10.5.6 update-- do it (my way)

Apple’s released the 10.5.6 update, so naturally I am getting zillions of calls about whether it’s safe to install or not. It is. Just be careful, as usual.

Do it like this:

1. Restart your computer.
2. Find the Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder, in the Applications folder, on your hard disk) and “repair permissions.” If you don’t know how to do this have me do it with you over the phone one time.
3. Download and install the 10.5.6 update (Apple menu, Software Update...)

The updater will want you to restart when it’s done. Do that, then run Disk Utility again, and repair permissions again. That’s it.

(The updater is full of bug fixes, including some for Mail and iChat. You won’t notice much new but your machine will run better after the 10.5.6 update.)

How to eject a CD from a Mac

Here's another tip for Dad, the new iMac owner.

You might be thinking "What could be so hard about ejecting a CD? Push a button and out it comes." Well, yes, but… sometimes things go wrong. Here's how to handle it when they do.

Actually, the first thing to do is NEVER insert a CD (or a DVD) into your Mac's SuperDrive unless it is the typical size and typical shape. That means "round and of regulation size." It also means "not like any of those in the picture below."

No star CDs, no saw blade CDs, no business card CDs, no mini CDs. Put one of those in there and it's not coming out. So don't do that.

This is not a good time to "test."

Assuming that all you did was put in a regulation-sized round CD (or a DVD), and now it's stuck inside and won't come out, let's run through some techniques that will help you get it out.

1. Press the Eject key on the keyboard and hold it down. The key looks something like this:

Sometimes people don't hold it down long enough for the "eject" message to get through. Apple decided a few operating systems back that pressing and HOLDING would be the better way to use the eject key because some people were inadvertently touching the eject button and accidentally ejecting things. Why WE should suffer because someone else can't type properly is not something I can answer. I don't like it either. But, at least you know how to make the keyboard's Eject key work-- hold it down.

Bonus Tip: on some keyboards F12 is the same as the Eject key. FYI.

2. If that didn't work, restart the Mac, and when you hear it go "Bong" click on the mouse and hold the mouse button down until the disc ejects. (Trackpad users: click and hold on the trackpad.) If the Mac starts up completely and still the disc doesn't eject we will have to move on to Step 3.

3. If you see the disc's icon on the Desktop you can drag it to the Trash in the Dock. I know it's weird and I know it makes you feel as if you're going to erase the disc by doing it. Everyone feels that way (except for the people at Apple who came up with the idea.) Turns out that the Trash can icon will change to look like an Eject icon (like the Eject key on the keyboard) as soon as you start dragging the disc, so you're "ejecting" and not "throwing away" the disc but there's no way of knowing that until you do it. But… by default, CDs and DVDs don't show up on the Desktop, so you may not have anything to drag anyway. You might have to change a Finder Preference to make the discs appear. So, on to Step 4:

4. In the Finder, choose Finder/Preferences… and in the General section check the box for CDs, DVDs and iPods. While you're in there, in the Sidebar section check the box for CDs, DVDs, and iPods too. Close up the Finder's Preferences and have a look around the Desktop. Maybe now you'll see the icon for the disc, and maybe now you can drag it to the Trash. If you click on the disc ONCE you'll select it, and if it's selected you can choose Eject from the Finder's File menu. You can also use Command-E and do it from the keyboard. Click and drag, or click and File/Eject, or click and Command-E. All fine methods.


If you can't see the disc on the Desktop maybe you will see it in the sidebar of a Finder window. If you do, move the mouse over the name of the disc and a little Eject icon will show up to the right. Click that and maybe it ejects. Maybe.

(There is of course a chance that you don't have a disc in there at all. Maybe someone else ejected it when you weren't looking. It is worth asking around.)

5. Still can't get the disc out? Maybe you had the icon on the Desktop, dragged it to the Trash, and now the icon's gone but still the disc is inside? Try launching the Terminal program (in the Utilities folder, which is in the Applications folder) and typing this in:

drutil eject -drive internal

and then press Return on the keyboard. That will tell the Mac to try to eject the disc from the internal drive. Maybe you'll get lucky.

