macOS

_______________________ 1. Mail in OS X. We're all very familiar with this and have been using it for years. Hover the mouse cursor over the suspect hyperlink and a rectangle will pop up showing the actual URL. 2. Safari in OS X. If you have Safari > View > Show Status Bar enabled, you'll see…

________________________ Several things got me thinking about this idea. Of course, as always, I present it as food for thought. It makes no sense to insist that this is something Apple must do. They probably won't. But consider…. First of all, during each Apple earnings report, Tim Cook notes the fact that PC sales are…

If you tap the spacebar when you see a suggestion like the one above, your Mac will helpfully insert the correction, and you’ll be on your way. But what if it keeps trying to correct a word you know is right? I find this happens a lot with technical terms. Thanks for playing, but no.…

_____________________ Introduction. Encryption is a vast and complex subject. There are many nuances and gotchas. In this article, we'll keep it short and sweet for beginners so that it's easily understandable for a specific, simple task. For those who want to go further and expand their knowledge, I'll list some resources at the end of…

The issue that often causes this behavior is what’s called a kernel panic. If that’s the case, you’ll see a window like this once you get back into your user account: Do as it says and click “Report,” and a dialog box with a bunch of technical gobbledegook will appear. You can click the triangle next…

Highlights of the DSM6 enhancements include: Synology's Content Search index is now automatically exposed to the OS X Finder, allowing users to perform truly valuable searches of the data on their network storage devices. Video Station, Synology's movie and TV-show server, will now do offline transcoding to make even more of your media compatible for…

In the way we'll use Loopback today it's best to think of it as a software pipe that pretends it has a hardware device on each end: audio input on one and audio output on the other. This lets you pass audio into it from one app and pull that same audio out of it from…

Click on the “Details” link there, and the window that pops up will give you all of the recent activity associated with your account, including the IP addresses used. The “Sign out of all other web sessions” button near the top is gonna do what we’re talking about in this tip… …but as Google will…

If you click on that, you’ll see why I think it’s so nifty—there are all sorts of options under there. You could choose, say, to sort your messages by whom they’re from, by their subject alphabetically, by their size, or whether they’ve been read. Also, when you pick one of those options, the two bottom…

OS X is based on BSD UNIX Here's the basic outline of this tip. Create a UNIX script with a text editor that contains one or more terminal commands. Make it executable. Double click it in the Finder. It's really quite simple, but there are a few things to be aware of. I'll walk you…

If you pick any mailbox from the sidebar and then choose that, Mail will attempt to, well, rebuild the mailbox, which can help with all sorts of display problems and emails that seem to be missing. Note that if the mailbox in question has a ton of messages, this process can take a while. You…

_________________________ I am right handed. What I discovered in my own case is that my left hand, resting over the left side of the Apple aluminum keyboard, covers all the special function keys. In order to exercise the default operation of CTRL + right arrow or CTRL + left arrow, I have to lift my…

________________________ One of the most overlooked System Preferences in OS X is, in my book, Accessibility. It sits out there in the nether regions beyond Time Machine and looks like something only people with certain handicaps would be interested in. Even its icon could be off-putting. Easy to overlook or dismiss. However, the Accessibility preferences…

Best. Pictures. EVER. In case you don’t know, you can select multiple items by holding down Command and clicking to select each one if they aren’t right next to each other. If you have a ton of pictures all in a row, however, just click to select the first one, then hold down Shift and…

Try using your password manager! I use 1Password, but this tip should work with other password managers as well. Let's say you're looking for a job on indeed.com, and have filled out the site's advanced search from. Have a Web form you need to fill in over and over? 1Password can help. To save the…

Well, if you visit System Preferences > Users & Groups, you’ll find that there’s a “Login Options” choice near the bottom-left.  There’s where you can adjust all sorts of things about how the login process works and acts. In order to make changes to those settings, though, you’ll need to click on the lock in…

So to get started, first you’ll open Disk Utility—it lives within your Applications > Utilities folder.  The new El Capitan version of Disk Utility is way more…well, jolly somehow than previous versions. It’s bright and colorful, inviting even. Which is a bit weird considering it’s where you’ll go to erase, partition, and repair disks. Nothing…

No offense to Apple, of course.   1) Turn the scroll bars back on. Under System Preferences > General, you can switch “Show scroll bars” to “Always,” and this’ll take OS X’s windows from this… …to this: For a lot of folks who haven’t used touch-sensitive devices before, this is a big one. It’s not…

We're setting up NumberSync on an iPad, but you can use an iPod touch or your Mac, too. NumberSync lets you use your iPad and iPod touch like your iPhone NumberSync Compatibility Just because you want to use NumberSync doesn't mean you can. That said, the odds are in your favor because the list of compatible…

Episode #153   My trip to Florida last week for Thanksgiving with my family reminded me that traveling with today’s technology isn’t always easy… so here are some tips that may help make your holiday travels a bit more pleasant. No matter where you go—hotel, motel, or a room at mom’s—chances are you won’t find enough electrical…

First, make sure you’re not actively using that Comcast network by clicking on the Wi-Fi icon at the top-right of your screen. The network you’re currently joined to will have a check mark beside it. I have a very clever neighbor. Then click on the Apple Menu at the upper-left corner of your screen and…

…or like this: Those icons basically mean “hey, I see you’ve got a program open on another device that I can use, too. Wanna pick up where you left off?” If you click that icon, your Mac will, for example, continue an email draft you started on your iPhone. It’s pretty handy if you use…

Once you’ve got stuff highlighted, you’ll have a couple of choices. First, you could just click the “Forward” button in your toolbar (or press Shift-Command-F), and that’ll start a new email with all of the items you selected in the body of the message. Secondly, you could instead forward the selected emails as attachments, which’ll make…

  1. Jump into Editing Contacts Within any card in your Contacts program, Force-clicking on a field you want to change will put you right into editing mode and select that field for easy-peasy correcting. This works with pretty much any item you want to correct, but you should know that if you’re wanting to…