pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRF 00:00:00 Let me simplify the command so that you can understand it. pmset is the command, wakeorpoweron is to tell your Mac to turn it ON if it is OFF or to wake up if it is sleeping. MTWRF are the weekdays where R represents thursday, I know you are smart enough to understand the reason and  00:00:00 is the time you want your Mac is to be back in action. Now, if you want to cancel this schedule, then type the following command:  pmset repeat cancel Though, this is not a big help as it can also be done from energy saving options in your Mac, but there is limit of setting only couple of schedules.  Using command line you can set as many rules as you want. This is what we call being a step ahead of the crowd. In coming posts we will discuss more about pmset command and its versatility.

Working at helpdesk, very often I get tickets from users requesting to synch their Entourage data with their iPhone. Though the steps to synch iPod touch with Entourage is same, but I would prefer using the word iPhone considering its popularity. All you have to do is go to Entourage Preferences, under General Preferences, select ‘Synch Services’. If you have a MobileMe account, you don’t have to bother about connecting your iPhone to the Mac. In our next post we will discuss how Mac synchronizes the data with iPhone.