6. Still no dice? Still can't get it out? I would not reach for pliers. You might get the disc out but you'll probably break the SuperDrive. Instead of reaching for pliers try reaching for your car keys and driving the Mac to an Apple Store. They will probably try all of the things I listed here but they can also take the machine apart so they can actually see the SuperDrive and (perhaps) manually eject the disc. I would not try taking the Mac apart as the modern Mac's SuperDrive is pretty hard to get to.

In my experience-- more than 20 years-- I've seen just a couple of stuck discs. Most were from those non-standard discs, the ones shaped like business cards or stars or saw blades etc. Don't let it happen to you.

TRUE STORY: Once upon a time I was asked to come see a Mac whose CD drive "didn't work." I asked what "didn't work" meant and the owner said "Well, it worked great for the first disc. But I had some trouble putting in the second disc, and after I got it in it didn't work. So then I tried another disc and it wouldn't go in at all. That's when I called you." I couldn't get the disc to eject either, but since this was an older iMac and easy to open up I took it apart and found the second disc AND THE FIRST DISC jammed very tightly into the drive. Turns out that the person using the Mac didn't understand that the SuperDrive holds only one disc at a time, and if you want to put in Disc B you'd better take out Disc A first.

How to Add Color to Lion's Finder Sidebar

Finally, there's a simple method for adding color the the Finder's sidebar in Lion. It comes to us from Norway, thanks to Fredrik Wiker, a 16 year old developer. Click to download his "Lion Tweaks" application. Your Finder windows will go from grey to colorful in just a few clicks.

Step 1 is to download Lion Tweaks. Put it into your Applications folder.
Step 2 is run Lion Tweaks. You will see all sorts of options. The one we're interested in here is "Enable colour in the Finder-sidebar." When you click the "Yes" button you'll be asked whether you have "SIMBL"installed already. You probably don't, so let Lion Tweaks download it for you.

Step 3 is to install SIMBL. You just downloaded it so you should be able to find it.
Step 4 is to continue the process with Lion Tweaks. You'll have to click the "Yes" button next to "Enable colour in the Finder-sidebar" again, but this time you have the SIMBL thing installed, so you can say yes all the way through. At the end, you'll see this message:


It really works. Check out the before and after pictures. Pleased to report that reverting to the original Lion grey sidebar is a simple click (and restart of the Finder). Well done, Fredrik!

Best Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

Dad is now a Mac owner. He used a Mac at work way back when but things have changed a lot. And, even the things that haven't changed a lot are ancient memories for him. I thought it would be a good idea to put together a series of Mac hints for Dad, a little at a time, for the next thirty days or so. Here's the first one:

Best Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

PC guys are friendly with the Control key, but here on the Mac side we use the Command key. A lot of keyboards don't show the word "Command" on them, so you may have to look for the Command key symbol:


(click to read Andy Hertzfeld's story of the Command key, from folklore.org)

Turns out that every Mac keyboard shortcut involves the Command key. Knowing where the Command key is (actually, where the Command keys are) means you're halfway home for an awful lot of shortcut keys. See how easy this is?

Refer to the handy picture of a keyboard (below) for the shortcuts that follow. Note that these shortcuts work just about all of the time, whether in Mail, Safari, Pages, or any other program. That means one can learn things once and use them all over the place. Dad likes to be efficient!

Command-Q: Quit
Command-W: Close Window
Command-P: Print

Command-A: Select All
Command-S: Save
Command-F: Find

Command-Z: Undo
Command-X: Cut
Command-C: Copy
Command-V: Paste (sorry, P was already taken for Print. Besides, V is next in line, next to the C on the keyboard, and it is important to have these frequently-accessed shortcuts laid out together, in a group)

Command-N: New (new Mail message, new Safari window, new Finder window, new Pages document, etc.)


Wondering how you're supposed to remember all of this? Here's how: just look at the menus as you choose them with the mouse or trackpad. Notice the shortcuts written to the right of the menu commands. For example, in Mail's File menu we see shortcuts for New (Message), Close (Window), Save, and Print. Those hints are there all the time, reminding you that there are shortcuts for triggering these menu items. See below.

Bonus Nice Touch: notice, when you use a keyboard shortcut, that the menu containing the menu item you're triggering flashes, as if to say "Got it, Chief." It's a subtle but helpful reinforcement that the Mac's received your command, no pun intended.

OK Dad, that's it for tonight. Try these shortcuts now and in a week they'll be second nature.

UPDATE: try this page from Apple-- "OS X keyboard shortcuts."

