The apps that run on your Mac or iPhone/iPad.
Has your Mac suddenly become slow or started having trouble doing the usual daily tasks? If so, you might have some accidentally installed app that isn’t helpful to your Mac. Not all of these apps are malicious, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll call them malware here. Malware behavior ranges anywhere from giving annoying pop … Read more
Have you ever received a warning that your email account is almost full? If so, here are instructions on how to learn which folders (aka mailboxes) in your email account are taking up space. Once you know which folders are taking up space, you can target these folders for cleanup. You can either move the … Read more
Have you noticed that Safari version 8, that comes with OS X Yosemite, no longer shows the full website address in the address field at the top of its window? For example, if you visit https://soundsupport.biz/ and then click on a link to visit some page within my website, Safari will only display soundsupport.biz in the address … Read more
Would you like to schedule emails to be sent in the future? You can by installing Feingeist’s SendLater plugin (see update below) for Apple’s Mail application. Once installed SendLater adds a button in Mail. Cleverly, the button’s name is Send Later! When you click this button you’ll see the window pictured below.
Read moreIf you have a relatively new Mac running OS X Yosemite (OS X version 10.10) and an iPhone running iOS 8 you may have noticed that your Mac rings when you receive a call on your iPhone and the two devices are close to each other. This feature is part of Continuity, which is a … Read more
Do you miss how Labels used to work? Do you miss having colorful shortcuts in your Sidebar? If so, then consider using XtraFinder. Starting with OS X Mavericks (OS X 10.9) Apple changed how Labels work. In fact, they renamed the feature from Labels to Tags. Labels used to add a background color to a … Read more
Is your web browser acting oddly all of the sudden? Do funny windows pop-up showing you ads? Do your Google searches look weird? If so, you might have inadvertently installed some adware on your Mac. Starting in late 2014 I noticed a rash of Macs infected with adware. Adware is software that makes ads pop-up … Read more
Do you struggle to stay on top of the high volume of email messages that arrive in your Inbox every day? Many people struggle with this, including me. Here are some suggestions on how you can start to tame your Inbox. You don’t need to implement all of these suggestions. Instead, just pick a few that … Read more
Do you use either Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Entourage as your email application? Do you store thousands and thousands of email messages? Do you infrequently access many of these messages? If so, you could consider archiving these messages. Once the message has been archived then you can delete them from Outlook which will remove them from … Read more
Did you know that Apple’s built-in search tool called Spotlight doesn’t search the entire hard drive? There are good reasons why Apple does this (which I won’t go into now), but there are also times when you want to be able to search the entire hard drive. When I’m troubleshooting a problem on a client’s … Read more
Are you retiring an older Mac that has a mechanical, spinning hard drive and its running macOS version 10.7 or higher? If so, here are instructions on how you can securely erase the Mac’s hard drive before you donate your Mac or sell it.
Read moreHere are instructions on how to rename your iPhone or iPad. The names of these devices are often copied from one device to the next so it’s possible that your new iPhone 6 might still be named Tim’s iPhone 4, for example. You don’t want that!
Read moreDo you use Gmail? When you click an email link on a web site does Apple Mail or some other email client open? If so, you should follow these instructions to make Gmail your default email client. I’ve provided instructions for the 3 most widely used web browsers: Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Follow the instructions … Read more
Below are instructions on how to change your OS X user account picture. When you took your new Mac out of the box and turned it on initially, you were lead through creating a user account and either had one of the built-in photos randomly assigned to your User Account or you were offered the choice of … Read more
A few weeks ago Apple released an update which addresses the bash security vulnerability found in OS X during the last week of September 2014. The security vulnerability was nicknamed shellshock or the bash bug and reportedly affects all versions of OS X as well as many versions of Linux and Unix released over the past … Read more
When you reset or change your email account password, you have to enter the new password in two places in your email account configurations in Mail. The first place is in the incoming mail settings. The second place is in the outgoing (SMTP) mail settings. Locating these outgoing settings is not obvious, so I’m frequently asked how … Read more
I use iText Express as my everyday word processor. I know that Microsoft Word is the defacto standard and Apple’s Pages is a common alternative. I own both and use Pages when I want to easily mix text and graphics to create a newsletter or flyer, but I find that iText Express meets my everyday writing … Read more
Do you have thousands of email messages in your Inbox or Sent folder? If so, read on to learn how this can cause problems as well as better ways to organize your messages. Recently, I’ve had a string of users who have been negatively impacted since they’ve had over 10,000 messages in either their Inbox or Sent mail … Read more
Did your new Mac come without a built-in CD/DVD drive? If you have an older Mac you can use a feature called Remote Disk to share the older Mac’s CD/DVD drive with your newer Mac. Here are instructions on how to set up that feature:
Read moreI’m able to provide remote support for my clients. In order to remotely connect to a Mac, it needs to be on and awake. Here are instructions on how to configure your Mac to never sleep. The instructions vary based on the processor in your Mac. To determine the processor, follow steps 1 and 2 below.
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