macOS

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.…

Anyway, the program that controls all of the keychains (and thus the stored passwords) that you have is called Keychain Access, so that's where we'll do our troubleshooting for the purposes of this tip.  One of the common symptoms of a potential keychain issue is this familiar but incredibly annoying alert from Mail, especially if you start…

However, with any personal computing device, there are always those tantalizing technical tidbits that turn out to be truly useful to everyone but are often hard to intuit without diving into documentation. Who reads the owner’s manual anyway? Who even gets an owner’s manual to begin with? I am like the magician who discloses how…

…by right- or Control-clicking on an email… …or by using the “Send Again” keyboard shortcut (Shift-Command-D) after selecting your message. Why is this useful, you may ask? Well, it’s a handy way to pass along an email that you’ve already sent without doing a lot of cleanup. I’m sure you’ve noticed that when you forward…

So as Jeff Gamet mentioned last year, you can use your trackpad to tap a word with three fingers (or three-finger double-tap under Lion) to get a quick definition. Here I’ve opened the pop-up, but I can’t see the entire thing because it’s been cut off. What to do? Well, I can click on the definition text itself,…

My angle in writing this up is managing my network to properly handle Bitcoin mining devices as I prepare for my Macworld/iWorld session on Bitcoins. Many mining devices not only need a static ID, they need to look for a local proxy server. By assigning a static ID to the Mac running that proxy, you…

Mac OS Desktop Accessories So why hasn't Apple considered letting users run iPad/iPhone apps on the Mac in their own windows akin to the desk accessories of yore? Imagine accessing multiple mobile apps, games, etc. on your Mac as little desk accessory apps/widgets (let's call them Desk Touch Apps). It could look something like this:…

I’ve written before about how to use this feature to your advantage, but what if you just hate it? Well, there’s an easy way to turn it off entirely so you don’t have to look at its ugly face ever again. To do that, visit Finder> Preferences… …then click on the General tab and change “New Finder…

In fact, the Mac’s existence defined my 20+ years IT career, as I became the lead Mac support specialist and trainer for a major Delaware-based chemical research company. I’ve written many a How-To article since those pioneer days. In homage to the 30th Anniversary of Macintosh, I present you with a How-To article from the…

Here’s how it works: The DNS (Domain Name System) is essentially the phone book of the Internet. You type “apple.com” into your browser, and DNS translates that into the numerical IP address needed to take you right where you’re looking to go.  OpenDNS maintains a list of sites and categories that parents might want to…

To try it out, let’s start with a simple object. I’m using just a shape here, but these rules apply to any sort of images you add. So here’s my circle: I’m going to go in and make some weird changes to it, so I’ve added a border, changed its color, and put a reflection…

Amazon has the lion's share of the ebook market with its Kindle platform, and the company has apps for Kindle, Android, Mac, Windows, and even your browser. That only works for Kindle format ebooks, though, and it turns out there are lots of other places to get ebooks. Apple's iBooks is the best, in my…