Contextual menu for files. I don't know about you, but this annoyed me greatly, so I researched how to get rid of it. Why? With too much frequency, I'd accidentally pick the wrong one and then have to fix the mistake. I delete a lot more files than I move to Dropbox, so the Dropbox…
John Martellaro
John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. With degrees in astrophysics (B.S.) and physics (M.S.), he has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include chess, science fiction and astronomy. John is the host of the TMO podcast Background Mode.
Articles by John Martellaro
4 Ways to Restart the Mac Finder
____________________ These techniques generally assume you are doing a configuration change that requires a benign relaunch (kill and restart) of the OS X Finder. If the Finder is really hosed, you may not be able to launch apps as in technique #3 below and you may have to resort to Unix trickery as in technique…
No Sooner do we Secure Our iPhones Than the Home Invasion Begins
______________________ The modern customer who surfs on top of the blue waters of the Internet generally has no idea of what's going on under the water. The enormous layers of complexity and software abstraction mean that we can no longer understand what's going on under the hood ouf our devices with the time we have…
Report: An Amazing Customer Experience with Apple
______________________ My wife, who is now a professor at a local college, was looking for a Thunderbolt (or mini DisplayPort) to VGA adapter for her MacBook Air. This is for in-class presentations with a projector. She assumed Apple would always have such an item in stock, but it turns out to be an adapter that's…
A Mad Magazine Experiment with iPad Gone Sour
___________________ In September of that year, I wrote: … I’ve started a pilot project to eliminate most of my paper magazine subscriptions and convert to digital format on the iPad. Of course, this has been possible previously on the Mac in some cases, but the size and portability of the iPad creates a critical psychological…
iPhone vs. Tricorder: Seeing the Future with Blurred Vision
_________________________ I started thinking about this when TMO's Bryan Chaffin pointed me to this add for a “Starfleet TR-590 Mark IX Tricorder.” You can pre-order this replica from the Roddenberry Shop for US$499.95. I am a big fan of Star Trek: The Original Series (although my favorite series is Star Trek: the Next Generation), and…
Why the Apple iWatch Won't Go Straight to the Bottom Dresser Drawer
Apple, in my opinion, is looking at 1) previously unexplored utility in wearables 2) health monitoring that makes sense and 3) fashion. The elegant combination of these elements will set the iWatch apart from geeky smartwatches that can tell us the atmospheric pressure in millbars in Hong Kong. In other words, I expect the iWatch…
How to Secure Your Mac With OS X Gatekeeper
______________________ 1. What is it? Gatekeeper is a part of OS X that checks an app for the presence of a digital signature, applied by Apple or the developer. A preference can be set such that if the app is not signed by a registered Apple developer or by Apple, the app cannot launch. That…
OS X Yosemite: How to Turn Translucency Off or On
___________________ In Yosemite, part of an app can, if so enabled, take on the color of the background via translucency. One example is the Safari search bar. Another is the sidebar in the Finder. Notice how, in the screen shot below, the Finder sidebar takes on the hue of the background: beige (at the top)…
OS X Yosemite: What Does That Little Green Button do NOW?
