macOS

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…

Matthew Brocker and Stephen Checkoway found a way to change the firmware for the Mac's built-in camera so that the activity light stays disabled. As a result, the camera can be activated without anyone that's actually at the computer knowing. Apple designed the activity light to work as an integral part of the camera so…

The upside, though, is that I sometimes find cool things to share with you. Let’s ignore the fact that my social skills have dwindled to pretty much nothing on a scale of, well—an imaginary scale that measures social skills. And with that soul-scarring realization, we’ll move on to today’s Quick Tip.  The first thing I…

Safari 6.0.5 flaw can expose website passwords Kaspersky Labs' Vyachaslav Zakorzhevsky said Safari “doesn't encrypt previous sessions and stores them in a standard plist file that is freely accessible. As a result, it's easy to find a user's login credentials.” The file that holds site and session data is tucked away in a hidden folder,…

You may have wondered, though, how you could break one apart into its individual frames (or even just view the frames separately if there happened to be a detail that you’d like to focus on). Your Mac actually has a built-in way to do that using Preview, which is pretty darned awesome. So to check it…

Alas, there's a better way as TMO's Melissa Holt points out in a pervious tip. Using Paste and Match style will take the copied text and paste it in using the current document's formatting. This is what many of you may expect will happen when you paste in some text, so it's nice to have…

Hey, I think that looks pretty neat, and the tabs are simple to use and understand. In celebration of this shiny new feature, here are my favorite tricks for using it.  1. Are you a fan of keyboard shortcuts? Command-T opens a new tab, and Command-W closes the active tab, just like in Safari. Faster navigation without having to…

That’s great and all, but what if you don’t want that much information to show up randomly on your machine? It certainly wouldn’t be ideal to get an embarrassing email while your boss happened to be standing behind you. Of course, we can turn notifications off entirely, but I think it's awfully nice to know who has…

One of the features Apple touted as An Official Awesome New Thing™ about Mavericks is that you can have your Dock and your menu bar appear on a secondary display. That’s pretty cool, I think, but if you’ve gotten accustomed to the old behavior, you can revert back to it if you want to. The…

Confused by Mavericks’ new “travel time” feature within Calendar and aren’t sure how it’s supposed to work? Hey, I'm here for you. There are quite a few steps involved for how it functions, so let's get started. I promise that it's fairly painless. Mostly painless. OK, there may be a little pain, but I'll hold…

Starting with the release of OS X 10.7 Lion, a feature was added that permitted the creation of a custom text message and have it emblazoned on the Mac’s login screen. The message could be a affable one of warmth and welcome. It could be a straightforward “If found, call so-and-so” kind of message communicating…

Prior to OS X Mavericks, moving and renaming files meant it was time to make a trip to the Finder. Now that Apple's new Mac operating system is out, however, you can handle those tasks in the title bar of the document that's currently open. Read on to learn how. To see the new document…

Mavericks’ new iBooks app has a neat hidden ability that’ll be especially great for you students out there. This feature adds citations to copied iBooks text for pasting into the app of your choice. It’s really simple to take advantage of, too—all you’ve gotta do is select some text on a page within iBooks on…

Before Mavericks, if you pasted a copied address into a contact’s card, here’s what would happen: Words cannot express how frustrated I was by the pasted address getting all mushed up on one line like that. How annoying to have to delete the city, state, and zip (or what have you) and then retype them into…