As I've discovered recently, one of the unfortunate side effects of having the logic board on your computer replaced (aside from the potentially hefty bill involved if your AppleCare has lapsed) is that your Time Machine backups won't play nicely with your Mac after the repair if you're using a Time Capsule.

Replacing the logic board is essentially like getting a whole new Mac; though all the data on the hard drive is identical, the new logic board will have different hardware identifiers (specifically, the MAC address) that will tell your Time Capsule, "This is a new Mac that's never been backed up before. Please treat it as such." The Time Capsule, doing as it's told, will fumble along and create a new Time Machine backup while ignoring the old backups completely.

Your options then are these:

1. Scrap your old Time Machine backups and start fresh. There may be an allure to this, but it's almost certainly unnecessary, and you can lose months of perfectly good backups. Plus, you then have to deal with the incredibly long first Time Machine backup all over again.

2. Hack your Time Machine backup using the following procedure, which will allow you to resume Time Machine backups as though your logic board was never replaced.

According to Mac OS X Hints, if you're trying to send an email to someone with a spamcop.net email address with your MobileMe account, chances are the message will never arrive, and you won't be notified.

What's worse, apparently if you're sending the message to a distribution list, and only one of those recipients has an address at spamcop.net, nobody will receive the message.

Apparently the problem has been happening for months, since Apple moved everyone from .Mac to MobileMe. A participant in the Apple Discussions thread notes that it's common for service providers to filter their outgoing mail by domain in order to avoid being blacklisted. So far, only spamcop.net appears to be affected.

A workaround for now would be to try to send the message using a different email account. We'll let you know if Apple offers a fix in the meantime.

Update: Friendly reader Jason sent me a detailed explanation about why this might be. In a misguided attempt to control their individual load of spam, some users choose to forward all their MobileMe mail to a spamcop.net address. Spamcop, unfortunately, thinks the "spam" originated at MobileMe, not the actual origin of the spammy badness. So, MobileMe, to combat this, forbids forwarding to domains like Spamcop in order to avoid being blacklisted. There's nothing sinister going on here, just honest network administrators doing what they can with what they've got. Thanks, Jason!

The idea of being able to select text and have it automatically converted into an audiobook using text-to-speech isn't a new one, but it is a good one. I mean, who doesn't love the idea of being able to take longer text on the road with you and listen to it in the car or on the bus?

Well, if you loved the idea as much as I did, but didn't think you'd be using it enough to justify coughing up some dough for it, you're in luck. Over at Mac OS X Hints, user miketyson has created a script that will add a service to your Mac's Services menu. The new service, which is appropriately called Speak to iTunes Audiobook, allows you to select a body of text and automatically have it converted into an audiobook, then have it imported straight into iTunes.

In testing the script works as advertised. My only quibble is that the clipped audiobooks don't get any sort of meaningful name given to them. They are simply named Speech 1, Speech 2, etc. If the script was smart enough to look at the title of the document the text was being clipped from and generate a title from that, this would be a killer utility. But that's really only a minor complaint considering the heavy lifting this little script actually accomplishes. And heck, if you find yourself using it, you might consider going back and giving GhostReader a second look.

It's hard to believe that the essential and educational font of Mac knowledge, macosxhints.com, is celebrating seven years of tips and tricks this week. Day in and day out, Rob Griffiths and his colleagues (the site is now owned by Macworld, but it began life as an independent resource) provide an essential service to the Mac community with user-contributed tweaks, tips and workarounds that help make OS X a better experience for all of us.

Congratulations Rob, and best wishes from your fans at TUAW for seven more years!

At last, the chains that bind an auto-synced iPod have been broken; or at least, this is the first time I've heard of such a simple hint for adding music (and possibly photos and video) to an iPod already bound to another computer's library. Mac OS X Hints has a surprisingly simple tip for accomplishing this: all you need to do is select and expand the iPod icon in the left Sources menu, then simply drag from the Finder whatever new music you want to add onto the main list of music, *not* the iPod in the list. This can be useful especially for those who have separate libraries on two machines (example: one for work and another for home), since the only other simple alternative is to set the iPod for manually managing your music, which then doesn't allow you to sync some metadata like ratings and comments or tags. Oh what a twisted music management web Apple weaves.

A commenter at Mac OS X Hints says they can add photos and videos using this method as well, but I unfortunately don't have a second machine to try this out on right now. Anyone in the audience care to give it a go?

Yet another slick tip I found while parsing my Mac OS X Hints feed is a fairly simple hack for setting the dock and menubar to auto-hide based on which app is in the foreground. This can come in very handy if you usually like to see these elements, but often work in screen-hungry apps that can't auto-hide them on their own. I'm even interested in trying this on Photoshop, which can hide the dock and menubar, but only when in full screen mode (which I don't often like to use).

The tip essentially involves using something like the Property List Editor (a free app included in Apple's Developer Tools) or Pref Setter to copy and paste two short lines of code into an application's info.plist file. The hint contains everything you need to hack away, including a hint from The Rob himself which I'd like to echo: definitely make a backup of the app, or at least the info.plist file, before you copy and paste your way into a problem. That said, enjoy having the best of both worlds.

