RANTS & RAVES: OS X Printing to Windows Print Server

Found a nice write-up of getting OS X printing to Windows Print Servers. This write-up includes advantages and disadvantages of 4 different methods:

1. LPD
2. Windows Print Sharing
3. Windows Print Services for Macintosh; and 
4. Direct IP printing.

The document also includes instructions, which are helpful if you're not familiar with a particular method. Here's a link to the document:

http://www.softwareshelf.com/news/printmanager/tips/MacOSX_Printing_via_the_Windows_Print_Server.pdf

If the document no longer exists, let me know as I've saved a copy of the PDF.

TIPS & TRICKS: Outlook 2011 Keyboard Shortcuts

I've always been a fan of keyboard shortcuts. Mousing is faster for somethings, but keyboard shortcuts really help to cut down time to do repetitive tasks. Here's a bunch of Outlook 2011 keyboard shortcuts from Microsoft:

http://mac2.microsoft.com/help/office/14/en-us/outlook/item/3b58300d-6f02-47f3-b1fc-9cbe8bb4eac7

Got any of your own you can't live without?

RANTS & RAVES: Design - The Difference Between Adoption and Failure

With all the Apple hype out there, I have come to realize what really makes Apple the company it is today. For a long time, I thought it was purely because Apple controlled both the hardware and software side of things. But, it's more than just controlling the different aspects of hardware and software. It's design. Steve Jobs was all about design. His singularly focused fanaticism on design results in Apple products that everyone either really wants or can't stop talking about.

The point of this post is a case describing the other end of the spectrum where design and usability is nothing more than an marketing topic. This example is quite simple really. I installed a piece of software call Kurzweil 3000 on a few machines. The department had not yet purchased new licenses for these machines so I had to install the trial version while we waited for the licenses to arrive. When they did arrive, I checked out some documentation online that said I had to merely call up the registration process under the existing installations Help menu and enter in the code to activate the software. The link to the registration process was not available. I called Kurzweil Support and they told me that I had to uninstall the old version first and then install the new version. Instead of taking a couple minutes to complete the process, I'm now over an hour into this update process.

Simple thing like design and usability can go such a long way.

TIPS & TRICKS: Google Chrome Behavior of Green Zoom/Maximize Button in Lion

Apparently, Chrome is still using the pre-Lion behavior of the green button, which is as a zoom button. In Lion, this basically means that when a Chrome window that is not full screen and the green button is pushed, then the Chrome window stretches full screen only vertically and not horizontally. I thought one of the best features of Lion was Apple's redesign of the green button to be a true full screen.

The fix for this is to hold down the shift button while hitting the green button. This will make the Chrome window fill the screen.

TIPS & TRICKS: Open Source Software (OSS) Imaging Tools & Process

Found a really nice write-up on using a couple of open source software (OSS) tools for imaging a drive.

http://geekyprojects.com/storage/how-to-clone-hard-drive-to-smaller-drive/

I've been using these tools for awhile and find them quite useful. This little write-up also helped to streamline my own basic imaging process. The extra hurdle I wanted to overcome was imaging from an larger drive/partition to a smaller drive/partition. In order to accomplish this scenario, gparted, one of the OSS tools we are talking about here, is used to shrink the Windows partition to something smaller than the new destination. Here's the summary of steps for my scenario:

- Adjust partition with GParted
- Reboot and let OS rebuild the file system (this is a CRUCIAL step)
- Use Clonezilla to save drive/partition to another drive (imaging rather than cloning works best for me)
- Restore the image to smaller destination drive

Again, the link has a much more detailed and well-documented write-up.