Google Calendar on iCal

If you haven’t noticed, Murphy uses some Google stuff. He likes the Calendar because he can access it from any computer with Internet access.

But sometimes Internet access is hard to come by. You know you won’t have access for a couple days? Use iCal to capture a Google Calendar to your disk.

You can also use Google Calendar to display published calendars for public events. Murphy is going to show you how to incorporate such a calendar into an iCal based calendar.

If you’re interested in syncing iCal information to Google, there are projects underway. Follow this link to SourceForge and this one to jin’sync.

There’s also an interesting warning about what you put on a shared Google calendar. In the screencast we use a private URL to help hide our calendar information from prying eyes. But security is still something to consider when you’re telling people where you’re going to be and when.

Custom Home Page with iWeb

Lots of people used to use Google for their start page. Now that our browsers have Google built-in the home page is up for grabs.

So make your own start page, and spread your favorite sites across it. Use big, easy to click images. You can add text links for sites you don’t visit quite so often.

This little project used to be a hassle, even with semi-friendly web editors like MS Word. iWeb makes it incredibly easy to lay out the images and publish your new home page.

If you make a really good one go ahead and post a link in the comments.

50 Screencasts Posted

Murphy has reached a minor milestone. The fiftieth screencast has been posted, enough to keep you going for a whole weekend of tweaking, cleaning up, backing up, and discovering fun little things your Mac can do.

Thanks to our friends at TUAW, Hawkwings, MacOSXhints, ars technica, and many others* for spreading the word about Murphy’s snippets. Before you know it we’ll have a hundred screencasts online.

One of these days you all are going to kick in with the comments. We’ve already got a handful of truly informative comments, adding valuable insight to Murphy’s screencasts or suggesting another way to do something altogether. Keep it up! You don’t have to register to comment, so go ahead and tell us what you think!

Here are some of the most popular screencasts to date:

• How to add a custom background to your DMG file.
• How to sleep you Mac with an email or text message.
• How to change the color of iWeb links.
• How to mail files by dragging them to a Finder folder.

The visitor count is creeping up every day. Send in your suggestions, Murphy would love to make you a screencast.

Thanks !

* Friends of Murphy Mac:

StumbleUpon

MacPlus

O’Grady’s Powerpage

MacTechNews

Screencasting

Apfelquak

From Windows to OSX

Combine Duplicate Address Cards

Every computer has duplicated information somewhere. Duplicate songs in iTunes, double photos in iPhoto, and yes, duplicate address cards in the Address Book.

Watch the screencast to see how Murphy selects duplicate entries for a contact and combines them into one card. Without losing any information.

We’ll handle duplicates in those other applications another day.

RSS Week is Over

Believe it or not, we spent the whole week on RSS. Murphy hopes you enjoyed it. Here’s a review:

• Monday covered Safari and its take on displaying feeds painlessly.
• Tuesday hit Firefox and its toolbar oriented feed display.
• Wednesday we saw how to open multiple feeds on one Safari tab. And we saw what Auto-Click does.
• Thursday was a review of the Google Reader.
• And today we saw how iWeb handles RSS feeds in your own blogs.

Bonus: we made it easy for your readers to add your blog to My Yahoo or Google pages.

That’s a lot of work! Reward yourself and take a minute to check out Tiger’s RSS screensaver. It’s nice to look at. (requires Quartz)

Murphy isn’t a big screensaver user. But as long as we’re talking about them, this one is about the best ever.