Donna B. writes:

I’ve found that quite often when I “cut and paste” from a document on my Mac to say, a job-posting site, there always seem to be weird characters in the “target” document.

What am I doing wrong?

Cheryl Colan responds:

This is not a Mac-specific problem. It tends to happen when pasting text from a word-processing application into a HTML document. Microsoft Word is especially notorious for this problem, but other applications are guilty as well.

You aren’t doing anything wrong. What’s happening is that you’re composing text in a program designed for output to a printer. Certain characters, such as apostrophes, curly quotes, dashes and alternate letter forms, and special formatting like bold, italic, or colored text are specially coded by your word processor so that your printer represents them properly. This printer encoding travels with your copy/pasted text. But these special printer characters have no direct web translation, so when they are published in HTML format, they look like gibberish.

The easiest way to deal with the problem is to cut and paste into a “dumber” text editing application before pasting into a target document destined for the web. On your Mac, the TextEdit application is the way to go, but with one caveat. You need to set up TextEdit to work in Plain text mode, not Rich text mode. Here’s how:

• Go to your Applications folder and launch TextEdit
• From the menu bar, choose TextEdit > Preferences
• On the New Document tab choose the Plain text radio button
• Close the Preferences pane
• Quit TextEdit

When you relaunch TextEdit, new documents will open in Plain text mode.

Now just copy and paste from whatever application you use to prepare your document into a blank TextEdit document. TextEdit’s Plain text mode should strip out any odd print characters that have been slipping into your HTML. Give it a once over to make sure all your characters appear the way you expect. Then you can reselect your text and paste it into your web document.

You could also try copy/pasting into Postable instead of using TextEdit.

If you want to get really geeky, you can also hand-code any of the characters that are giving you trouble. Just look up the problematic character in this handy chart: http://www.natural-innovations.com/wa/doc-charset.html. Replace the character with the HTML equivalent listed in the Entity column.

Photo Credit: DSCN6654.JPG by basictheory on Flickr

The “Ask iBAM” crew got this email a couple days ago from Wes:

I recently broke my headphone cord off in the headphone jack of my macbook. I heard an imic would work by plugging it into the usb jack, but when I tried to order the imic it was on back order. I really really want to be able to listen to music with my computer because that is what I use it for the most and I’m pretty upset right now. I was wondering if there is another product that does the same thing the imic does? Please answer my question asap because I really need to start making some music. Thanks in advance.

The iBoughtAMac staff batted the question around a bit and came up with the following:

Cheryl Colan responded with a focus on repair:

My advice would be to take the laptop over to an Apple Store (especially if you have an Apple Care Protection Plan) or certified Mac repair shop. A simple search revealed some people with this issue are told they have to replace the whole logic board, but others get the repair done cheap or even free.

If you feel the repair is too costly, there are a few methods for getting the broken piece of jack out, hopefully without damaging your MacBook (repeat my search and read results for details):

• You should not try a magnet. Usually the jack isn’t magnetic, like brass. Magnets aren’t especially good around hard drives.
• Several people reported success cutting off the end of a cotton swab and using that to snag and remove the broken jack tip.
• Others have used a toothpick and a tiny dot of superglue. Only attempt with a steady hand, and give the glue plenty of time to bond with the jack tip before attempting to pull it out.
• You can try a removal tool like splinter forceps or any number of cell phone repair tools. I’d take the battery out before inserting metal forceps into your headphone jack to prevent shorting anything in your computer.

Ted Byars had the following suggestion for replacement of lost function:

To my knowlege, unless you buy a usb audio interface, there isn’t much on the market for a mac. Back in the bluberry imac days there was a company making a thumb drive looking interface w/ a 1/8 in jack. You might be able to find one on ebay.

Of course you should always take utmost care in attempting a repair, and when in doubt, let the professionals handle it.

How about you, readers? Do you have further suggestions for Wes? Let us know in the comments!

Let’s discuss…

Do you have an iPhone 1.0 and wanna get the new one?

I know I sit in that category and I am trying to figure out what to do with my 1.0. I’m sure I can sell it here of via eBay, but the bigger question for me is what in the heck to sell it for? My first thought is maybe half of the new one’s pricing ($100). But do you think I could get $150? And what would people pay extra people pay for the official ‘iBoughtAn’ iPhone? (haha, kidding! no I’m not… seriously though, yes I am!) … haha

I would love your thoughts, as I’m sure the rest of the readers would as well. Open up the discussion. What’s a good quality, great shape iPhone 1.0 worth now?

*** NOMINATIONS NEEDED ***

Ok, so we own Mac’s (most of us) and Mac owners would like to think that we have a little more keen design sense (I’m included and I know we all really know it’s not actually true, but we like to think so and I did say “like” remember?)…

Anyway… Let’s have some fun and post our favorite designed websites on the planet in the comments here and I’ll make another post with a voting app so we can all cast out vote to see who comes out on top.

So, lend a guy a hand and post some links in the comments. Yes, even if it’s your site, but it better be good (haha)

Can’t wait to see ‘em … bring it! (this should be fun)

One of the most searched terms here at iBAM is “MacBook Battery Life” and we have a couple articles on that subject but I know there are some other little battery care tips that I have not stumbled upon across the net, so here’s my “Ask iBAM”…

What battery ‘funk’ have you come across with your MacBook and how did you fight the fight?

Do you have any battery life tips that we haven’t published here before?

Is there something we should know about MacBook battery care that we might not know already?

How about some battery stories? Those should be fun to read…

Okay… share away! Thanks