Ask TUAW: Kids' games, Pref Panes in the Dock, Access on Mac, and more

In this round of Ask TUAW we'll tackle questions on games for kids, Pref Panes in the Dock, expanding RAR files, accessing Access databases on the Mac, controlling Front Row with an iPhone and more.

As always your suggestions are most welcome, and questions for next week should be left in the comments. And now to the questions!

Michael asks

I used a tip I found online to alter the Time Machine backup interval from 1 hour to 3. Ever since then, backups don't run according to schedule, and only run when I manually start one. I restored the file I edited to its original version, but backups still don't run automatically. How can I fix this?

I assume you followed this hint at Mac OSX Hints. In all likelihood the permissions are messed up, as occurred for this user. He suggests that the problem can be fixed by running the repair permission command with the Disk Utility.

Jonathan asks

It's the holiday season and time to get some new games for the kiddies. I have a toddler, a preschooler, and a kindergartner. As a recent convert, I'm trying to find games for the first time for my kids, but am having an incredibly hard time. Some of the jumpstart series of games advertise working with 10.2 and above, but actually only run under classic. What's a guy to do? I want to find educational games for my kids that work in tiger and/or leopard.

Well Mike's TUAW's Buyers Guide for Parents would seem to be the place to start. Apple also has a Kids & Learning Games page that should be helpful.

Peter asks

Is there a way to add a dock icon for an individual panel in system preferences? For example, I want to be able to launch straight into the 'Sharing' panel instead of launching System Preferences and then clicking on it. Other than that, is there a simple way to turn on and off internet sharing other than going into the Sharing panel?

You can place Preference Panes to the right side of the Dock just by dragging and dropping from the Finder. You can find user installed Preference Panes in /Library/PreferencePanes and ~/Library/PreferencePanes . The Sharing Pref Pane (along with other default Pref Panes) is in /System/Library/PreferencePanes.

You don't say which version of OS X you're running but you can probably do what you want with an AppleScript and some UI scripting. I found an old hint that could possibly serve as the basis for a solution, but you'll probably have to modify it to some degree. Your fellow reader Paulpro pointed to the interesting SharingMenu, though unfortunately it does not appear to have been updated since 2004.

Darren asks

I often have to produce documents in Japanese and the only thing keeping me from jettisoning Office for Mac 2004 for good, in favour of Pages 08, is that Word allows vertical text... I've searched high and low in Pages but can't find a way to make this happen... any ideas?

Unfortunately you simply can't do it in Pages. There is a thread on this at Apple Discussions, but the long and the short of it is that Pages simply does not support vertical text for the main body of the document. As this post suggests you can use a text box to rotate text, but I don't think that's really going to help.

iGo asks

Is there a "Utility" that will allow me to spin down my external Firewire drives (two drives mirrored - Raid 1)? For my iMac internal drive, at least there is a setting that puts the drive to sleep when possible and I'd like to something like this for my external drive-set. The external drive is forever spinning and at an audible high speed, and I have to believe that is undue wear and tear, which may lead to premature failure.

As one of the other commenters noted that many folks think that it's actually the starting up and shutting down that puts more stress on the drives than leaving them spun up all the time. But as far as I know this is not really an OS issue, but rather is determined by the firmware of the FireWire controllers inside the drives. So I do not think that any sort of software utility will do what you want.

Colm asks

I know OS X supports .zip files but do you know of any plugins for .rar files?

There are many Mac utilities that will expand RAR files. You should check out the list over at MacUpdate. For a free utility I've always found UnRarX to be very useful.

How could i use my macbook to print either wired or wirelessly....preferably wirelessly with a Dell printer.. I have a dell Photo 924 printer which is hooked up by usb to a Dell Desktop running XP....I assume u'd use the windows machine as a print server and use Ghostscript or something to mask the printer as something else but I realy haven't a clue about this..

Basically it's a huge pain. I've set something like this up once and swore I'd never do it again. However if you're a glutton for punishment these instructions will get you started.

Matt asks

I'm getting a Macbook sometime in January, but I've hit a problem. Our IT class in school is now mving onto Access databases, fancy ones. I need a Mac application that can read and create ".mdb" files. I have heard about OpenOffice's Base program, but I've also heard that the Mac version is a bit buggy. I've also heard of FileMaker, but have never seen anything about it working with Access files. I won't be in huge trouble if I can't get one, but I really don't want to have to use the family WinXP machine.

Well one obvious solution is to run Access with Parallels or VMware Fusion in a virtual machine. That's is probably what I would suggest for maximum compatibility. However there is also the Actual ODBC Driver ($30) from Actual Technologies which will allow you to "use Excel and FileMaker Pro to quickly and easily retrieve data from your Access database." Nonetheless, I think you'd probably be best off just running Access in a virtual machine.

Justin asks

Is it possible to use your iPhone as a remote to control front row?

Other commenters have suggested Telekinesis and Remote Buddy (€20). I think I would probably recommend the latter for a more mature solution. Basically Remote Buddy runs a little webserver on your Mac that serves up AJAX pages onto your iPhone. So you can actually get two-way communication between your Mac and the iPhone.