Ask TUAW: Announcing Caller ID, Time Machine, iTunes syncing, Bonjour and more

Tristan asks

I have a mac mini mostly collecting dust in my family room. Is there a way to use the mini for caller ID? We have some panasonic phones that announce the callers name on the 2'nd ring, but the text-to-speech is lacking. Is there a way to have the mini announce the caller using OS X's voices?

Yes there are several ways to do this, but you'll need a CallerID compatible modem connected to the mini (from what I understand the USB modem Apple presently sells is CallerID compatible). Out of the box, PhoneValet and Ovolab Phlink will do more or less exactly what you want. However, PhoneValet has many other features as well and costs $169.95 and Phlink is a similar $149.95. There are a couple of CallerID applications out there, however, that sell for around $15 and have AppleScript support: Caller ID from Apimac and CIDTrackerX from AfterTen. With AppleScript you can easily cook up scripts that would announce the caller using the say command. Finally, there's also a free application Silica that also has some AppleScript that you might like to start with.

Lui asks serially

1) Is there a way to stop iTunes from expanding when I connect my iPhone or iPod? It is really annoying now that I have all my applications specifically set up in Spaces to be more productive. iTunes is set up in mini mode, and set for every space . I go to sync my iPod and iPhone and iTunes gets all egotistical, expands, and robs me of my precious screen realty and organization.

You can do this if you stop it from automatically syncing, of course. However, you'll have to remember to manually sync. If you go into the Syncing tab of the iTunes Preferences you can select the "Disable automatic syncing for all iPhones and iPods."

2) In the same theme of organization as I stated above, I want to get rid of the recent buddies group in the iChat window since i have no room for them and have never once had a use for them since all my buddies are from my address book (I may just be unpopular). Also while on a rant , it would be even more helpful to get the recent buddies group and the offline group to vanish-I mean who really cares about people being offline? How does that help you?

As one of the other readers points out you can set Offline buddies to invisible in the View menu of iChat.

3) is there a trigger/hotkey floating around out there for quicksilver that will enable a hotkey to sync a ipod or iphone so that when i set my itunes not to autosync i can just hit a button to sync?

There is an Automator action for "Update iPod" which you could conceivably save as an application and then run with a Quicksilver trigger. The kicker, however, is that this action will only work if the iPod is "configured to allow automatic updating."

Josh asks

1) I recently upgraded to Leopard, but before that I was using SuperDuper! to backup my iBook to an external firewire drive with Tiger. One thing I loved about SuperDuper! is that if something ever happened to my drive, I could just boot into the external drive and I was right back to work - no down time while I repaired/reloaded the internal drive. I haven't taken the time to setup Time Machine yet, mostly because I'm not sure if it provides the feature. Does Time Machine allow you to boot straight to your external drive?

No, Time Machine does not create bootable backups. If you lose your main drive you can recover from a Time Machine volume, but you'll have to boot from a Leopard DVD and then restore your TM backup to your drive, which could take some time; you could also use Migration Assistant to integrate your data onto a working Leopard system, if you had one ready. For this reason I actually recommend using both Time Machine and a utility like SuperDuper (on separate drives). The only problem with that is that SuperDuper is not yet fully compatible with Leopard, but Mike Bombich's free Carbon Copy Cloner is Leopard-ready and can handle most of SuperDuper's workload.

Update: Clarified the answer above. As our commenters have pointed out, it is not necessary to reinstall Leopard from scratch, then restore. The Leopard DVD includes the restore functionality to allow you to recover your drive from Time Machine, including the OS itself; however, as noted, this is not the immediate 'swap & go' recovery offered by a cloned drive.

2) I currently have about 40GB of data on my iBook's drive. How much space should I expect Time Machine to occupy on my external drive? I know that Time Machine saves multiple copies ("versions" or whatever) of some files, unlike SuperDuper! which just kept one. Is my Time Machine backup going to be significantly bigger than the 40GB of data on my primary drive?

Time Machine will use whatever you give it. So it needs to be at least as large as your main drive, but it will continue to use however much space is available. Basically the more space you give it, the farther "back in time" you can go. (That is, the more versions it saves.)

Trudy asks

My printer is connected to my Mac. How can I print from a Win XP computer? The two computers seem to be networked in some way. I'm not so sure, but it does show up in "Shared" in Finder.

I normally don't answer Windows questions, but I'll make an exception here because Apple has released Bonjour software for Windows that makes this relatively easy. First, make sure Printer Sharing is turned on the Sharing Preference Pane. That done, download and install the Bonjour for Windows software from Apple onto the XP computer.