It’s always a privilege to blog on a typhoon day. School is cancelled, and you have an entire day from 5:50 AM to 10 PM to complete any outstanding homework eat, sleep and watch TV.

But apart from the whistling and whirling of winds and the minor flooding of my other apartment, I realised that I didn’t do jack today, and therefore won’t have too much to comment on my day. (Except for the fact that I went to the gym. In terms of keeping with the schedule, so far, so good.)

So here’s a nice filler article for you: 6 annoyances that come with a Mac. This is a topic which I know alienates users who are – shall we say – technologically inept,  and those who heartily support other operating systems, which consists mostly of Derek and JJ holding up a valiant front for Windows. Oh look, I’ve knocked out a couple of the 7AP writers already. Nevertheless, here we go:

6 annoyances that are bundled with a Mac (and their solutions)

See that shiny beast up there? Yeah, it’s kind of irritating.

The following are only mini-tutorials that should ease the transition from Windows to Mac. They are indeed extremely basic, but let’s just say that I had problems with these myself in the beginning.

Cleaning a Mighty Mouse scrolling wheel

So the ball of your Mighty Mouse has become unresponsive, defying in your quest to scroll down the page. The good news is: It’s not broken. The bad news: The reason for this resistance is the amount of dirt and dead skin cells lodged into your mouse. Eww.

Fortunately, there is a primitive but effective solution. Ready?

1) Get a piece of white printer paper. New and unused is best, but if I’m in a hurry, I find myself using the back of something like my athletics standard certificate.
2) Flip your mouse over so that the wheel is touching the paper and the laser is facing you.
3) Roll the mouse all over that fresh new piece of paper.

You’ll see all the debris that has managed to accumulate inside.

Beware not to push too hard; I had to send my mouse in for repairs when I pushed the ball too far in for it to continue to function.

Reading manga

…or any set of documents that require you to open more than one file at a time. Unlike Windows Explorer, Preview doesn’t allow you to browse to the next file nor to view a slideshow of photos. Hmmmm.

So yeah, another simple operation. You’d better hope your manga is organised in files and not strewn all over your desktop like mine used to be.

1) Open up a folder with image files.
2) Press Cmd+A to select all.
3) Press Cmd+O to open. Voila.

By the way, if you’re looking to read ebooks, try Tofu, a revolutionary PDF reader. It has made badly-OCRed Animorphs ebooks that much easier to read. Possibly the improvement that can be made to the series, I might add.

Deleting from removable media (e.g., USB drives, Micro SD cards)

This is something that puzzled me forever. In Windows, once you delete something off a flash drive, it disappears permanently and the disk space is freed. On a Mac, this is not the case; when a file is deleted, it is displaced (yes! managed to sneak this word in outside a Chemistry write-up!) to the trash can on your computer.

Obviously, my primary use of a Micro SD card is to try new nDS games; a process that constantly requires me to delete and reload files. At first, I was using Disk Utility, a lengthy process which erases the entire contents of the drive – you can see how annoying that would become. Do not do this. Instead, after deleting, simply empty your trash and the space should be restored.

I lied in the title, I can’t be bothered to delve into three more snippets. And this is getting rather lengthy. AND I love Macs, really. Until next time.

(Just kidding, hopefully by next week I’ll have something more interesting to say.)