Another Reason to Like Snow Leopard

Ever use the "Help" menu in 10.3 or 10.4. or 10.5? If you have, you know it's the slowest thing ever. But, in 10.6 (Snow Leopard), it's fast. Really fast. So, now, it's useful. If you'd previously given up on getting help from the Help menu, and you're now on 10.6, give it another try. You'll like it.

iCal College Football Bowl Calendar

It's time for the college football bowl games. Here's a handy iCal calendar with the entire schedule. It's updated to show you the most recent information (dates, times, TV network, and even the scores). Click the link, add it to your iCal calendar, remember to tell it to refresh (recommendation: daily), and you'll have the information at your fingertips. Or at least on your computer.

Thanks to DavidGagne.net for the calendar.

Address Book to Google Maps

Google Maps is fantastic, better than Mapquest in my opinion. If you're not using it you are missing out on a terrific service, and of course you can't beat the price (it's free). Enter maps.google.com into your browser, type in any address, and presto, you're looking at a map of that location. You're only a click away from getting directions, and traffic, and more. It's super.

Even more super is being able to bring up the map without typing in the address. That's what you can do if you use Apple's Address Book (the brown one whose icon is shown at the top of this hint). Bring up a contact in Address Book and click next to the address. If it's a home address, click where it says "Home." If it's a work address, click on the word "Work." You can see part of the word "Work" in grey in the picture below. That's where I clicked.


Select "Map this Address" and you're taken to Google Maps, where the address you clicked on is displayed on a map. Like so:

Isn't that cool?

(By the way, if you're wondering why your menu doesn't show "Make Envelope" it's because you don't have my custom "Make Envelope" AppleScript installed on your machine. It turns out that Apple allows us to create our own menu items that do anything we want them to do, and I thought it would be handy to be able to create an envelope by clicking on an address. So I did the programming and now I have the "Make Envelope" option on all of my machines. If you have an idea for something you'd like to do with an address send me an email and we'll figure out how to do it.)

Office 2011: Don't Bother

Executive Summary: we waited three years for THIS?!
Don't bother buying it, unless you absolutely have to. And, keep in mind that in some ways it's not even as good as the previous version.

Microsoft's Office, like McDonald's hamburger, is very popular without being very good. Thanks to clever bundling arrangements on the PC side, Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint and Excel have become a workplace standard. Until recently, Mac users who wanted to view documents created by PC users were almost forced to purchase a copy of Microsoft Office for the Mac, even if they really didn't want to use it themselves. (There are some excellent non-Microsoft options available for Mac users today, notably Apple's iWork, a word processor, presentation program, and spreadsheet that are a pleasure to use. And they can open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents just fine.)

Microsoft was not particularly quick to get this version out the door-- the previous version was released in 2008-- but it still feels rushed, and frankly it's a huge disappointment. Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, which had suffered under previous "leadership," was under new management, and Office 2011 was supposed to be the product that showed that Microsoft "gets it." Based on my experience with Office 2011, which I bought with my own $200, it's plain that Microsoft still doesn't get it. They don't get what's important to Mac users, they don't get how to make software that's a pleasure to use, they don't get that the out-of-the-box experience matters.

They also don't get that iPhone users would like to sync their calendars, carrying with them the events and appointments that they've entered into Office 2011's Outlook. Well, maybe they do get that. But they didn't provide that feature. Yes, that's right-- if you're going to use the calendar in Outlook from Office 2011, you won't be able to sync it to your iPhone. Not. At. All. From what I hear, the iPhone is fairly popular with Mac users-- what was Microsoft thinking?

If they made a word processor that couldn't do the letter "Z" it would not be more surprising than this lack of calendar synching. Apple's been doing calendar synching through Sync Services, something that is available to everyone who programs for the Mac, for something like five years. Even Outlook's predecessor, the not-very-good Entourage, could sync calendars (though, to be fair, Entourage's synching was very unreliable, producing duplicates galore). It's a mind-boggling omission.

You might be thinking that I'm just getting started, and I am, but I'll spare you the details. I will, however, describe some of the more notable gaffes that I've found in just a few days of using Office 2011.

Notable Gaffe #1: lack of awareness that computer screens are wider than they are tall.


