Pressing CTRL + ALT + Delete on a Apple Mac

On my Mac I use a Windows 10 VM (Parallels Desktop) to access my work PC remotely. It took me some time but to do CTRL + ALT + Delete on the remote PC I needed to press the following:

FN + CTRL + ALT + Left Arrow + Right Arrow.

When running Microsoft Remote Desktop it is the following:

FN + CTRL + ALT + Backspace (Delete)

How to reduce size of PDF file on Mac

I had some PDF files which were over 14MB in size and I needed a way to reduce the size to upload them to a web site that had a limit of 10MB. I thought this would be an very easy and I would have some option to save the PDF with reduced quality to reduce the size of the file. But I could not find any option on my Mac and found it even more frustrating in Windows 10. One solution I though of, which works is:

1. Open PDF file in Preview.
2. From the 'File' menu select 'Export'.
3. Export the file as a JPEG, this will save the file with a small file size.
4. Open the JPEG in Preview and then from the 'File' menu option select 'Export as PDF'.

Copy Photos from iPhone to Mac

It does not seem that obvious on how to copy photos and video off the iPhone onto a Mac. With Android phones you can look at the file system and locate the required files. One method I used in the past was to use iPhoto, import the photos and then drag the photos into the relevant directory in Finder.

But the quickest method I found was to open up the 'Image Capture' (I use spotlight for this) and from there you can view and browse the images and videos on the phone and drag and drop them into the relevant directories in Finder.

Apple Mac - Freezes when another monitor is positioned close to it

At home I usually use an Apple Mac, recently I've needed to do work on a separate PC in the same location. I've noticed some strange behaviour with the Mac when I position the monitor of the PC near my Mac, the result is I can move the mouse pointer, but the mouse click does not work and also the keyboard does not respond. The cursor for the keyboard actually disappears and the Mac appears to be frozen apart from the ability to move the mouse. First time this happened I thought there was a problem with it so restarted it, but all I needed to do was move the PC's monitor a bit further away. 

The monitor that is causing the issue is a standard Dell one and the distance the monitor needs to be is very close, approx 150mm from the Mac. 

Parallels Desktop - How to start in safe mode

I have recently updated my Parallels Desktop on my iMac to version 10 (which I am regretting), I have a severe issue with running my XP virtual machine, however than will be another blog entry at some point.

I wanted to start my VM in safe mode, but could not find any options in the configuration. The solution in the end is not elegant, but works. Here are the steps

1) Boot up your VM as normal.

2) While it is booting up try to close the VM screen using the red close button in the top left hand side of the screen. The following dialog should be displayed.

3) Select 'Shut Down', this will force the VM to shut down.
4) Boot up your VM again, because it did not shut down property you should get this screen.

5) Select 'Safe Mode' from the menu using the cursor keys (up and down keys).

How to find IP address from MAC address

To find IP address from a MAC address in Windows go to a dos prompt and type "arp -a", this will give you a list of IP addresses on the network with related MAC address.

Lightroom - How to multi select photos to import on a Mac

I have been using Lightroom for a couple of years now and the other day I needed to import some photos from my camera, but I did not want to import all of them. I started clicking through each photo I wanted and quickly realised this cannot be the way to do it and what I wanted was a way to multi-select a load of photos. The way to do it is as follows:

1. In the import screen uncheck all the photos.
2. Select the first photo in the range, this is not clicking on the checkbox, just click on the photo and it will turn a light grey.
3. Hold down the 'Shift' key.
4. Select the last photo in the range, this will turn all the photos between light grey.
5. Now click on a check box of the last photo, this will check the tick boxes of all the selected photos.

Broadband speed tests between Apple and Windows

The IPS I use at the moment is BT Infinity, which sells itself as a high speed broadband supplier. I thought recently I would try to check what speed I was getting

Below are some results of speed checking web sites. I concentrated on just the download speeds and on both iOS and Windows I used Google Chrome as the browser.

Speedtest.net
Apple - 37 mbps
Windows XP - 3.19 mbps
Android App - 14 mbps

BroadbandSpeedChecker.co.uk
Apple - 34 mbps
Windows XP - 3.38 mbps

I was surprised to see such a difference in the results. The results are the best I could archive and are not the average, but you can see a clear difference between Apple and Windows. I tried the speed tests on 2 different Windows XP machines and got similar results, so concluded at the time that it was not the hardware.

The following day, I looked at just using my Mac with a Windows virtual machine installed, here are the results:


Speedtest.net
Apple - 19.8 mbps
Windows - 17.8 mbps

BroadbandSpeedChecker.co.uk
Apple - 13.5 mbps
Windows - 5.9 mbps


You can see that the following day the speed was generally less, this could be the time of day and other factors, but these results are using the same hardware, just different operating systems to run the browser. Speedtest.net web site does seem to get very similar results, which would hint that different hardware (same router) could make a difference, but with BroadbandSpeedChecker it seems that different operating systems also make a difference.

In conclusion I think these speed testing web sites are a useful tool, however I am still not confident on how accurate they are and do not understand why Apple iOS gets such better results.

Screen Capture MAC

I use both Windows and Apple computers and I needed to find the best way to capture an area of the screen on my iMac. I thought I needed something like Cropper which I use in Windows, but have discovered iOS has it built in. Here are the following capture options I have discovered:

1. To capture an area of the desktop, press cmd+shift+4, this will give you a cross hair where you can select and area of the screen, this will save the image as a png file on the desktop.
2. To capture a application screen, press cmd+shift+4, to display the cross hair again, now hit the space bar and the icon will change to a camera and will select areas of the desktop.
3. To capture the whole desktop, press cmd+shift+3.

I thought this was great that Apple has included these features in iOS, I bet I will find some more useful features the more I use iOS.

How to Access Android files on Mac

I recently purchased a Nexus 4 phone, over the past couple of months I have been taking photos and video and wanted to transfer them to my iMac. I thought I would simply need to plug in the phone into the USB port and it would see the files, this is how it is done on Windows PC. At first I was a bit worried that because it was not Apple, and I had an awful feeling it would not work. But after doing some research all you need to do is download the Android File Transfer application, install it and you can see the files on your Nexus 4 phone.