September 2007

NZ Daylight Savings Problems
Mac Tip #308/26-Sept-2007

We have a problem: on 30 September 2007 New Zealanders put their clocks forward by an hour. Nothing unusual about this, except that it’s a week earlier than usual. Daylight Savings will also run longer than it has in the past:

“From [2007], Daylight Saving will run for a period of 27 weeks. It now commences from the last Sunday in September, when 2.00am becomes 3.00am, and ends on the first Sunday in April the following year, when 3.00am becomes 2.00am.”

In the past, while we worked our way through the house, office and car resetting everything that has a clock in it, we could relax in the knowledge that at least our Macs would sort themselves out, and update their clocks automatically.

Not this year: Apple have failed to update the system software to recognise the changed dates.

Apple have issued a Knowledge Base article to tell us what to do.

But there’s a wider problem that affects not just Kiwis, but anyone who has any dealings with us, as David Empson explains:

• If you do anything involving international time zones, such as talking to people overseas or bidding on eBay auctions, you will need to rely on an independent world clock instead of the computer, or remember that your computer is an hour fast for everywhere else in the world.
• The same problem applies in reverse for anyone overseas with a Mac who needs to know what time it is in New Zealand. If their system is not patched, they will think the time in New Zealand is an hour earlier than it actually is.”

David’s article is comprehensive, with a great deal more information than these two points. He mentions email, web servers, databases, sharing documents, calendars.

There are three courses of action open to us:

1. Do nothing — the time on the computer will be an hour wrong during two separate weeks.
2. Follow Apple’s instructions — the time on our computers won’t match the time some others believe should be on our computers.
3. Download and apply a small, free piece of software called a patch, made available by local Kiwi programme Glenn Anderson. It won’t solve all the possible problems, and doesn’t work for everyone.

I haven’t yet decided what to do and am not in a position to make a recommendation here. I suggest you read the three pages I’ve linked to in this Tip and make up your own mind.

Whichever course of action you take, you need to be vigilant. Watch out with any activity that involves other computers: email, web, backups, sharing files and so on.

I’m still hoping that Apple may release a software update between now and Sunday that will sort out the problem. It doesn’t seem likely.

Perhaps we should all simply take a week off, shut down the computers, find a warm spot and a good book…

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Explore Font Book
Mac Tip #307/19-Sept-2007

Font Book, available in your Mac’s Applications folder, helps you manage your fonts. When I wrote last week about installing a font, I pointed out that Font Book would open up to display the font and offer to install it.

Open Font Book and the first thing you’ll see is a list of the fonts on your Mac, grouped into ‘Collections’, along with a preview of whichever font happens to be selected.

Use the Size pop-up near the top right of the window, or use the slider at the right edge of the window, to see the selected font at various sizes.

Select a font and choose Preview from the gear menu at top left of the window to see a preview of the font in a separate window.

If the font is available in different faces, such as bold or italic, you can preview the face by choosing it from the pop-up in the Preview window.

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Corrupted fonts can cause all sorts of problems. To check one or more fonts select them and choose Validate Font from the gear menu. A window appears, showing the results.

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In that window you can also select fonts and remove them.

Rather than removing fonts, you may wish to disable them. Select the font in the main Font Book window and click on the check box at the bottom of the Font listing. An alert appears, asking you to confirm the action.

You can also disable and remove fonts by selecting them and choosing the action from the gear menu.

There are some other useful features in Font Book. More on those things in another Tip.

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Mac Tip #306/12-Sept-2007
Install a Font

Many fonts come with your new Mac, others are installed automatically with software such as Microsoft Office. Then there are others that you can download, such as the very fine Gentium, available free.

Download the font to your computer — the first in the list, Gentium 1.02, is fine for Mac OS X.

Gentium_102_W.zip should appear in your downloads folder. It may unpack itself to create a folder called Gentium102, if not, double click the file to unzip it.

You can now delete the zip file.

When you open the folder you’ll see a number of files inside. The files with the extension .TTF are the actual font files. Double click one of these.

The Font Book application opens and displays examples of the font.

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To install the font click the Install Font button. The main Font Book window opens, displaying the font in its listings.

After installing the font you can delete the Gentium102 folder from your downloads folder.

Coming soon: Explore Font Book.

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