This is Microsoft Word from Office 2011. Gee, that empty gray space looks nice and there sure is a lot of it. Meanwhile, the toolbars and "Ribbon"-- a much-trumpeted feature that is, for the most part, simply a way to turn on and off toolbars-- shove my document so far down that I get about half a page on the screen. Word could gain more than an inch of document space by putting toolbars on the sides of the window-- where all of us have extra space-- but no. Toolbars should be horizontal. Thus spake Microsoft.

Big deal? Yes. Thanks to this one poor design decision, every single user of Microsoft Word will spend extra time scrolling and zooming in and out trying to see how his documents look-- every user, every document, forever and ever amen. They call this "Print Layout View" but if you can't see the whole page at once, it's not very useful... thus the endless zoom out to see how it looks on the page, zoom back in so you can edit. A giant time waster, multiplied across thousands or maybe millions of documents per day. No wonder we're not keeping up with China.

Notable Gaffe #2: registering the product-- which you must do before using it-- is a pain.
Here's the product key (serial number) from the back of the CD cover (actual size, with most of the number blurred out for security):


and here's the message I got when I typed it in:


As you can see, according to Microsoft, "The product key is not valid." I clicked that blue link to contact Microsoft Customer Service and Support, and got this:


I would have clicked "Activate By Phone" if such a link existed. But, as you can see from the figure above, the link does not exist. How helpful. (They're lucky I don't call "Inaccurate Help files" Notable Gaffe #3. Maybe I will anyway.)

Since I wasn't getting very far using the "Help" system I decided to try, try again. I very carefully typed and retyped that product key and each time got the "Invalid" message. Finally, I found my mistake: the real number is BK92B, not BK928. Microsoft has used the same weird computer-printout font to print their Mac product keys for about ten years, but as is typical of Microsoft they don't seem to look at their own products and think "how could we make this nicer for the user?" (The font face and the font size is bad, but to make things even worse, the ink they use to print the product key spreads, so the fine points of the characters get clogged up, making things even harder to read. Come on, Microsoft!)

Notable Gaffe #4: Confusing and awkward "Product ID" craziness
If/when you manage to get the product key entered correctly, you get this screen:


That's a completely different number than the product key I just entered. Why can't I use my product key to identify my product? And, what's the difference between "registering" and "activating"? Yikes.

It turns out that "registering" means you put in your name and email and sign up for "tips & tricks, product update notices, and special offers just for our Office for Mac users." Activating merely turns the product on. That's a big difference, yes, but why not use the same number for both? And, when am I supposed to do the registration? They force you to activate, but leave registration up to the user, without telling him how to do it. Hint: if you want to do it, open any Office 2011 program-- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook-- and under the menu named for the program, choose "Online Registration." Wouldn't have been hard for Microsoft to put a link to the Online Registration webpage right here in this window, but no. Yet another example of a tiny bit of extra work that Microsoft could have done, which would have made things a lot easier for EVERY user of Office. ONE person at Microsoft could have added that link in 15 minutes. Instead, each and every Office 2011 USER gets to spend time trying to find how to Register (they don't ALL read this blog), and the cumulative amount of time lost by the users is way, way, WAY more than the 15 minutes it would have taken one person at Microsoft to fix this. I have to find that person and talk to him. Of course a lot of people never bother to register-- this screen is the last time they think of it. There's no way for me to know how many people actually bother to register, but it can't be 100% of Office users-- so Microsoft's lack of attention to detail here ends up costing them too. Holy cow, what a mess, and it would be so easy to fix-- but only if you're in the right position at Microsoft, and only if you care.

Bonus Gaffe: when you go to "About Word" (or Excel or PowerPoint or Outlook) you'll see the Product ID at the bottom of the window (see below).

But, you don't see the Product Key. So, if you have multiple copies of Office 2011, each with its own Product Key, you'll have no way of knowing which Product Key was used during the installation on a particular machine. Better write it down somewhere, because if you inadvertently use the same Product Key on two machines you'll have a situation where only one or the other machine can be used with Office at any particular time. There's no predicting the Product ID based on the Product Key, and vice versa, so if you haven't kept track of which Product KEY was used for which machine, you're going to be in a jam when you someday reinstall. This "feature" has been present in at least the two previous versions of Office 2011, and maybe more. All it does is waste time and cause frustration, and it could be EASILY fixed-- for example, they could show you part of the Product Key in the "About..." window. As mentioned above, once Microsoft has something going they don't go back and say "Gee, this really could be better, let's change it." So much for constant improvement and refinement.

