I really like Apple's Clock application: they really put effort into the face of the analog clock, you can make it transparent, and it's a nice replacement for the college student with no wall space. Too bad the face is just too darn big. I use Pocket Watch X ($5 donationware) which gives you all the features of Apple's Clock plus customizeable skins.

Using the skins feature, I placed a reduced version of Apple's clock face on the Pocket Watch X face ... read the rest of the article for the how-to.

Did you know you can drag and drop address from the standard Mail-Address Book to Entourage X? Simply open both address books up and select the addresses you want to move over and drop them in Entourage's Contacts.

There's also a handy Mail folder importer included on the Entourage CD, or it can be downloaded from the MS Mac Office site. Just download the French or German language script and run it... you don't need to know the language as it automatically imports the mail into Entourage.

A friend called up a bit confused over the behavior of iPhoto. He had originally set up his iPhoto library on his removable FireWire drive (using this hint). All was working well until one day when he connected his camera to the Mac while the FireWire drive was powered down. My friend knew the drive was off, so he wasn't surprised that iPhoto didn't show his existing library and albums. He imported the new images and then quit iPhoto.

Later, with the FireWire drive connected again, he relaunched iPhoto and was surprised to find that while his "new" images showed up, his older library and albums were nowhere to be seen. He could see that they were still on the FireWire drive, but iPhoto didn't seem to know anything about them. He called me with two questions. First, out of curiosity, where were the new photos stored, as he couldn't find them using Sherlock or the Finder? Second, and much more important, how could he get the original library and albums to show up in iPhoto again?

Those of you who are familiar with the way OS X operates probably have already figured out what happened. For those of you who don't know what the problem was and would like to know, read the rest of the article for the cause of the problem and the relatively easy solution -- although I will admit I was stumped for a few minutes myself until doing a bit of sleuthing in the Terminal!

In iPhoto if you drag photos to the "Albums" pane it will create a new album. Most people know that already. However, if you hold down option while you drag the pictures to the album pane, it will automatically make a book from those pictures. Pretty slick undocumented iPhoto (OS X only) trick.

These "Tips" are fairly obvious for the long-time Mac-user but I found them nowhere else.

Did you notice how tightly integrated iTunes and the Finder are?

• Drag some mp3 files onto a playlist - they are imported and the playlist is filled with them. Useful if you have sorted your files by genre and want to have a playlist with that genre.
  
• Now, drag a some titles from iTunes to a Finder window - the files are copied to the destination! Great if you want to burn several playlists on a mp3 CD.
  
• If you want iTunes to play the files from a certain folder, drag that folder on the iTunes icon in the Dock.
  

[Editor's note: Once again, this may be a semi-duplicated tip, but I couldn't verify it with a quick search. Still, these are good things to know if you're new to iTunes!]

My ISP's SMTP server is only reachable to send mail when I have my TiBook at home. If I take it to work and try to send mail, my ISP's SMTP server will give me an error if I try and send mail through it. However, I found a way to send the mail via an alternate SMTP server with Mail.app. Here's how:

1. Create a second account in the preferences dialog.
   
2. Use the same email address, full name, host name, user name,
   
3. Set the password field to something incorrect (like "1"). You can't leave this field blank
   
4. Set the SMTP host to some mailserver at work you know you can relay through
   
5. In the accounts options, enable the account but uncheck "Include this account when checking mail".

Now, when Mail.app tries to send email, it will use the account that shows up first in the preferences display to send the email. If you are at work, drag the work account to the first position in the list. If you are home, drag the home account to the first position in the list.

It's not a great solution but it gets the job done.

Note: If you give the two accounts different "email address" lines, you will get a selection box when you are editing the email to tell Mail.app which account to send the email from. In this case, however, I didn't like that so I purposefully made the email addresses on the two accounts the same.

I keep my address book, password list and other info in Filemaker databases. Since I don't want to worry about synching them with other copies, I would like to make them available on the web using Filemaker's Web Companion plugin.

Unfortunately, Web Companon doesn't support SSL and all communications with databases, including password transmission, is done in clear text. This is horribly insecure. Read the rest of the article for info on how to secure FileMaker through SSH.

A great encryption app is Cypher. Cypher uses the government's Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and can be downloaded here.

[Editor's note: I have not tried this program myself.]

I bought a Palm m125 the other day and was excited to try AvantGo, only to find that they don't support OS X. So I started looking for alternatives and found Plucker, a free offline HTML viewer with conduits for UNIX, Linux, and Windows. There's no GUI for OS X (it's possible that the UNIX/Linux GUI will work if you have XWindows running), but getting the command line tools up and running is fairly straightforward:

To find out how to do this, read on...

In Classic it was easy to print on both sides of the paper as Acrobat Reader had an option to print only even or odd pages. Epson printer drivers in OS 9 allowed automatic double-sided printing, but not with OS X Epson drivers.

Here is how to do it:

1. In Acrobat reader (for OSX off course) open your pdf file.
2. Select thumbnail view and resize the thumbnail area so that only two columns can be seen.
3. To print odd pages, select the first column and the print as if you were to print all the pages.
4. To print even pages, repeat step 3 selecting the second column instead.