Posted by Victoire on Apr 29, 2009 in
Applications,
Blogging,
Useful stuff I am feeling more than a little foolish right now and the reason is simple… I’m kicking myself for completely forgetting a lesson I learnt not so long ago.
I have been in between computers using both my acer laptop and macbook (it’s a long story). When on the windows-based machine I like to use Windows Live Writer (WLW) to blog as I don’t have to be online to do so and it is pretty easy to save a draft when I’m unable to complete a post in one sitting. So I decide to set up an account in WLW for this blog. All goes well until I need to submit the remote posting url for Wordpress 2.2+. I hit a snag.
“The server reported that the following URL can not be found: http://victoire.za.net/onmydesk/xmlrpc.php. Please ensure you have a valid URL”.
I struggle with the same error for 2 days. I search the net and come across some very helpful sites. Finally I remember that I had the same problem the last time I used this machine, and even blogged the solution on the now defunct victoire.za.net! What was the solution? Uncheck the proxy setting in Internet Explorer… Voila… I’m posting this post from WLW.
Tags: desktop publishing, error, fix, proxy, remote blogging, windows live writer 117 views
Posted by Victoire on Feb 15, 2009 in
Tools,
Tutorials,
Useful stuff This one puzzled me this morning, when I had to capture an image of a map, and had no idea how to do so on my MacBook! Thankfully there are loads of helpful hints available via Google. I got this one off My Journey to Macintosh:
“I knew that I could take a screenshot of the whole screen with Shift + Command + 3 and that I could grab a lasso with Shift + Command + 4 but I didn’t know how to just grab the contents of one window. Anyway, it turns out if you press Shift + Command + 4 and then hit Space, your cursor turns to a camera icon and you can grab just the contents of one window.”
As macnewbie states in the blog article, the image is saved to your Desktop for easy access.
16 views
Posted by Victoire on Dec 26, 2008 in
Devices,
Toys,
Tutorials,
Useful stuff 
My tech world has been turned upside down - I bit the bullet, or the forbidden apple in this case, and bought a shiny new MacBook a week ago. Since then I have been fumbling around like a complete newbie trying to figure out the basics of operating this stylishly sexy machine. The learning curve is gigantic when almost all you’ve known is Microsoft’s Windows (I had a brief stint with Ubuntu a few years ago)… yes, really.
What do you do if nothing seems to work the way it should? You spend lots of quality time with your new best friend, Google. “There must be others who have gone through similar situations and have documented their findings” you mutter under your breath as you scour Google’s proffering. Well yes, there are, all you need is patience and time. Don’t have either? Here are a few simple yet essential things I’ve learnt…
Keyboard shortcuts don’t work the same on a MacBook
Whether you want to copy and paste, move your cursor a word at a time, or delete instead of backspacing it’s just different.
The basics
Cut: cmd x
Copy: cmd c
Paste: cmd v
Delete: fn backspace
More: Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts
A bit more adventurous
Move one word left or right: alt arrow
Move to the beginning or end of the line: cmd arrow
Select one word left or right: shift alt arrow
Select to the beginning or end of the line: shift cmd arrow
More: Table of keyboard shortcuts, Default Mac OS X System Key Bindings
Now to reprogram my fingers into the correct positioning for the new shortcuts!
Still to come is a look at some blogging tools I’ve discovered, with the next blog post published from one of the blogging applications.
Tags: Google, Keyboard shortcut, MacBook, OSX 31 views