Double-Bonus Gaffe: they tell us, during Activation, to "Keep the following Product ID in your records" and it sounds as if this may be our last chance to see that number... but, as seen above, the Product ID is available ANYTIME, from within the program itself. They could have simply said "You can get the Product ID at any time by going to the Word menu and choosing "About Word." Maybe they didn't know! Somehow, it doesn't seem that Microsoft actually tries this stuff themselves, or reads the dialog boxes. So easy to fix, but again, they'd have to care enough to try. Of course it was exactly the same in the previous two versions of Office, dating back to 2004-- no surprise there (and no improvement either).

Smaller but still notable blown opportunity: Poorly designed Document Gallery (template chooser)

At first glance, this looks pretty good. (You get a similar Gallery for PowerPoint and another one for Excel.) The idea is, you click once on a thumbnail in the middle section of the Gallery, obtaining a slightly enlarged "preview" of the chosen template in the right-hand pane. It's rather neat, and in some cases you get some font and color options in the right-hand pane too as shown here. But, if you double-click the preview's icon, nothing happens. You have to either click "Choose" at the bottom of the box or go back to the small thumbnail and double-click that (and it feels weird, after using the preview pane to make changes to the color scheme, to go back and double-click the small thumbnail still showing the original set of colors and fonts). The natural thing would be to double-click the big preview, now that you've made changes to it, but that doesn't work.

They Just Don't Get It award: floppy disk used as a symbol for "Save."


Here's part of Word 2011's Toolbar. Circled is the icon for "Save." I wonder whether anyone using Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac uses floppy disks anymore. Actually, I know they don't, because Microsoft Office 2011 requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later, and no version of Mac OS X supports floppy drives. Apple last sold a Mac with a floppy disk drive in 1998. Before that, the floppy disk icon had some meaning (but not a lot-- we had hard drives for saving stuff, so the floppy was a lousy symbol for "Save" even before 1998), but it has zero now. All it does is make Microsoft look silly and careless and out of touch.

I could go on (and on). There are so many omissions and weird design choices and carryover dumbness from previous versions (my favorite: the character count that shows how many characters there are in your Word document, but adds "an approximate value") that I could be writing for a month. I think though that the point's been made: Microsoft Office 2011 is not very good, and I do not advise buying it except in special cases. You can contact me to see if I think you're a special case.

If you want a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation package that works the way you'd expect it to, with the ability to open and save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, get Apple's iWork '09. It costs a lot less, does a lot more, and is a million times nicer to use. Click here to get a 30-day demo for free.

Even More Stuff I Like: Cameras preference pane

One of the things I like about iPhoto is it kicks in automatically when I connect my camera. One of the things I don't like about iPhoto is it kicks in automatically when I connect my iPhone for synching or charging (iPhoto kicks in because it thinks of the iPhone as a camera, and wants to import its pictures). You might be thinking "Go into iPhoto's preferences and tell it not to connect automatically, as shown below"--


... but if I do that, iPhoto will NEVER launch automatically, and I usually want it to-- just not when I connect my iPhone. I do want iPhoto to open when I connect my camera, but I don't want iPhoto to open when I connect my iPhone. I want it both ways-- but how can I do that?

The answer is "You use the Cameras preference pane, available via this link." And guess what: it's free.

(Note: if you're using 10.6 (Snow Leopard) you have something like Cameras built in. It's in the Image Capture program, inside the Applications folder. You don't improve things by having two programs trying to control your cameras, so if you're using 10.6, find the Image Capture program, make your adjustments there, and forget about installing Cameras. If you're using 10.4 or 10.5, Cameras is the way to go.)

When you install Cameras you get a new item in your System Preferences, in the "Other" section. At first, it's pretty empty in there, but as you connect cameras to your Mac you'll get messages like this one:

(The "No Name" camera is the camera card in my Olympus. I want iPhoto to open when I connect that camera.)

I get a similar box when I connect my iPhone the first time, but I make a different choice:

I could leave it at that, but there are some other options. If you open the Cameras preference pane in System Preferences you see your list of cameras and the instructions for each one, like so:


You can click in the "When Connected" column for more options:

So... if you want some other program to launch when you connect your camera, Cameras can take care of that too. (So can Image Capture.)

