macOS

___________________ Those of us who grew up with the Mac tend to think of its OS as cast in stone as the way a modern GUI on top of a classic BSD UNIX system should look and feel. It's easy to fall into the idea that change is bad. The fact is, however, is that…

There are a few different preferences around your Mac that control this behavior. If, for example, you have Location Services turned off within System Preferences> Security & Privacy> Privacy, then you may be seeing warnings like this one instead: While turning off Location Services entirely is certainly an option if you’re concerned about privacy, there…

No amount of fancy camera gear will guarantee that you become a better photographer Why do I find this so cage-rattling? People will surely disagree, but in general, it’s not about the camera and photographic accouterments. At the very least, camera gear is secondary to a good grasp of the photographic principles of Composition, Light…

One bug squished, one bug survived. Unfortunately this is just a case of history repeating itself. When this flaw was discovered the update was released immediately on Mac OS, but three weeks later on iOS, drawing criticism from a former employee for the delay. Unfortunately, that delay for Windows users is approaching two months now,…

Volcano image source: USGS, via Wikimedia Commons. As an example, I can no longer remember phone numbers. I was driving the other day and realized that if my car broke down and my phone died simultaneously, I would literally not be able to call anywhere except my childhood home. Not helpful! So if you’re like…

Speculation went wild, with many (including Apple Support reps) presuming that this was intentional on Apple's part and now policy. Apple ended that speculation late last night with the release of iTunes 11.2.1 (also available via Software Update). Install this and you can literally watch your /Users folder re-appear during the installation process. No reboot…

Encrypting Disks Under 10.8 or 10.9 If you’re running Mountain Lion or Mavericks, this process is really, really easy. However, even though this first method theoretically shouldn’t erase any data on the drive, be sure you have a backup before you begin just in case things go all nutty on you. Better safe than…well, you know.…

Blu-ray, disks, however, are not supported directly by this Handbrake/VLC combo, and that makes things frustrating. Typically you need to first rip the Blu-ray into some format that Handbrake will understand and then you can convert/compress from there.  MakeMKV is one such program that will do that Blu-ray conversion. What many users don't realize, though,…

It’s pretty cool that you can add something to your iPhoto Library or set it as your desktop wallpaper right from that contextual menu. I use “Copy Image Address” and “Copy Image” a lot, too, but mostly just to send links and cat memes to my pals. As I do more often than is probably necessary.…

But here’s a pickle: What if you’re editing a document, and you find that its formatting is all messed up because of tons of those invisible characters? Is there any way to do a find and replace on them so that you don’t have to go through and delete 476 tabs, for example, that were…

To enable this, what you’ll do is go to the computer you’d like to access remotely and open System Preferences> Parental Controls. First of all, if you see what’s in the screenshot below, then there aren’t any non-administrator accounts on your kid’s Mac, which means that you can’t set up Parental Controls until you make…

Switch to the Finder and choose Go > Go to Folder… and paste in the following path: /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/ Your Mac's Menu Extras folder When the window opens, you can see a list of files that end in .menu. To add eject to your menu bar, double-click on Eject.menu and you’ll get a little eject…

What these do is pretty simple but really helpful. Let’s say you’ve just run a command with a lot of output—fs_usage, for example, which I’ve written about before—and you decide that you want to save all the data that Terminal just gave you. If you think about it ahead of time, you can of course…

Pointers are the endearing little on-screen indicators designed to provide feedback to users. According to the latest revision of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines document, there are eighteen system pointers in OS X. A few of the typical OS X system pointers The two system pointers we're most familiar with are the “mouse pointer” – “arrow”…

First, you can edit which icons show in the window at all by going to the View menu and selecting Customize: Options under the View menu You can uncheck the ones you don’t necessarily need: Look at all those checkboxes! When you’re finished, just click the ‘Done’ button. Don’t worry, you haven’t removed anything from your…

My first suggestion is unplugging the second monitor, launching Time Machine and restoring the file, then plugging the monitor back in. This is not necessarily the nicest solution, but it does save having to log out and back in after making changes. Other ways to resolve this involve changing monitor settings. First, try switching monitors…

An ideal use for Photo Books is for the creation of travelogues. iPhoto offers several travel themes to choose from that you can apply to your book layout, such as Tropical, Asian, and Old World Travel.  This beautiful travel itinerary map is easy to create in iPhoto Here’s one of my favorite features: iPhoto can…

There are quite a few ways you could go about it. First, you could open the Calendar program on your Mac and hover over any of your calendars in the left-hand list to reveal a sharing icon: Don’t see a list? Select the “Calendars” button on the toolbar. Click that, and you’ll get a little pop-up…

__________________ First, it's important to understand the terminology. A display is a physical monitor, typically a flat panel LCD device. This article focuses on a second external monitor connected to, say, an iMac or MacBook. An OS X desktop resides on a display and has a menu bar at the top and (generally) a dock…

      One of the Spotlight features I find most useful, though, is the ability to search for and jump right to a person’s card in my Contacts program, which is far faster than opening the application first and then searching. So here’s what you’ll do to try this out. Start by bringing up Spotlight…

iMessage I started having a strange problem with iMessage. I could get messages on my i-devices, or on my Mac, but not on both of them at once. Since I rely heavily on iMessage this was a problem. It turns out that my Send & Receive settings on my iPhone in iOS 7 got changed,…

…then this is probably a familiar sight to you: That’s just madness, my friends. MADNESS. If you decide you don’t like the looks of that, then there’s a way you can minimize windows into their programs' Dock icons, which’ll keep things all organized and stuff. Plus, your Dock won’t look like window mayhem. Seriously, that screenshot…

Doing some Math in the Spotlight bar In fact, I use Spotlight so often to do quick calculations that I've nearly forgotten that the Mac comes with a full-blown app. All you need to do is type your calculation into the Spotlight bar and it'll produce an answer. It's fast, incredibly convenient, and quite powerful.…