When I got home, unpacked, and tried to read my email, Mail would not let me in the program unless I entered my administrative password. When I tried to do that, it seemed like a demon had taken over my Mac, a demon intent on typing character after character in the password field when I wasn’t even touching it. For instance, if my password were 123456 and I tried to enter that, the computer would continue to enter something and I would have no control over it. I had to go to the Apple Menu > Force Quit to get out of Mail and end the action. I tried to open Safari and had the same results so I knew the problem had nothing to do with Mail and everything to do with my OS. A shut down and restart did not solve the problem, either, which surprised me.
So, I banged my head against the wall in frustration – a step I recommend you skip – and opened disk utility to see if that would help.
Disk Utility is in your Applications Folder > Utilities, but the fastest way to open it is to enter “disk utility” (or even “utilities”) in Spotlight (without the quotes). It will probably be the first thing on the list and you can just click on it.
When this window opened I selected my hard drive, clicked on Repair Permissions, and let it do its thing.
Disk Utility Window
When it finished, I restarted my computer (not required, but a good idea), and everything was back in good working order.
Screenshot Drop for TextEdit, Mail, and Stickies
TextEdit never ceases to amaze me. It appears to be such a simple little application on the surface and I always tell new users to start out with it as their word processing app of choice because it is so easy to use, but it has hidden depths.
Take screenshot drop as an example. The premise is that you want to add a screenshot to a TextEdit document you are creating to illustrate a point (or whatever). Without using this technique you would have to take a picture of your example using command + shift + 4 to get a camera image then hit the space bar to highlight the window you wanted to save, and then hit return so that a picture of the image could be taken; or use the utility Grab to do the same thing. Either procedure would give you an image that you could drag into your TextEdit document. Unless you had a reason to keep your examples, you would then have to discard them.