I used Cameras until I updated to 10.6, and it worked great. As of 10.6 I'm using Image Capture, and it's also working great. Thanks to these programs, the days of iPhoto launching itself when my iPhone connects for a sync are over, and while I'm not sure that I'm doing anything productive with the few minutes I'm saving each day it's nice to think that maybe I am. Give this tip a try and save some time for yourself.

Hardware and Software Money-Savers

Amazon has Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Editionat $89.99, almost $60 off of the list price (The Apple Store sells it for $98). This is an especially good deal because you get three installation serial numbers in the package, meaning your $89.99 covers three machines. Microsoft Office is a little on the clumsy side but if you're getting documents in Word and Excel formats you'll be glad that you have Office installed.


Another good deal: Apple Airport Expressfor $94.95 (Apple's price: $99). Use this to extend your wireless network, and/or to play your iTunes music from your Mac through your home stereo-- wirelessly.


And another: iWork '09 Family Pack for $80.49. This is the 5-installation Family Pack, at only $1.49 over the single-user version at Apple. Apple charges $99 for the 5-user pack. Amazon sells the iWork '09 single userpackage for $72.99, if that's the one you need.

All in all, it pays to check Amazon's prices. Use the Amazon box at the left-hand side of this page to do your search, and simultaneously support the Blog.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all. I'll spend my Thanksgiving cooking a turkey in the Primo Kamado cooker on the balcony, doing a little online shopping, and keeping an eye on the key football games. Here is how I do it. You can do it too.

Cooking a turkey in the Primo Kamado
A Primo Kamado is a ceramic cooker, something like a Big Green Egg. I've cooked a lot of turkeys on my Primo over the years and they have all been delicious. Turns out that the preparation and cooking are much more important than the spices. There are probably fifty ways to cook a turkey on a barbeque but here's the one way I do it every single time.

Get your cooker going with plenty of fuel. Your turkey will cook for about three hours, maybe a little longer. Set it up for about 300 degrees F. You don't want flames to touch your turkey so put a pan down on a lower rack to block the flames or just put the coals on one side of your cooker and the turkey on the other. I have an old cookie sheet (a round one) that I put on the lower rack and it catches the drippings and blocks the flames.

1. Start with a nice fresh turkey. Frozen is OK but if a fresh one is available, get one. I usually pick one that's in the 12 to 15 pound range. If you go too big you won't be able to fit it on the cooker. I've cooked brined turkeys, Butterball turkeys, plain fresh turkeys, and probably some other kinds that I don't remember and they all came out great.
2. Take out the neck and giblets and do whatever you want with them. That's up to you.
3. Cut the backbone out, using heavy kitchen scissors or poultry shears. Some people call this "butterflying," some people call this "splaying," some people call it "spatchcocking." Watch this video, and call it anything you want. The video shows how to do it to a chicken but it's exactly the same on a turkey, only harder. You will need some strength. Watch your fingers. The reason you do this is it cuts your cooking time almost in half.
4. Cut off any extra fat and rinse the turkey off. Pat it dry with paper towels. You will need more paper towels than you thought.

Like I said, the preparation and cooking are more important than the spicing. I've made great turkeys using Dizzy Dust, Grub Rub, Texas BBQ Rub, and Bob Tallman's Ranch Rub. These are all fairly heavy on the brown sugar. You'll need a good bit, maybe half a bottle. You're going to apply rub inside and out, and under the skin, so plan accordingly. Pour a bunch of rub into a coffee cup or some other smallish container and put a spoon in it now because your hands are going to be all slippery pretty soon and you don't want to make a mess of your cupboards if you can help it. While you're at it set out another coffee cup and put an inch or two of olive oil in there. You'll need a brush to apply the oil later so you may as well get that out now.

First, run your fingers under the skin on the breast meat to loosen up the skin as much as possible. If you are careful you can get the skin completely loose from the breast. Get a spoonful of rub and put it onto the breast, under the skin. Do it again on the other side and pat it down with your fingers. You will almost always wish you used a little more rub so this is the time to do it right. Put some more in there.

Next, do the same thing with the thighs. The skin comes loose very nicely and you can dump a good bit of rub onto the thighs, under the skin. This takes a bit of time but it's worth it.

