Changing Your Computer's Name and User Names

Now and again I meet clients who have bought a used computer, pre-installed with an operating system and user accounts that become disconcerting for them because it's somebody else's name.

It's simple to personalize your computer by changing the computer's name as well as the user name.

To change the computer name, simply navigate to the System Preferences > Sharing > Computer Name.

Changing the user name and password is just as simple, navigate to the System Preferences > Accounts, click the lock and login to make changes and change your name and password there.

That won't change the home folder name, however. To do that, you must hold the Control key and click on the account name who's home folder you'd like to change, that will take you to advanced options where you can change the account name and home folder.

Up Your Media's Quick Tips Newsletter Volume II

Hi, and welcome to another edition of our Quick Mac Tips newsletter. These are some issues that have come up with my Apple cpmputer clients around Parksville, Qualicum, Nanaimo and central Vancouver Island in the past weeks.

In iPhoto 9 you can now choose to send mail via iphoto or your mac mail application I suggest choosing the Mac Mail program. Choose this option in the iPhoto General Preferences pane.

Hot Corners, is one of my favourite navigation features. If you're like me, you tend to have a lot of windows and applications open at once. In your System Preferences pane, go to Expose and Spaces, and pick Active Screen Corners, I like my top right corner to tile all open windows and my lower right corner to clear all windows and expose the Desktop.

You can add a photo or logo to your email signature by opening up the signature dialogue in your mail program and simply dragging the image directly onto that particular signature from either the finder or the iPhoto application.

Change your Safari homepage from the default Apple store to a page more suitable to you. In the Safari preferences pane, simply type in the url to your favourite page where it says 'home page'.

Need to translate text or full webpages, use the Google translator at http://translate.google.com/ . This free tool will allow you to translate over 50 languages

iTunes Radio contains access to hundreds of radio stations worldwide in every genre.

To save a PDF for the best emailing and sharing compatibility, choose print in your Pages, MS Word, Safari or Mail program, at the bottom left of that window you'll see the PDF tab, from there you can save the PDF or mail it directly

To type fractions go into the keyboard language drop down menu near the top right of your screen (the flag beside the clock) and choose to "show character viewer". From there you choose symbols, then number and number symbols, pick the fraction you want and click insert.

What do people have against meta tags.

Through my work with Vingo.ca, my Vancouver Island Travel Search Engine, I regularly have to dip into a website's source code to pull the company's description from their meta tags. Fully half of these sites, even the pretty ones, have ignored their meta tag keyword and description fields, the first step in effective search engine optimization.

Your meta keyword field should be littered with significant and descriptive words about your business, page or product, preferably words that appear in the text of the site. Separate them with commas and string them together. (ie., web, web tech, web tech blog, web blog,...). Your meta description should be a sentence, (a long sentence), also full of those same keywords but in an easy to read description. This is how you'll be identified by the search engines.

Visit my site at Up Your Media. Don't be shy, dip into my source code to see what a properly optimized meta stack looks like.

Programs like Dreamweaver make it easy for anyone to build a website, but too often these budget priced websites, though they may look good, have forgotten the basics, making it far more difficult for customers to find you. If it's worth building, it's worth promoting.