OS X Mavericks and Before Historically, in fact, that green button at the top left has had two kinds of behaviors. If you're in a Finder window, clicking the green dot will expand the window as much as it can in order to show as many files as it can. Sometimes it can do that…
Apple's Tim Cook Says iPad Sales Behind IBM Partnership
____________________ The initial remarks came during the call's preamble in which Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri summarized Apple's the hardware unit sales. For the second quarter in a row now, Tim Cook has had to explain a slight drop in iPad sales, both year over year and in successive quarters, and that has to…
OS X: The Best Way to Share a Page (via Email) in Safari
In Safari, if you select File > Share > Email This Page, an image of the page you are viewing will be dropped into a mailer. All you have to do is fill in the recipient. Image #1 Holt: Default Share. For a quick recap, see “Safari: Mailing Page Links (the Easy Way) by our…
OS X: The Best Ways to Share a Web Page (via Email) in Safari
_____________________ In Safari, if you select File > Share > Email This Page, an image of the page you are viewing will be dropped into a mailer. All you have to do is fill in the recipient's address. Emailing just the page from Safari. For a quick recap, see “Safari: Mailing Page Links (the Easy…
Voyager Q Conveniently Docks Your Extra SATA Drives
The Voyager Q dock from NewerTech allows you to access a 2.5- or 3.5-inch SATA drive with a Mac (or PC) using a conventional connection, USB, FireWire or eSATA. It's a boon for those moving on from the old Mac Pros but want to keep a SATA drive or two active. NewerTech's implementation is very…
It's a Mistake to Declare Apple Supply Chain Rumors of Problems a Disaster
_______________________ When I read about issues Apple may be having with its production of sapphire, problems with the case or display or battery production problems, I assume that Apple is able to bring its own engineering and manufacturing expertise along with that of the supplier to bear. Perhaps I feel that way because I worked…
The Bidding is Open: Have Lunch With Apple's Eddy Cue
Charity Buzz has the details. Currently, the highest bid is at US$16,000. Bidding closes on Wednesday, July 16 at 2:20 PM EDT. You must bid at least $17,000 to bump the current high bid. Mr. Cue is a 25-year veteran of Apple, and lunch with him, while not likely to divulge any Apple secrets, would…
Poke a Used and Reset Android Phone: it'll Spill its Guts
What they found will alarm you. In contrast, iPhones use a hardware encryption, so when the encryption key is destroyed on a reset, the data is very hard to recover. Not so for Android phones apparently. Here's the story: “Hard Proof That Wiping Your Phone Doesn't Actually Delete Everything.” So … I'll never forget the…
Black Holes and Scientific Computing with Apple's New Mac Pro
Recently, Dr. Khanna and I were in a FaceTime session, and he was explaining how the 2013 Mac Pro in concert with OpenCL, has greatly assisted his scientific work. That conversation led to this interview which, we hope, provides substantial insights into using these Apple tools for scientific computing. TMO: First, give us a little…
Up Close With the olloclip 4-IN-1 Photo Lens for iPad
olloclip is well known for its lens kits for the iPhone going back to the iPhone 4s. These small, easy-to-attach lenses typically include a wide angle, fisheye and Macro capability. Now, olloclip has launched the olloclip 4-IN-1 Photo Lens for iPad, and it carries on a great tradition. _______________________ The 4-IN-1 Photo Lens for iPad…
Fuzion+ Aluminum Case for iPhone 5/5s: Pros Outweigh Cons
The Rokform Fuzion+ Aluminum Case for iPhone 5/5s has military good looks and ruggedness. It is one of the best cases reviewed to date with respect to ultimate protection and has many strengths. However, there are a few negatives that keep it from being great. ______________________ I have been using this case for almost a…
Is Amazon Setting the World on Fire? Or to Itself?
_____________________ Social pendulums swing back and forth. It could be women's hemlines over the years or changing attitudes about American involvement in foreign conflicts. One constant remains: whenever we go too far in one direction, there's a social backlash, and the pendulum starts to swingback the other way. Right now, we've gone about as far…
8 GB of RAM in the New Entry-Level iMac is Just Fine
_____________________ First, the sensible thing to do is see how much memory Apple specifies as required for Mavericks. Apple's OS X Mavericks specification page says that you need at least of 2 GB of RAM to run OS X 10.9. If course we all know that numbers like that are on the conservative side. The…
OS X Mavericks: How to Easily Reset the Administrator Password
[Note: this article was edited and updated in November, 2014 with additional methods.] _____________________ To be clear, there are several technical ways to reset the administrator password on a Mac if you cannot log in. Some of them are rather Unix-geeky and can make a novice user nervous. For the sake of completeness, I'll reference…
How to Check Your Actual Netflix Streaming Speed
__________________________ Netflix doesn't try to saturate your internet connection delivered by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). For example, if you're paying for a 12 megabits per second (Mbps) connection, Netflix won't try to use all of it just to generate a slightly better picture. Note: communication rates are always expressed in bits per second (bps),…