To this point you have not put any rub on the outside of the turkey. It is all under the skin, which is great because the rub you put on the skin isn't going to get into the meat nearly as well as the rub you put down under the skin.

Now put the turkey breast-down, exposing the inside of the bird. Brush the inside of the bird, and any part of the bird that is exposed in this position, with olive oil. There are three reasons for this:

• It makes the skin brown up very nicely
• It makes the rub stick to the bird
• Olive oil makes a lot of stuff better and this is no exception.

After you've brushed everything you can reach with the turkey breast-down, sprinkle rub all over the bird, knowing that you are later going to roll it over and do the other side. Give it a good healthy sprinkling. Like I said, you will usually wish you'd used more.

Now you are almost ready to cook. Hopefully your cooker is ready to go. Put the bird onto the cooker with the breast up.

It will look something like this:

You can see the rub under the skin on the breast.

Take your olive oil and brush everything you can reach. Sprinkle with rub. Yes, the fire is going but it won't be so bad. Work fast.

Your turkey will look like this when it's olive oiled and sprinkled with rub.

Close the lid to the cooker and let time do its magic. A thermometer with a digital read-out outside the cooker will be very handy so get one of those if you can. Put it into the thigh and in a few hours have a look. When it's 170 degrees in the leg your turkey is done. In my experience that's going to take somewhere around three hours. That is probably less time than you expected but that's the whole point of spatchcocking.

It will look something like this when it's ready to come off. I use tongs to lift the turkey but be careful as the legs will be pretty loose and might come off.


Put it on a rack in the kitchen and let it sit for ten or fifteen minutes. It's impossible to carve when it's super hot, so let it cool down a bit. Then, carve it following these instructions. This is the finishing touch and it makes all the difference. Forget about carving it at the table. Carve it in the kitchen and bring out the cut-up meat. Everyone will be impressed and it will be a million times easier to serve.

Here's what it looked like when I'd carved one breast for transport to a friend's house.


Notice that the breast meat is cut much thicker than what you're probably used to. That's the right way to do it. Note that this kind of cooking does not result in a smoky flavor. What it does result in is a juicy, delicious turkey that looks and tastes great.

Practice on a chicken (cooking time: about an hour) and be an expert by Christmas.

Online Shopping Tips
My sister likes to get up early on the Friday after Thanksgiving and get deals at the stores. I like to sleep in and do my shopping online. Here are a couple of tips that will save you money while letting you shop from home.

• Visit www.dealnews.com. Set up an account and have them send you emails when items you want are on sale. I devoted an entire blog post to them and here is the link. Hint: sort the list of deals chronologically. That way, when you check the site a second time, you can quickly see what's new since your last visit.
• Visit www.retailmenot.com before buying something online. RetailMeNot finds discount codes which you can use to save money on your online purchases. This should be part of your routine. Find the item you want to buy online, then make a new browser window (File menu) and go to retailmenot.com to see if there is a discount code for what you're about to buy. I wrote about this site a bit ago and here is the link to that.
• Visit Amazon.com and see what's cooking with their Gold Box specials and also their Black Friday specials.

You'll probably save money with these tips and you'll definitely get more sleep. For some people, the thrill of the hunt makes getting up in the dark and driving to the mall worth it. If that's you, tell me about it sometime after 9 AM.

Keeping Track of the Football Games
You're probably thinking "turn on the TV, silly." Turns out that I don't have a TV, so I keep up with the games in other ways. First, there's the ESPN ScoreCenter app for the iPhone and for the iPad. This keeps you up to date on the scores of the games. Next, there's the Watch ESPN app, for the iPhone and for the iPad. This one actually lets you watch the games right on your iPhone or iPad, with some restrictions based on your internet provider. I also use the Watch ESPN website to watch games live, but also to watch games I've missed, on my Mac. It is very cool to be able to jump to the 4th quarter of a game, or to rewind a game in order to see a key play. Even Monday Night Football can be seen this way.

I also use Yahoo's Sportacular app on the iPhone and on the iPad. These apps do a great job of keeping up with scores and they also provide written play-by-play, so you can keep up with a game without really watching it. Very handy stuff. With several key games this weekend, college and pro, you need all the help you can get.

So there you have it: turkey, shopping, and football. If that's not Thanksgiving in a nutshell I don't know what is. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone and thanks for visiting the blog.

