Silvermac

One of the very frustrating things in Mac OS X is that you cannot click a button and show Desktop. Well, you can … sort of. You have three options:

• Press F11, this will engage expose and move all windows to the edge of your screen,
• Click anywhere on your desktop while holding Cmnd-Option on your keyboard – this will hide all programs, except Finder if open, or
• You can use ShowDesktop, a free application by Everyday Software that sits in your dock or your menu bar and shows desktop by simply clicking on it.

I was upgrading BIOS on my ASUS EeePC 1000H today and was surprised to find how many users are asking the same question in so many forums – How to upgrade BIOS on 1000H?

Surprisingly, it’s dead easy. This is what you need to do.

Go to Asus website, click on Downloads and select your hardware from the list, then select your operating system. The operating system is not  important when it comes to BIOS updates, but this option will give you a list of all drivers for your PC and your OS, so you can download them as well if you need any.

Once you’ve downloaded the bios update file, unzip it and rename it to 1000H.ROM and copy the file to a CD/DVD or to a USB drive.

Needless to say, plug in the power adapter, you definitely don’t want to lose power while upgrading BIOS.

Plug in the USB drive or an external CD/DVD drive with a disk containing 1000.ROM file and reboot. When you see the EeePC setup screen (grey) that prompts you to press F2 if you want to enter setup, press Alt+F2.

The setup will scan any attached storage devices for the .ROM file and once it’s found it will start the upgrade process. The upgrade takes about 2-3 minutes and at the end you’re asked to press the power button to restart the computer.

That’s it, as easy as it gets.

The …@hotmail.com.au domain is now available for Australians to use as an email address! However,  there is a little workaround needed to get there, but it works just fine:

• Go to www.hotmail.com
• It will redirect your URL to some ‘login.live’ etc. – note the end of this address is en-us (or en-gb, etc.)
• Change this ending to en-au.
• Let the page reload, and then ‘Sign Up’
• Now in the drop down box ‘@hotmail.com.au’ is available to choose!

For our friends and neighbours from New Zealand, just use en-nz to access hotmail.co.nz addrerss registrations.

Better get in quick, because names are going fast.

Google has finally fixed something I was looking for for quite some time, adding multiple attachments in one go. Say you want to email 5 photos to someone, you have to click on “Attach a file” navigate through your file manager to find the file, select it and click OK. And repeat this four more times.

Now when you click on “Attach a file” you can select multiple files and click OK. The next you will see is a list of files being attached and the upload progress bar for each.It works with both Gmail and Google Apps (GAFYD).

One of the new functions of iPhoto 09 are Faces. When you select the Faces in the menu bar on the left you will see a cork board with the thumbnails of faces that iPhoto has identified in your library. The default thumbnail photo, or the key photo, is not always the best choice, so you’d like to change it.

There are two ways of doing this. Firstly, you can click on a little “i” icon in the bottom right corner of the photo, then skim through the photos until you find the one you like. Click on it and your new key photo will be set.

The other and easier way of doing this is simply to skim through the images (slide your mouse pointer over the thumbnail) while on the cork board, and once you see the photo you’d like to set as a key, just hit space bar. The new key photo is set. The same applies for the Events view thumbnails.

An extra tip – if you are skimming through the Faces, hold down the Option button, this will show you the entire photo, not only the face.