The Real Mac Genius

Because the battery on my Macbook always seems to run out quickly, I decided to see if I could find some ways to extend my battery life. The first way to extend your battery life is to simply lower the brightness of your computer (this trick also works with iPhones and iPod Touches). You can also save battery life by going into system prefrences and clicking on “Energy Saver”. The “Energy Saver” option allows you to explore other ways to extend battery life like having your computer automatically put itself to sleep after a certain period of time. Limiting the use of CDs and/or flash drives will also extend your battery life as will closing the lid of your laptop. My last tip is to make sure that you are aware of all the applications you have running. The less apps you have running, the longer your battery life!

For those of you who need to do a small amount of photo editing, but don’t want to spend a lot of money on photo editing software like Adobe CS5, iPhoto could be a great option for you. To start editing, just select a photo from Faces, Events, or wherever you are keeping your photos in iPhoto and it will pop up enlarged. If the photo is “sideways”, simply scroll down to the toolbar and click “Rotate” or command + r until the picture is facing the right way (each time you click “rotate” the picture will rotate 90 degrees). Once your picture if oriented corrected, click on “Edit” (the button right next to “Rotate”) and a new toolbar will appear on the bottom. There are many things that you can do in iPhoto so I will just go over some basics. The first editing tool is cropping. Cropping allows you to cut out portions of your picture that is not needed. Removing a portion of your picture allows you to make the picture fit better in a layout, remove unwanted distractions (like people walking in the background), and/or have your eyes focus on the subject of the picture. To begin cropping, select the cropping tool and adjust the cropping box so that the part of the picture you want to keep is within the cropping box. Anything outside the box, will be “cropped” or cut out. Another tool that is helpful to use is the straightening tool. Once you select the straighten tool, a yellow grid comes up as well as a black bar with a ball. Move the ball on the bar and the picture begins to move and twist. Use the lines of the yellow grid to help you straighten your picture. This is a great tool for editing photos that weren’t taken with a tripod. Probably one of the most used editing tools is the “Retouch” tool. This tool gives you a brush in the form of a circle. The size of the circle can be adjusted so you can select the size that best suits your needs. The retouch tool blends the pixels from one area to the next so that you can hide imperfections. First click on the area that you want the “retouched” area to blend into or look like, then click on the “retouched” area and the first area you touched is essentially copied or blended into the second area. The last editing tool, I am going to discuss is the “Effects” tool which allows you to change the color or add borders to your photos. Click on the “Effects” tool and a box pops up allowing you to choose from 9 different types of effects. You can choose “sepia” or “black and white” to create an old fashioned photo or “edge blur” to blur the edges of your photo. If you click on an “Effect” and there is a number in the box, this means that you can click on the box again to either intensify or lessen the “Effect”. Have fun!

For those of you who have never used the terminal program, there are many great things that you can do with the terminal. Here are some new tricks that you can try. My first trick lets you measure the strength of your wifi. To find out the strength of your wifi, just type this into the terminal “/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -I” . You will see a number of texts on the screen. Look for “agrCtlRSSI” which will show you the signal strength for your wifi. If you want to figure out what applications you have running that are using the internet, just type in “lsof -P -i -n | cut -f 1 -d ” ” | uniq” and a list of the apps using the internet will appear. If you don’t want to type the script, just copy and paste it in – simple as that! Also, if you want to turn your computer into your talking mouth piece, just type “say (then your text of what you want it to say)” and press enter and it will say what you wrote! Have fun!