Magic Mouse and 27-inch iMac in stock at Amazon

It took a few weeks but Amazon finally has the new Apple iMac 27 inch Quad-Core in stock. You can click this link to go straight there. The price is $1972.98, or $26.02 less than Apple charges... and you don't pay sales tax if you're in California, and there's no charge for the shipping either. When you consider the sales tax it costs you $210 more to buy it from the Apple store. The warranty is through Apple either way, so it seems a lot better to get it from Amazon. (Those of you not living in California should go through the motions of buying the iMac through Amazon to see what your total will be. Regardless, it's probably going to be less expensive than going directly through Apple.)


Amazon also has the new Magic Mouse, reviewed by me here a few days ago. You can click this link to go to the Magic Mouse page on Amazon. You get free shipping and no tax (in California, and maybe where you live too).

Note: purchases made on Amazon through the links above benefit The Boyce Blog. Such contributions-- which come from Amazon, not from you-- keep The Boyce Blog going, and are very, very much appreciated.

More Stuff I Like: Automatic Time Zone

Well looky here: another nifty improvement in the Date & Time preference pane, thanks to Snow Leopard! Finally, all of a sudden, and only in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, your Mac can show you the correct time for wherever you are-- automatically! Those of you who travel with a Mac laptop will appreciate this-- no more trips to the Date & Time preference panel to set the proper time zone. You do have to turn this feature on, so get in there and do it now!

How to Tune Up Your Mac

If your Mac seems a little slower than it used to be it might be in need of a tuneup. Here's the procedure we run for the Macs we're responsible for. Done once a month, this routine will help your Mac to run its best.

It's a three-step program.

Step 1: Run Cocktail

Cocktail does a lot of important stuff that has techie-sounding names, such as "repair permissions", "clear caches", "clear logs", and "perform Unix "cron" scripts." Fortunately, Cocktail knows what all of this stuff is, even if you don't, and it knows how to do it right. My advice: download Cocktail, choose the "Pilot" option (right-most button in the Cocktail toolbar), make it look like the figure below, and then click "Run." Might take a few minutes but it's totally unattended. Let it do its thing, including the restart, and all will be well. HINT: restart your Mac BEFORE you run Cocktail, because it will run better if there aren't other programs in the way.

You can run Cocktail a few times without paying for it but eventually you will want to register it. $14.95 for one computer, $29.95 for five. There are other ways to perform Cocktail's tasks but none that is as easy. NOTE: there's a "Scheduler" button up at the top of the window. Click it and you can set Cocktail to run on a repeating schedule. You won't make things worse by running Cocktail more often, so if you feel like having it run every Monday morning at 4:15 AM go right ahead. That happens to be the way it's set up here and look how I've turned out.

Bonus: the makers of Cocktail provide a free iPhone app with lots of maintenance hints and tips. Worth a look.

Step 2: Run Software Update (repeat until there are no more updates). Restart when they tell you to.

Generally speaking the Software Updates are good things. Sometimes, rarely, a software update will have unintended consequences. For example, a recent software update caused problems for people who emailed PDFs via automatic means, from FileMaker, AppleScript, or Automator. The problem was fixed in a subsequent update but the weeks in between were rough. If you're not sure, ask someone (me).

Step 3: Update your Microsoft stuff (if you have any)
Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage or Outlook) has an automated software update system that is supposed to keep those programs up to date. Apple's won't do it, so you have to use Microsoft's. Look under the Help menu in any version of Microsoft Word (or Excel, or PowerPoint, or Entourage, or Outlook) for "Check for Updates." The Microsoft AutoUpdate program will launch and tell you whether there is anything for you or not.

After you get one update you may "qualify" for another. Keep trying until there are no more updates. NOTE: after you choose "Check for Updates" you should quit Word (and Excel and PowerPoint and Entourage/Outlook). The updates cannot install when these Microsoft programs are running. I agree, it's kind of goofy to complain about the programs being open when that's how we got to the updates in the first place-- fodder for another article.

And that's it! It takes a little time, but when done monthly it should be less than half an hour from start to finish, counting the restarts.

NOTE: our Managed Service Plans include monthly maintenance at no charge for up to two machines, and at a reduced charge for others. I do the work personally, over the internet. You ought to look into this-- it's a time-saving, money-saving program and it's all in your favor. Click here to learn more.