Macinstruct

How to Delete Books and PDF Files from iBooks

mcone — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:40:35 +0000

So you've read a book or PDF file on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. Now how do you get rid of it? This tutorial shows you how to quickly and easily delete any book or PDF file from the iBooks app. It's a great way to free up space, because these files can take up precious space on your device, especially if they contain a lot of embedded pictures.

Here's how to delete book and PDF files from an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch:

From the iPad's home screen, tap iBooks to open it.
Switch to the collection that contains the file you want to delete. To do so, tap Collections, and then tap a collection, as shown below.

Tap the Edit button in the upper right corner, as shown below.

Tap on the books and PDF files you want to delete. The items marked for deletion have checkmarks displayed on their icons, as shown below.

Tap Delete to permanently erase the selected books and PDF files from your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch.
The alert shown below appears. Tap Delete. The books and PDF files you selected will be deleted.

Tap the Done button in the upper right corner.

That's it! The books and PDF files you selected have been deleted from your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Matthew Cone, the author of Master Your Mac and a freelance writer specializing in Apple hardware and software, has been a Mac user for over 20 years. A former ghost writer for some of Apple's most notable instructors, Cone founded Macinstruct in 1999, a site with OS X tutorials that boasts hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month. You can email him at: matt@macinstruct.com.

How to Change Your iPad's DNS Servers

mcone — Mon, 21 May 2012 12:49:41 +0000

Just like in Mac OS X, you can change the DNS servers on your iPad. This can significantly speed up Safari and other iPad apps that use the Internet. For a general introduction to DNS, and to learn why you would want to change the DNS servers on your iPad, see How to Change Your Mac's DNS Servers.

Before we start, you should know a couple things about how iOS handles DNS. First, these instructions only work for Wi-Fi connections - iOS does not allow you to change the DNS servers when connected to cellular networks. Also, the changes are network specific, so you'll need to change the DNS servers every time you connect to a new wireless network. The good news is that iOS remembers the settings, so you won't have to do anything the second time you connect to a network.

Here's how to change your iPad's DNS servers:

From the iPad's home screen, tap Settings.
Tap General on the sidebar. The screen shown below appears.

Tap Network. The screen shown below appears.

Tap Wi-Fi. The available wireless networks in range of your iPad appear, as shown below.

Find your wireless network in the list, and then click the arrow. The screen shown below appears.

Tap the DNS field.
Delete the current DNS servers, and enter the new DNS servers. (If you enter more than one DNS server, be sure sure to separate the servers with commas.)
- To use OpenDNS, enter 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
- To use Google DNS, enter 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Test your new DNS servers to make sure they're working.
- If you're using OpenDNS, visit the OpenDNS test page.
- If you're using Google Public DNS, follow these testing instructions.

That's it! You've updated your iPad's DNS servers!

Meet Your Macinstructor

Swamp Cooler

mcone — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:07:43 +0000

If you are reading this wonk in my neck of the woods, the American Southwest, you can stop right now and go back to Facebook. In fact, wherever the climate is very hot and very dry you, too, can probably skip it, at least if the term “swamp cooler” or “evaporative cooler” is familiar to you. But a swamp cooler was new to me when I came here many years ago* and it underscored the fact that I wasn’t in Kansas (well, Pennsylvania) anymore, Toto. It was, really, part of the exotic allure, the distinction of this new place, a detail that I could casually drop into letters back East, like roadrunners or green chile or mescal. Ever since then, like all of my neighbors, I have had a love/hate relationship with the box on the roof.

A swamp cooler is a wonderfully simple device. It consists of a big metal box
with three, or sometimes four, louvered side panels. These panels you line with pads that allow water, in a sump at the bottom, to flow down them, saturate them, when a pump shoots that water up to the top of the panels. Inside the box is what I call a squirrel cage fan, a cylindrical fan that is really more like a hamster’s wheel. This fan draws in the outside air, newly moistened and cool, and shoots it down into the house through the air ducts. Wonderful, eh?

In many ways, swamp coolers certainly are. For one thing, they cost much less than comparable refrigerated air systems. And they use a lot less electricity—you are not running a big compressor, just a belt-driven fan with maybe a ¾ horse electric motor and a simple water pump. That is much cheaper than turning your house into a 2000-square-foot refrigerator. Another thing about a swamp cooler is that it puts moisture into the air in the house, which is a wonderful thing where the air is parched and so are you. That is also, of course, why you will not find swamp coolers in the Midwest, the East, or the South, where to add even more moisture to that muggy air would be intolerable. That saving moisture is also why the longsuffering Diana insists on evaporative air despite its drawbacks (which we’ll get to). Refrigerated air conditioners suck the moisture out. In this desert, we need all the moisture we can get, to give our lungs and our skin a break.

