Here’s a workaround, but one which I haven’t tried yet - there is a website, globalitunes.com, which I had read about in the comments to the post Set up an iTunes account in Malaysia.

You’d first need to set up a fake US address, which is documented in their setup guide.

For this post, I’ll assume that you’ve let iTunes manage all your music files, which means that all your music data is located in the iTunes folder. To find out how iTunes manages your music folder organization (or not), simply launch iTunes, open up Preferences and navigate to the Advanced tab. You should see the following:

Incidentally, this tab also shows you the physical location of your iTunes library. Make a note of this.

Here’s how I’d proceed with the backup.

Find out how big your iTunes library is

Open the Finder and change to icon view mode. The icon view mode presents information in an easy to read fashion for this purpose.

If your sidebar has the Music folder icon there, click once on it. Otherwise, locate your Music folder by clicking on your Home icon (that’s the icon with your machine’s name on it) and navigate your folder structure until you find the Music folder.

Open the Music folder and highlight the iTunes folder by clicking once on it.

Then, show the Info window by pressing cmd + i, or select File > Get Info from the menu, or right-click (control + left-click) on the folder and select Get Info from the contextual menu:

Copy the entire iTunes folder

In my example, I have about 8.45 GB of music files and iTunes meta / database data. Rounding it up, I’ll need about 10 GB of space on the target media (say, an external drive) to copy the entire folder into.

That’s all you need. Connect an external drive to your machine, and use the Finder window to copy the entire folder into the destination disk.

To restore the files to your machine (or another), simply drag the entire iTunes folder from your backup drive into the Music folder on the computer.

According to the Readme.rtf document, the SmartSleep preference pane needs to be installed for all users.

I’ve decided to go with the smart sleep setting with the default value of 20 seconds, which means that if the remaining battery level is 20 minutes or more, the system will just go to sleep immediately without writing the contents of the RAM to the hard disk.

If the battery level is at 20 minutes or less, it will automatically switch to the sleep and hibernate setting, which means that the contents of the RAM will be written to the hard disk during the start of the sleep process.

Turn off Embed ColorSync Profile

This is a mandatory rule - turn it off!

You can find this option by going to the Preferences menu in iPhoto, and then navigate to the Advanced tab.

If you have this option checked, iPhoto ‘08 overrides the profile in your images without asking you for permission.

I realized this too late - now thousands of my photos has the Camera RGB profile:

(You can see what the profile is for your images by right-clicking on your image in the Finder, select Get Info)

The Help says that iPhoto would override the profile only if it can’t find a profile in the image, well, obviously, this didn’t turn out to be the case with my images.

With the option turned off, my Nikon D300 images retain the profile embedded by the camera, Nikon sRGB IEC61966-2.1 in this example.

Coincidence?

It’s just too bad I don’t have a working copy of Windows Vista installed on my home PC computers (they’re still running on Windows XP Professional) as I would love doing a proper comparison of both search technologies.

All I can say for sure now is that Spotlight Search far outstrips the Search tool on Windows XP in terms of performance, utility and usability.

I had a bit of initial trouble calling up the Network folder as it doesn’t appear in the Finder’s sidebar (I’m running Mac OS X Leopard on a MacBook Pro), but here are the steps to see that icon for yourself.

First, ensure you have a connected PC computer on your network.

Click the photo below to view a larger version.

1. Launch Finder, and click on your computer’s name in the Devices section.
2. Click on the Cover Flow view option icon in the Toolbar.
3. Scroll to the Network Neighborhood icon in Cover Flow.
4. Double-click on the Network Neighborhood icon.

At this point, the icon representing your networked PC is probably a little to small to view, so just grab the handle of your Finder window with your mouse, and drag to make the icon larger.

Here’s a larger version of the icon that I grabbed from my screen.

Sometimes, I want to copy files from one location to another and would like to know beforehand the total size of the files I’ve selected for copying.

In Windows, it’s just a matter of keeping your eye of the Explorer status bar as you select the files / folders.

Things are slightly more complicated on the Mac.

Your first instinct would be to select multiple files, right-click on them, and click on Get Info.

Don’t do this! Finder will show an Info window for each individual selected file. If you happen to have selected hundreds or thousands of files, you’ll … well, I haven’t tried it myself but my guess is your Mac would slow down to a crawl.

Instead, the correct way is to Show Inspector, which can be accessed in one of the following ways:

1. Hold down the option (alt) button, and then right-click on the selected files (or folders), then click on Show Inspector.
2. Press option (alt) + command + i
3. Press control + command + i
4. Hold down the option (alt) button, click on File in the menu, then select Show Inspector.

I prefer the second approach.

To dismiss the Show Inspector / Multiple Item Info window, simply click on the close window icon, or press the option (alt) + command + i again (if you had used option (alt) + command + i in the first place).

If you had used control + command + i to call up the Inpsector window, you can use command + w to close the window. Don’t ask me why Mac’s are so complicated in this regard.

This trick works for folders too, or a combination of files and folders.

I’m on a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz, and I launch iTunes.

I create a smart playlist, called “To delete”, in iTunes to collect all songs with a 1-star rating.

My intention is to physically obliterate these songs from my hard disk - I don’t ever want to see them again, not in this lifetime anyway.

I just want to free up some HD space, and moving these unwanted songs into the Trash is taking the first step.

I navigate to the smart playlist.

I then highlight all the songs (and there’s a whole bunch of them).

I then tried pressing command + delete - nothing happens.

I tried alt (option) + delete - I only get the option to remove the selected songs from the iTunes library. Not good, as these songs will still be taking up hard disk space, but won’t appear in iTunes.

After a bit of searching, it turns out that I need to perform a finger-twisting shift + alt (option) + command + delete so that I get the prompt to remove these tunes from iTunes and move them to the Trash.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which finger goes to which key. You don’t have a choice, as even the option to delete selected songs on the menu is grayed out when you’re in a playlist.

If you’re tired of viewing photos and graphics with dull colors in Firefox 2 vis-a-vis what you see in Photoshop / iPhoto / Finder / Preview, or if you get inconsistent or “wonky” colors in Safari, try installing Firefox 3.

Thanks to Johann Sanneblad for this article that pointed me in the right direction.

When installing, be sure not to drag the Application icon into your Applications folder as this might overwrite your existing Firefox application (I did not test this). I installed Firefox 3 on my Desktop for now.

Next, launch Firefox 3 and type about:config into the Address Bar. Type gfx in the filter box, and double-click gfx.color_management.enabled to set it to true.

Click the screen capture below to view a larger version:

Now, open your favorite photo gallery in Firefox 3 and Safari, and compare what you see.

Which browser displays better-looking photos and graphics?

I’m willing to bet you’ll prefer the viewing experience in Firefox 3.

I know I do.

Refer also to Rob Galbraith’s report and check that your Firefox manages color correctly against this web page.

In the Finder, I see these files:

Next, I narrow down the list of files in this folder to those of THM extension by entering .THM in the search bar of the Finder window.

You also need to ensure that the current folder is selected (rather than This Mac).

Now that you have the desired files filtered and listed, simply perform a Select All using CMD + A. You can also select Select All from the Edit menu.

The final step involves moving your files to the Trash.