Got an iPad for my birthday but didn’t want to buy the Apple case as there’s bound to be much better ones flooding the market before long.

So, instead, I decided to make an iPad cover. It took me about a day to crochet. I completely made the pattern up but I think it turned out pretty cute. If anyone’s interested let me know and I’ll post the pattern. Well, I’ll try anyway.

I have been trying out the Office 2010 beta. I like it but it’s not so different from Office 2007 that I’d consider forking out for an upgrade.

So, instead I’m honing my 2007 skills as it looks like I’m going to need them for a while longer…

Although it is not possible to save all open documents in Word 2007 the ‘old way’ (ie by pressing Shift and selecting ‘Save all’ from the menu bar), you can add that command to the Quick Access Toolbar.

1. Click the Office button (top left)
2. Click ‘Word Options’ bottom right
3. Click Customize (about 6th option down in the left hand panel)
4. Click the small arrow next to the’ Choose Commands From’ box (it will probably be on its default of ‘Popular Commands’) and choose ‘Commands Not In Ribbon’
5. Scroll down and click on ‘Save All’
6. Click the Add button (in between the two main boxes, in the middle of the window)
7. Click the up arrow (far right)  if you want to change the position of the command on the Quick Access Toolbar
8. Click OK.

And you’re done. Now just click the icon to Save All open documents.

Well, it’s finally here.

Google Chrome for Mac. In beta.

Give it a whirl here.

Tired of visiting lyric websites and copying and pasting lyrics for each individual track into the ‘Get info’ section in Tunes?

Canto Pod has a solution. It’s a free Mac Widget that automatically finds the lyrics to the song you’re currently listening to and copies it directly into iTunes with one click.

Don’t despair Windows users, there’s also a Windows app.

Download Canto Pod for free.

A health check for your Mac's battery

My MacBook’s battery took a turn for the worse last week. Luckily Apple has already sent me a new one (even though I only had 26 days left on my warranty – Apple customer service FTW).

While I waited for the new battery to arrive I played around with coconutBattery, a free download from coconut-flavour.com, which showed me the health of my battery (it weirdly fluctuated throughout the day from 96% to 54%), how much charge I had left and the number of full charge cycles it had been through.

Of course the latter two snippets of info can be found from the ‘About this Mac’ facility, but coconutBattery does more and all in one place. It tells you the original maximum capacity of your battery  on day one, lets you save information about the maximum capacity of the battery at any given time and even how long you’ve owned your beloved Mac.

It will also tell you if your battery is currently charging and apparently even warns you if you’ve plugged in the wrong charger. Although how that could happen is a little beyond me.

coconutBattery can be downloaded for free from http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery.

If you’d like to try the Wave just leave a message in the comments.

And if you’re still wondering what it’s all about or how to use it once you’ve got it, check out the Complete Guide to Google Wave.

Happy waving

Once you’ve become used to using tabs to browse your files and folders, there’s no turning back. Productivity dives.

So, I’ve found an alternative: Nomad.NET.

It’s not as pretty as QTTabbar and doesn’t do things quite as intuitively either, and there are certainly a couple of glitches when trying to open the downloads folders from Chrome. But it certainly beats using windows explorer.

If you’re a tab fan, give it a try. It’s free and can be downloaded from: http://www.nomad-net.info/downloads

The main reason I bought it was not for the games but to stream movies from my MacBook and Windows 7 PC to the TV. I had been using an old laptop with its screen removed for this, but it looked pretty ugly and didn’t play nice with the wifi in the house.

So, if you’re looking for a way to do this on your Mac try PS3 Media Server, which is also available for Windows. However, for Windows I prefer TVersity which does so much more than simply stream your own media, it also gives you the ability, for example, to stream podcasts.

Both are free (there’s a pro version of TVersity for ‘premium internet content’).

What do you use for streaming your media?

Command + ` (tilde/accent key) allows you to switch between open documents in Microsoft Office Word 2008.