Archives for August 2011

Over the past 10 years, the two main problems I’ve had with Mac hardware are disk drives and motherboards. Three Mac motherboards croaked in Macs from 2001 to 2006 and none since. In that same time span, three Mac hard disk drives have died. In the case of the failed hard disk drives, each … Read More »

Apple seems to be torn in two directions. Small screens. Large screens. On the small screen side, there’s the popular MacBook Air models (not to mention iPhone and iPad screens). On the large screen side, there’s the highly popular 27-inch iMac, and the 17-inch MacBook Pro. The larger the screen, the more the need … Read More »

A few years ago the rage in online photos was images with a reflection on the bottom, as if the photo was standing free, but on a glassy surface. Those days are gone. Today, it’s adding color to a black and white photo. The easy way is to start with a color photo first. … Read More »

Some things in life are meant to be. Macs are beautiful. PCs are not. iPhones are beautiful. Android phones? Not so much. With the world moving quickly to the cloud, and Apple’s iCloud service set to rule the digital cumulus, stratus, cirrus, and nimbus of Macs and PCs, let me explain why it’s a … Read More »

When an earthquake strikes, can you feel the earth move under your feet? That depends on how sensitive you are, how strong the quake is, how much everything shakes, and whether or not your Mac is a seismograph. Shake Your Mac Booty Recent MacBook models come with a few built-in features that we don’t … Read More »

My day job has me managing many dozens of commercial web sites scattered around the country. That means multiple web servers. That means I need some way to know when a site has changed or a server has gone offline. One of the best apps that checks web site automatically is also free. Free … Read More »

You still use the Finder? Apple’s aging interface for file management gets a facelift every now and again, but it’s the same old Finder. And it’s the place where many Mac users spend their time. Here’s a way to make your Finder efforts a little easier. Finder Is, As Finder Does The Finder has … Read More »

Do you back up your Mac? Please. I preach because I care. Horror stories abound of Mac users who start up their Macs only to have nothing happen. Another wonky hard disk drive has died. There are dozens of ways to back up a Mac. Here’s another good one. It’s Déjà Vu All Over … Read More »

The Dock on your Mac is a launcher. Ditto for the new Launchpad in Mac OS X Lion. That brings the app launcher from iPhone and iPad to the Mac. Some Mac users swear by Spotlight as a launcher (good for hands that never leave the keyboard). Others prefer Quicksilver or DragThing. The former … Read More »

If you have a digital camera, then you’ve run into the auto focus problem when taking photos. The auto focus focuses but the final focus when the camera takes the picture is slightly out of focus. I’ve had a dozen digital cameras through the years and they all have that same focus problem. Here’s … Read More »

Last week my wife asked me if there was a way we could fax something on the Mac. Fax. How quaint. Do people still fax documents back and forth? Didn’t email and PDF’s kill faxing? Can you still buy a fax machine? In answer to her question, I mumbled something about once having a … Read More »

For reasons too detailed to go into, I collect Mac video screen capture tools. Some are expensive and loaded with every video and audio tool you can imagine. Others are elegant, quickly useful, and inexpensive one-trick-ponies. This is the story of one of the best ever, if it were not for a single deadly … Read More »

One of my favorite, built-in Mac OS X functions is zoom. When set up correctly, click the Control key, and scroll up to zoom in, and scroll down to zoom back out again. The only negative is that it zooms the whole screen rather than, say, a photo on a web page. For that, … Read More »

The first time I saw a web page was back in the early 1990s. Hypertext, meet Hypermedia. The first thing I thought was, “Well, this is just like HyperCard.” Apple’s legendary HyperCard died a slow, lingering, nostalgia-laden death in the early 21st century, leaving behind millions of users who cut their computing teeth on … Read More »

That’s a good question. It ranges from all freakin’ day, to a few hours. Which apps do you spend the most time on? That’s more difficult to determine. For many of us it’ll be email, or the browser, or Microsoft Office apps, and so on. How do you know for sure which apps get … Read More »

Legalities aside, there are many legitimate and legal reasons to rip DVDs to your Mac. Most Macs these days are notebooks. Carrying a stack of DVDs to play movies on our Macs while we’re on the road is a painful, battery-draining experience. Is there a better way? How about an app that rips? Ripping … Read More »

Let your paranoia get the best of you. Sooner or later, when you least expect it, your Mac’s hard disk drive will fail. What’s your backup plan? Time Machine? You need more than that if you want to get your Mac up and running quickly. If your photos, music, documents, and movies are valuable … Read More »

According to someone, the year 2012 will be a disastrous doomsday for the world. Somehow that’s based upon the Mayan calendar, which everyone knows, does not have a Labor Day or Valentine’s Day. Mayan calendar? How is that calendar different from the one most of us use? There’s a Mac app that knows, and … Read More »

Every new Mac gets my time honored treatment—a number of steps that I walk through to set preferences, install specific apps, to get my new machine ready for human use. Like most Mac users with a new toy, I’ll set System Preferences the way I prefer, update iLife and iWork to the latest versions, … Read More »

Are you a paranoid Mac user? Do you worry that important files on your Mac could be, uh, retrieved, by others (hackers, friends, or enemies)? As they say, only the paranoid survive. Whether that’s true or not, I won’t judge, but if you’re worried about how to truly delete incriminating files from your Mac, … Read More »