Things have been going well at Maciverse.com and we’ve appreciated all your comments, feedback, and emails. Below are some of the more popular articles the bast few weeks.

1. Install OS X Leopard On a Flash Drive - If you want to have a safety net for times when you’re having hard drive trouble, you may want to have a bootable version of OS X on a Flash Drive.
2. Sync iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook - This tutorial takes you through the needed steps and tools to keep your iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook Calendars all in sync.
3. Re-Installing OS X on Macbook Air Wirelessly - Need a fresh install of OS X on your Macbook Air and don’t have an external DVD drive? Step by Step instructions and screenshots will show you just what to do.
4. Quick Reboot to Windows - Boot Camp users will be interested in this script that will help them quickly reboot into Windows XP or Vista.
5. The Case of the Slow Mac, and how to fix it - Having speed issues with your Mac? These instructions may help you speed them back up!

Let us know if there are any hints, tips, or ideas you’d like us at Maciverse to explore!

If you’ve had trouble getting your USB sound device to automatically be enabled in OS X you’re not alone. Unlike other operating systems, OS X 10.5 Leopard does not automatically enable USB sound devices such as Head sets when they are installed into your Apple computer.

To be able to take advantage of USB head sets or other third party sound devices you’ll need to enable. To enable USB sound devices:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Select Sound
3. Click the output tab
4. Select the Headset or sound device of type USB
   
5. And/Or Click the the Input tab
6. Select the Headset or sound device of type USB.

After setting the sound system preferences to the USB device for both Output and/or Input, your USB sound device should be enabled and functioning on your Mac

We last touched upon Inquisitor, a Safari plugin that brings Spotlight like search to Safari, when they joined the Yahoo team. Since then, Yahoo has had some interesting times, but it doesn’t look like it stopped the Inquisitor team from slowing down on their development work.

Recently, Inquisitor announced their first major upgrade since joining Yahoo. As one would expect version 3.2 includes improved search experience for those individuals that have selected Yahoo as their Inquisitor search engine. These upgrades include increased performance (Faster results) and use of Yahoo’s new Search Boss platform.

In addition to the new Yahoo capabilities, Inquisitor 3.2 adds visual improvements. Now your search results will a record count of how many times you’ve visited the site you’re searching for as well as the last time you visited.

Finally, one of the most significant announcement of Inquisitor includes support for eight additional languages (Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German).

If you haven’t yet upgraded Safari with Inquisitor search, now may be the perfect time.

While adding Google Gadgets to your iWeb site allows you to display articles from sites you visit often, it lacks the capability to allow you to create a custom RSS feed of information most relevant to your site and embed it onto your site to share with your readers.

Fortunately, one of their search competitors has provided a way to combine and customize RSS feeds and also a way easily add them to your iWeb sites.

To create a custom RSS feed that you can add to your iWeb site, navigate to Yahoo Pipes and login with a yahoo account. Once you’ve logged in click “Create a Pipe”. The Pipes customization page will load and allow you to start your custom built RSS feed.

For this tutorial, we’ll create an RSS feed for just Maciverse.com and add a filter to just display information that includes iWeb related articles.

To get started, we’ll need to select our Source. On the left side of the Pipes customization page click sources and then drag the “Fetch Feed” option to the workspace on the right.

We’ve added the source field but we still we need to enter the location of our source. In the open field enter the address of the RSS feed you’d like to pull information from. I entered “http://www.maciverse.com/feed/”.

Next, select Operators on the left and then drag Filter to the workspace. Select Permit for items that match all of the following. In the field below select the Content item from your RSS feed and enter a keyword into the open text field. For this tutorial, select Contains and enter iWeb.

Now that we’ve selected the source and filtered to the specific data that we want we can connect the pipes and see our results.

Save the newly created pipe and click “Back to My Pipes”. You’ll now see the pipes you’ve created. Select the one just created and click on View Results.

Next we want to get the code behind the Pipes we created so we can embed it on our iWeb site. Click the Get as a Badge button.

Select the Embed option to be able to grab the code and apply it to your iWeb site. After clicking on embed copy the code displayed.

We’ve built the pipes for our customized RSS feed and grabbed the code we need. Open iWeb and navigate to the page you’d like to add the customized RSS feed. Select html snippet and add it to the page. In the html snippet page paste in the code we copied from Yahoo pipes.

Once the code has been applied you should be able to see the pipes details on your iWeb site and it should be ready for publishing.

This is a quick and easy way to add customized RSS feeds that are particular and relevant to your iWeb sites. If you enjoy this article, please subscribe to our RSS feed to get the latest updates on how to get the most out of your mac.

Its clear by the long lines, the millions sold, and the number of software downloads since July 11 that the iPhone has been a success for Apple. One of the reasons that the product attracts so many people is its almost unlimited capabilities. The software that is available allows users to play games, watch video, listen to music, and stay connected to their work as well as their hobbies.

One of the free software applications that is available to iPhone and iPod Touch users is Wordpress. Wordpress, a very common and widely used blogging and web publishing tool, was released for the iPhone just a few days after the 2.0 firmware was made available. The Wordpress application for the iPhone focuses on making it quick and easy to post and update contact on all the Wordpress websites you have on the internet.

The following guide will walk you through connecting to your Wordpress site and how to post and update content.

After downloading Wordpress for the iPhone, open the application and click the “Add a blog…” button on the screen.

Next, enter in the Blog Url, Username, and Password that you use to login and update your Wordpress site. After entering the information click save

If you successfully entered your login credentials you should now see the title of your Wordpress site on those available on the menu.

Select the blog or Wordpress site you’d like to update or edit, once it has loaded you’ll see a list of recent articles. To write a new article click the small pencil and paper icon at the bottom right corner.

The next page you see will allow you to enter the Title of the article you’re writing, enter tags, and add categories as well as enter status. Once you’ve updated details about the content you’ll be writing, the window is open for you to type your article. This will be the true test of how skilled you are at the touch button keyboard.

Press the Categories button to mark the categories that the article falls under.

One of the best parts of Wordpress for the iPhone is that it allows you to keep local versions of the articles you create. Feel free to write up a post, but wait to post it to the internet at a more convenient time. It also allows you to write and save data when you are out of 3g and Wifi range. To do just, just leave the status as Local Draft.

After you’ve set all the article variables and written your new content you can Save or Post the article to your site by simply pressing either the Post or Save buttons. Once posting the site, your Wordpress on the iPhone application will upload the information to your Wordpress Site and make it visible to all your viewers.

Updating web content while mobile has never been so easy.