by: One who wishes he could remain anonymous but knows better, Associate Editor
(at least my wife doesn’t read this site)

Let’s say you happen to be passing near a household fixture that regularly holds water. Let’s further say your iPod Touch slips from your grasp. You hypothetically are lucky enough to catch it right as it hits the water. But it still gets a little on it. You quickly turn it off so no power is flowing while you dry it off. A while later you decide to see if you got lucky or not. You turn it on, everything works EXCEPT the headphone jack. Maybe a little drop got into the jack and has not fully dried. What to do?

You leave it in the standard household iPod Touch dehumidifier. Most American homes come with this fixture. Make sure the bottom is in the vent so the air can get into the jacks. A tip, don’t leave it on there too long when your warm air is flowing. It will make the touch pretty hot. Just a few minutes then let it cool and check it an hour later. If you are lucky like the hypothetical person in this post your headphone and all other functions work properly again.

Uploaded with Skitch!

This writer is not responsible if you try this on your own hardware. Either as an experiment or if you are equally unlucky and then this trick fails to work for you.

by: George Starcher, Associate Editor

Today I was using my remote buddy via my iTouch to control streaming to my airport express w/ speakers in my bedroom. I wanted to listen to some podcasts but I noticed some really old podcasts were showing when I chose Library under remote buddy. Seems the library file for iTunes thought some tracks still existed even though the audio files were long gone. There is a nice quick fix.

Download and use the ‘Super Remove Dead Tracks v2.0′ from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes.

There are a lot of good scripts on his site for other things too.  Check it out.

by: Matt Beckwith, Associate Editor

After sliding to the macintosh platform a couple of years ago I have slowly lessened my dependence on my Windows computer. Nowadays, I really only use my Windows machine for two applications - Microsoft Access and Microsoft Money. I will have to use Windows for Access for the foreseeable future but I can officially say goodbye to Microsoft Money, after nearly a decade.

When my wife and I decided to shop around for a replacement to MS Money we found a lot of choices. We downloaded and kicked the tires on Cha-Ching, CheckBook, iFinance, Jumsoft Money, MoneyWell and Moneydance. We ultimately decided on Moneydance and purchased the $29.99 license.

Although most of the other applications had similar interfaces, Moneydance is the most intuitive of the ones we tried. The default home page, complete with a snapshot of all our accounts and their balances, along with reminders of upcoming expenses and a calendar, is great. Setting up new accounts in Moneydance is very simple and took only a few minutes for us to set up all of our different accounts. Moneydance is an extremely efficient and lightweight application, running quicker than MS Money ever did on our PC. You can also import your data files from Money or Quicken into Moneydance.

Moneydance comes in three flavors: Windows, Linux and Mac, and is available at Moneydance.com. With the new year right around the corner, there’s no better time to make the switch from Money or Quicken.

I took the time to join Daniel on the Apple Universe Podcast Today. Daniel is 15 and does a great job as a young podcaster. Check it out and subscribe to his show if you like what you hear.

Merry Christmas to all of you from Mary, Jonathan and me. May your day be filled with family, joy and peace.

The subjecdt of recording Skype has been one that has been talked to death since podcasting started. Many articles and tutorials have been written about this subject.

Today Paul Figgiani from The.Point and Doug Kay of The Conversations Network, who are two of the most knowledgeable experts in audio and new media, have distributed this wonderful tutorial addressing recording using Skype head on and providing solutions you call all use.

Give yourself a wonderful holiday present and listen and watch this piece today. Leave them a a comment too.

Thank you Paul and Doug for this holiday gift. For more information please also visit The Conversations Network’s forums.

1password is one of my favorite applications, and a must have one in my book.

Today at 40% off there is no reason not to get it. They are not paying me to say this (although they can contact me for ads anytime<wink>). However, really it’s a deal at $17.97

*UPDATE* Don McAllister over at Screencastsonline also just recently released a free episode on the updated 1Password. So if in doubt on using this deal check out his video first.

One more time my friend Kreg Stepee from the Techorama podcast turns me on to one killer application. Fluid

This is not a maybe get this application. If you have Leopard (required) you must get this application and use it.

Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a small window where you specify the URL of a webapp you’d like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Provide an application name, click ‘Create’ and you’ll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you’ve just created.

I’ve already used it with Seesmic (even made a short screencast for them during lunch) and tried it with GMail. Go see for yourself and then show some love for the developer of Fluid .

As a part of my end of year duties, I am changing my discussion (comments) on the blog from the native Wordpress comments, to Disqus.

Disqus is going to allows you to make comments on the blog post that are threaded and relevant. You can also start Forum type discussions using the standalone page at
http://typicalmacuserpodcast.disqus.com All forums entries are part of the Disqus community, so people can easily discover and participate in any discussion. This will allow us to provide each other with help not just on blog posts or podcasts but also on all things Apple and Mac.

Also from now on you can always know when someone replies directly to you, not just when someone else adds a comment to the discussion. View a history of all your conversations as well.

I have enabled this feature for all “New comments on new threads” going forward. Please take the time to sign up and to use this as a further way to built the TMUP community in 2008.

I will also be looking for two people to become the moderators for this forum for me. Preferably one here in the U.S. and one in Europe. Here is a link to that post.

You will also be able to subscribe to any discussion’s RSS feed or get the comments emailed to you. I’m excited about this new way for our TMUP family to communicate. Let me know what you think by commenting to this post.

UDATE:

You can also leave  anonymous   comments as all of  you man not want to participate in Disqus

by: David Sparks, Associate Editor

The guys over at Agile Web Solutions seem busier than Santa’s elves lately. They just released version 2.5.7 of 1Password which makes several substantial improvements. In case you are unfamiliar with 1Password, it keeps track of all of your secret data and web login information (among other things) simply and painlessly. I reviewed it awhile back and it has quickly become essential in my Mac bag of tricks.

This new version provides full Leopard support for all of the major browsers: Safari, WebKit, Firefox, Flock, Omniweb, DEVONagent, Camino, and NetNewsWire. It also now supports DEVONagent 2.3.

My favorite new feature is the new Wallet formats including email accounts, instant messengers, FTP, .Mac, Amazon S3, ISP, passport, driver license, hunting license (Yes … Hunting License!), AirPort Extreme, bank accounts, and MySQL database information. It also sports a new backup system and a much expanded search feature.

1Password also exports a nifty encrypted bookmark to my iPhone that puts all this information in my pocket. You can check it all out at 1Password.com.