JT's Blog

Do you regret giving out your email address for an online purchase, for an online account or sent an email to a friend or family member who ultimately messes up and gives that address to some marketer? Do you regret it more knowing you paid $99.00 a year for the email address? If you have, worry no longer.  With MobileMe account you can create up to five aliases following these easy steps:

1. Log into me.com
2. Click the gear icon in Mail
3. Choose Preferences
4. Click the Addresses Option
5. Click then Add button (note below) to Create a New Alias
6. Choose your new Alias, enter the name and click done

Now keep in mind that this address will still forward email to your main account, but you can set up a rule to block incoming mail from alias email address.

Have you ever set up Google Voice with your iPhone?  Well if you ever want to stop Google Voice from being your iPhone’s default voicemail then follow these simple steps:

1. To deactivate forwarding and return to regular visual voicemail enter ##61# and hit call.
2. If you are on AT&T in the United States and you not only want to deactivate regular voicemail but your busy voicemail as well, enter ##004# and hit call.

In case you are asking why?, well lets just say Google Voice is not all that it is cracked up to be.

The Apple TV is more than just a hobby to me. When I purchased the device earlier this year I began converting my DVD library for use on the Apple TV.

As I began to import movies I found myself searching Google for poster artwork, as well manually selecting the movie genre. Unlike imported music, iTunes has a hard time importing movie art. Additionally, I wanted to include each movie’s description, but there wasn’t an easy way to find this information.

In the July 10th issue of MacLife I came across the Google utility Subler. Once downloaded simply drag the converted file onto the Subler icon. Alternatively, add Subler to the Application folder on OS X and open files from the menu bar.  Next click the search button and search for the movie. After deciding on the description and artwork click save.

The results of each search may vary depending on the movie. Once completed import the movie into iTunes and the saved information will appear once synced with your Apple TV, iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch device.

This has been around for a while, but I love to find new things.  If you wanted to intantly darken your Mac Screen, by pressing the ctrl-shift-eject buttons  To bring the screen back, simply move the mouse or hit the all important any key.

Posted via web from jtray’s posterous

I am not very fond of using browser based applications to chat with friends and family over the web.  In chatting with my Facebook family and friends, which most of whom are not OS X users, I found the Facebook user interface to be poor.

An alternative presented itself in the form of OS X’s iChat program.  As of February 2010 iChat users gained access to create a generic Jabber account to chat with Facebook users as a result of Facebook’s chat being powered by Jabber/XMPP.

To set up iChat to interface with Facebook follow these steps.

1. Open iChat
2. Click on Preferences and go to the Account Tab
3. Click on the plus sign and add a new account
4. Select a Jabber account from the Drop Down Menu
5. Enter the following yourusername@chat.facebook.com.  (Your user name can be found via Facebook’s Account settings page.)
6. Enter your password
7. Finally in the server box type “chat.facebook.com,” then configure the port to 5222 and make sure to un-check the box for “Use SSL.”

From there sign-in and start chatting away with your Facebook friends.  Please note several third party applications on both Mac and PC support this feature as well.