Mr. Beast

I am considering switching to a MacMini from a PC. I have an external Firewire HD with all of my music. Can I just plug the HD into the new MacMini or do I need to some fancy formatting, etc? If it is the latter, is it is easy to "convert"?

As one of our other readers noted, it depends on how the external drive is formatted. If the drive is FAT32, you can plug it into your Mac mini without any problems. If the drive is NTFS you will be able to read the drive, but not write to it. So you could copy all the music to the Mac's internal drive, but you wouldn't be able to write to the drive.

There are a few tools that will allow you to write to the NTFS drive -- a commercial package, Paragon NTFS and a free tool called NTFS-3G among them. However, if you're really going to switch over (which you absolutely should!) then I think the best thing to do would be to copy the music over to the Mac, reformat the drive as HFS+ (with the Mac's built-in Disk Utility) and the copy the music back to the drive (assuming you want to keep all your music on an external drive).

Kevin asks

I need to use a https site to manage my webhosting account, however each time I access that page I have to specifically tell Safari to trust the certificate. Is there any way to force it on a certain domain?

Yes you can change the way OS X / Safari trusts certificates. When the certificate box comes up you'll see a checkbox which will allow you to select an "always trust... when connecting to...". When you do so you'll be asked for your Administrator's password and it should then automatically trust that certificate.

If that doesn't work initially, you may already have an entry in your Keychain. If so, start Keychain Access in /Applications/Utilities and delete the relevant entry. The next time you visit that website it should automatically bring up the certificate box.

John asks

Does anyone know of a mac utility (or pc... if necessary) that can restore an image (or an actual dvd) to a non-hfs partition or a usb stick? I'm trying to get boot camp working, but my superdrive is fried and windows won't boot from my external firewire dvd drive. I have an external usb hd, though, and a usb stick thingy, so i figured i could just make an image of my xp install disk (is this legal? it's my own copy that i bought), and restore that to the usb stick or to a partition on my drive. trouble is, superduper, carbon copy cloner, and disk utility are all unable to do this (at least i can't figure out how.. after 5 frustrating hours of trying, and googling!). I've also tried a few different programs on an xp virtual machine - alcohol 120, daemon tools, and a few others - but i can't figure out how to do it. all the articles i've read describe long complicated procedures with command line tools - all way above my pay grade! i figure there MUST be a simple way to do this, no? I did the equivalent with my leopard install disk, to a bootable partition on my external, and it was ridiculously easy. i know it's windows, but it can't be THAT much more complicated to do something this simple, can it???

I think you're going to have to do this on Windows. From what I understand you want to install Windows XP from an external USB flash drive. Fortunately, I found couple of tutorials for installing XP onto various netbooks lacking an optical drive. Check out this tutorial for the eeePC. Here's another tutorial focused on the HP Mini-Note which has basically the same steps. The basic procedure should cross-apply to any computer and will give you a good idea of how to proceed.

macuser asks

Can someone tell me an application that can pull text from pictures and make a text document. I know Microsoft OneNote had this feature, but I was wondering if there was a free program somewhere. I have a typed document printed and I did not want to retype the whole thing just to make a few changes, so I was wondering if I could scan it and use a program such as this.

What you're asking for is OCR (optical character recognition) software. On the Mac there are a few options Readiris Pro ($129.99), OmniPage X ($499.99), and DEVONThink Pro Office ($149.95) among them -- Adobe's Acrobat Pro also has built-in OCR capability for PDF files. Unfortunately, as you can see each of these is rather expensive. If you only have a single document that you want OCR'ed you might try an online service OCR service. I haven't used any of these myself, but several are listed here. If you try any of them let us know what works best for you.

Joe asks

I have a few computers on the home network, sometimes they all automatically appear in finder, but what do I do when they don't automatically show up, I want to refresh the network so I can swap files between computers.

In the Finder invoke the Connect to Server... option in the Go menu ( ⌘+K ). You should then be able to hit the browse button. If you know the actual locations of the other computers (i.e. their IP addresses) you can also put those in directly. In fact, once you connect to them it's a good idea to save their locations in the Connect to Server window (with the plus button) so you can easily access them in the future.