Over at MacOSXHints, Rob G. has posted a must-read article about possible data loss from TextEdit's Save dialog. The problem stems from TextEdit's (and Cocoa's) willingness to overwrite entire folders with text files.

This data security hole seems to occur because "bundle" style files (which are actually folders and not single files) are considered on-par with flat files in OS X. TextEdit does not seem to check to ensure that the folder being replaced is actually a bundle and not, say, your entire home directory. It's an important article to read and a bug that you need to be aware of.

MacOSXHints reader posted a tip about how to enable Front Row on your Mac Pro. This trick will get around the problem of no Apple IR remote being detected, which causes Front Row to fail to launch. Front Row is already installed on Mac Pros - it just doesn't work. It just sits there, teasing you...

All you have to do is edit a plist file and you'll be up and running. Which plist file to edit is dependant on which mouse you use, but if you don't use an Apple or Logitech mouse you might have to scramble a bit to get it working. For complete details, check out the tip on MacOSXHints. Of course you're still going to need some sort of remote to actually use Front Row, and there are a number of options available for that (a Salling Clicker-enabled cell phone, for example), but being able to activate it is a good first step.

I don't have a Mac Pro handy to test this with, so let us know if you get it working on yours!

UPDATE: We've added new instructions for users of the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse. See this post.

Well color us surprised: Mac OS X Hints just found out that iCal actually can publish calendars through FTP (not just WebDAV), opening the doors for many users to publish their calendars and integrate them into services like Google Calendar and the like. One simply needs to use ftp:// when using the Publish... command, and all should be well. While it should be noted this still doesn't enable full sharing and editing of calendars like SyncBridge, it should allow users with non-WebDAV enabled hosts to get their iCal publishing on.

A post at Mac OS X Hints lists some bizarre shortcuts that appear to be new in iTunes 7. The shortcuts apply to selecting the various content sections such as Music, Movies and the Store, but what's strange is that if you have any playlists which begin with the same letter as the shortcut, the playlist takes precedence. For example: the letter M (amongst others) can take you to your Movies section, but if you have a playlist titled "Mashups," the letter M will take you to the playlist, not the major content section.

These shortcuts are very strange indeed, and it would be nice to have a more unified and universal list tucked away under a menu somewhere, so the shortcuts worked no matter what you were doing in iTunes, or what was selected. Still, if you're interested, check out Mac OS X Hint's list of shortcuts found so far.

I've done it again -- sent an email that mentions an attachment, and then forgot to attach the file. It's always embarassing. Here's a way to save yourself from similar humiliation.

Download this free Attachment Scanner plugin for Mail.app, and install it following the directions on the developer's site. Now when you type "attach," "attachment,", "attaching," or similar words in an email, if you hit Send without actually attaching a document, you'll see a warning like this one: "Message Has No Attachment. Your mail appears to refer to an attachment, but none exists. Do you wish to continue?" If you don't mention an attachment, you won't see anything different than usual. I've been using it all day, and really appreciate getting a second chance to save face thanks to developer James Eagan.

[via macosxhints]

The fact that iPhoto, even the latest and shiniest '06 version, doesn't allow access to a camera's storage card to pick and chose which images get imported has irked users across this great planet of ours for years - until now. macosxhints has discovered that striking the return key twice when the import screen is displayed (upon connecting a camera or card) will enter users into a manual browsing mode, allowing them to browse their images directly from the device, the way it was meant to be (at least as an option; I'd bet this is yet another undocumented feature).

The original hint poster stated that they couldn't manually move images over; he/she could only browse them. Rob Griffiths, however, added that he could in fact manually import a custom selection of photos, suggesting that this might work on a per-camera basis. He requests, and I echo, that users who try this out post their camera model and experience over at macosxhints so they can get a good list of working models.

This tip has apparently been around for quite a while, but the indispensable macosxhints just discovered it today, and I thought I'd share the love. It turns out that, using iMovie and at least one picture/video file, you can chose a couple of specific export options to crank out a DRM-free AIFF file from any of your iTMS songs. Bringing this file back into iTunes, of course, re-converts and compresses it to your bidding. It might be a roundabout solution, but if you can export more than one song per iMovie project (anyone care to try?), I bet this could turn out to be a bit easier than burning all those CDs.

Check out macosxhints for the full instructions on using iMovie to de-DRM your tracks.

The 'don't-buy-a-Mac-without-it' macosxhints.com has debuted a hint rating system, allowing both logged in and anonymous users to place a 1-5 star rating on each hint.

As you might expect, their stats page now includes a 'Top 20 Rated Hints' section at the bottom. This should allow you to spend even more time you never intended to, learning even cooler ways to use your Mac.

The invaluable macosxhints has received a redesign and feature boost. The site's theme has received a stylistic bump, and legibility has improved site-wide. New functionality and features include more topic categories and a better search (while Rob won't use the term 'better', I will). Registered and logged in users will likely welcome simplified account management tools and more control over what information you include and display for others.

Head over and take a look at macosxhints' new look and add your $0.02 to their announcement post.