So you are wondering what the downside is. Well, for one thing, with a swamp cooler you have to leave a couple of windows cracked open to let the air flow through the house and out. I never considered this a big deal, especially if you have a couple of patrolling Rottweilers to discourage unwanted visitors. Or you can put bars on the windows as many of my neighbors do, an idea that never appealed to me.

Anyway, that’s the least of the problems. For one thing, swamp coolers are incredibly dirty. We are talking rust. We are talking build-up of mineral scale. We are talking the flaking off of whatever they spray on the inside, some black stuff that comes off in big chunks over the years. And a vigorous wire brushing never seems to catch it all at the source. We Sheas have a ritual in the spring. Diana will turn the swamp cooler on high blower and I will station myself below the vents with the vacuum cleaner to try to collect as much blown-out crap as I can. After a half hour of this, working every vent with the Hoover, we can run the cooler on low for the rest of the season with only the occasional big black flake floating down to the living room rug to fascinate the cats.

But there is more. My impression is that refrigerated air needs very little upkeep, or if it does, you have to get a pro to do it. But the swamp cooler, which has to be mothballed every fall and put back in service every spring, has become a guy thing, like changing your own oil or mowing the lawn. There are certain things you do to prove that you can still do them. (Yes, mortality, I’m lookin’ at you!) To rub salt in this wound, Diana now says that she doesn’t want me up on the roof if she’s not home, explaining that I would be in no shape to dial 911 if, shaky old gent, I should fall off the roof. (I love you too, dear.)

Anyway, up a shaky ladder to the roof you go. And you always, always, forget something. You take the custom covers off but forget the next step, where you need the vise grips. Down you go; up you go. You drop the tiny brass fittings and they roll off the roof. And everything leaks. Things spurt and squirt. Or a fitting will finally produce a drip so subtle that you cannot even see where the leak is. Get a better wrench. A 9/16th this time. Get some plumber’s putty. Down you go; up you go. To the hardware store you go. There seems no end to this.

There is an end, of course, and you are grateful for it, and the swamp cooler will rattle and hum and squeak for another summer. But for the life of you, you can’t imagine how romanced you once were by this misbegotten device.

*The “floor furnace” was new to me, too, and I will leave the details to your imagining. A hint: it quickly cured me of stumbling around barefoot in the dark on winter nights.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Jerome Shea is an emeritus professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he still teaches his classical tropes course every fall and his prose style course every spring. He has been the Weekend Wonk since January of 2007. His email is shea@macinstruct.com.

Where to Find Saved PDF Files on an iPad

mcone — Sat, 19 May 2012 20:27:57 +0000

In another tutorial, we discussed how to save PDF files on an iPad. But where do you find the PDF files that you've saved on your iPad? They're stored in the iBooks app, but you might have to change collections to see them.

Collections are essentially folders for the books and files stored in iBooks. By default, all PDF files are stored in the PDF collection. If you have a different collection open, you won't see the files in the other collection. For example, if iBooks opens to the Books collection, you probably won't see any of the PDF files that you've saved. You'll need to change to the PDF collection to see the PDF files.

Here's how to find saved PDF files on an iPad:

From the iPad's home screen, tap iBooks to open it.
Tap the Collections button in the top left corner, as shown below.

Tap PDF. The saved PDF files will appear, as shown below.

By the way, you can always tell what collection you're in by looking at the top of the iBooks window. In the example above, it says PDFs to indicate that you're viewing PDF files.

How to Save PDF Files on an iPad

Meet Your Macinstructor

How to Minimize Windows in Slow Motion

mcone — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:53:40 +0000

Ready to learn a fun trick that has absolutely no practical value whatsoever? A trick that you can use to impress your friends and show off your Mac skills? Then you've come to the right tutorial! We're about to teach you how to minimize windows to the Dock in slow motion. In other words, we're going to take the default minimize window action and slow it way down by a factor of 100 or so.

Here's how to do it:

Right-click the separator bar in the Dock and select Turn Magnification On, as shown below. Then select Genie Effect from the Minimize Using submenu.

Open a Finder window or an application window that has a yellow minimize button, as shown below.

Hold the Shift key, and then click the yellow minimize button in the upper left corner of the window. The window will slowly shrink into the dock, as shown below.

You can also see the reverse effect (maximizing the window) by holding the Shift key and clicking the recently minimized window in the Dock. Doing so will cause the window to slowly expand out of the Dock and onto the Desktop.

By the way, if you select Scale Effect instead of Genie Effect, the window that you minimize and maximize will scale up in size when reopened and scale down in size when minimized to the Dock. It's just a different effect, and it also works in slow motion when you hold down the Shift key.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Eric Buczynski says it all started with the Apple II in grade school. Years later, he moved on to a Performa 6360 and then PowerMac G4s. He's still interested in emulation, HTML, and icon design, but these days his creativity goes mostly to Mac hardware hacking and customization.

Macinstruct

How to Delete Books and PDF Files from iBooks

How to Change Your iPad's DNS Servers

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