Macworld is closed today in observance of the Fourth of July holiday in the United States. The hints will return as usual on Monday morning. For those in the USA, enjoy the long weekend! -rob.

I was digging through my old email archives the other day, when I stumbled on one that explained how to use Quick Look on documents in Open and Save dialogs. The trick? A free AppleScript Quick Look Droplet, provided by none other than Apple themselves.

There are actually two little apps on that page -- Quick Look Droplet, and Quick Look Viewer. The first is just what you might guess it is -- drag and drop any file or files onto its icon, and you'll get a Quick Look preview of those files. The second is a miniature media player, of sorts. You can store files inside the application bundle, and those files will be shown in Quick Look when the program runs. So you could, in theory, place the desired documents in the application bundle, then distribute that bundle to customers as a demo of your work, without worry...

Think you emptied the trash on your external drive? Even if you did, there may be large amounts of trash still lurking on external or network drives that has not been emptied. As most folks know, the trash is segregated by user ID, and when you empty the trash, it only empties your user's trash -- even on FireWire disks.

If you delete a user's account on your computer, the system won't remove the trash for that user ID on the external or network drive. This can also happen if you have ever shared a disk between two computers. Since the UIDs on one computer may not be the same as the other, trashes can be created by one computer that cannot be emptied by the other. This can even happen if your username is the same on both computers, but your UIDs (e.g. 501 an 502) are different.

Thus periodically one needs to manually remove the trash like this, in Terminal:

$ sudo -s
$ rm -rf /Volumes/"my_external_disk"/.Trashes/*
$ exit

Replac...

Here's how I got Bloomberg Radio working on my Mac. First, download and install both Windows Media Player for Mac OSX and Flip4Mac from this page on Microsoft's site. Then create the following file, and name it Bloomberg_Radio.asf:

The new iPhones may be on the horizon, but that doesn?t mean we?ve forgotten about the ?old? ones. We take a look at two cases, one from Incase, the other from Uniea.

In this week?s show: YouTube stars gather in Boston, a laptop is stolen from a car in just 90 seconds, a look at new robots, a tearful farewell to Bill Gates and we look inside a cable laying ship.

Earbuds or headphones? Full-size or miniature? No matter what kind of listening hardware you like to plug into your iPod (or iPhone), Dan Frakes has some advice and recommendations for finding the perfect pair.