How to capture text from Google Books

Google is a great place for searching for things and doing research—not just for the trivial, but also for serious academic research. Google Scholar will give you academic articles and books, and also show where books and articles have been cited elsewhere. And Google Books can give helpful access to books which might be out … Continue Reading

How to upgrade the hard drive on your MacBook

It is very likely that, if you are using a Mac, the machine will outlast your drive. I had a 250GB hard drive a year ago, and it is fairly full, so I decided to upgrade to a 1 TB. A full disk is usually the number 1 reason for the dreaded spinning ball or generally slower performance on your Mac.

But help is at hand; fitting a bigger hard drive is really easy.

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How to extract YouTube video clips

There is a lot of interesting material on YouTube these days, since it has moved on from being the home of dodgy student home videos to being the near-universal place for all sorts of video material. (See St John’s theology stream here.)

But how can I use these clips in a church or teaching context? If you have reliable internet access where you want to use it, the simplest thing is probably to play the clip from YouTube direct. But what if this is not possible? Or you want to keep the video clip for the longer term?

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Apple stories on Telegraph

I have just noticed that The online Daily Telegraph has a really good section of technology stories about Apple products here. It includes the latest evaluations of the iPad, and a fascinating story that Apple has filed a patent for 3-D glasses for watching films in 3-D, to which you can go directly here.

How to recover messages from deleted mailboxes

You will learn here how to do something that no-one anywhere else on the internet can do!

The problem: for some bizarre reason, when you delete a mailbox in Apple’s Mail, instead of going to the Trash in Mail or the Trash in the computer, the folder and files just disappear. The dialogue box says (in one sense correctly) ‘This action cannot be undone’. However, it can because the files are still on your drive.

So you need to:

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How to replace a cracked iPhone screen

Having done this myself twice over the New Year 2009/10, I am now the world’s expert on the best way to do it.

Like many others have, I dropped my iPhone on Christmas Eve and the glass crazed. Apple quoted £114 to replace, so I looked elsewhere. A plea on Facebook yielded advice from a someone we had met in the Australian rainforest, who said a teenager could do it in five minutes. I quickly found the parts, and video instructions on YouTube, so went for it. BUT it was not quite as straightforward as I had thought, since most sources don’t give you all the information you need. What follows relates to the iPhone 3G and 3GS but not the earlier iPhones, which are more complicated.

You need to know that the iPhone screen comes in four parts: the glass; a plastic sheet attached to the glass called the digitiser which detects touch; a plastic frame glued to the glass screen [really important this one] which attaches it to the fourth part; the LCD screen. You can buy all these things separately, but whatever you do,

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