Working Late on Your Mac? Turn on Night Shift to Help Your Sleep

A woman with dark skin and long hair, wearing a white shirt and black jacket. Background is dark and her face is lit up by the light of a computer screen.

Research suggests that exposure to blue light fools your body into thinking it’s daytime, making it harder to fall asleep if you work late on a Mac with a bright white (which has a lot of blue light) screen. To help, a macOS feature called Night Shift subtly changes the colors of the screen as the sun sets to reduce the amount of blue light hitting your eyes. Read More from “Working Late on Your Mac? Turn on Night Shift to Help Your Sleep”

How to Make Productive Use of Generative AI Chatbots and Artbots

AI-generated image showing a side view of a laptop with hands typing on it and a robotic hand coming out of the screen. Image has a blue hue to it.

Artificial intelligence dominates the tech news these days, but it’s hard to separate the hype from the reality. Every large company seems to have some major AI initiative in the works. Even Apple, which tends to stick to its own path, has started to tout features previously described as relying on “machine learning” as being “AI.” If you can get past the hype, AI has plenty of good uses now. Read More from “How to Make Productive Use of Generative AI Chatbots and Artbots”

How to Disable Time Machine

Disable Time Machine

Have you recently migrated to a new Mac while continuing to use your older Mac occasionally? If so, you might continue to backup your new Mac using Time Machine, but you might not need to backup your older Mac any longer. Here are instructions on how to disable Time Machine on a Mac running macOS 12 Monterey or newer. If your Mac is running an older version of the Mac operating system (macOS) see the section below.

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Tame the Tangle! Quick Cable Management Tips

A jumbled mess of wires and cables seen from behind a monitor and computer box.

Take a moment and look behind your Mac. Do you see a tangle of cables? The main downside of a mess of cables is that it’s a cluster of chaos that attracts dust bunnies. However, it’s possible for power cables—especially when tightly bundled or looped—to emit electromagnetic interference that can disrupt or degrade the signal carried by nearby data or network cables. They can also heat up, which is generally best avoided. Read More from “Tame the Tangle! Quick Cable Management Tips”

At WWDC, Apple Unveils Apple Intelligence and Previews New OS Features

Screenshot from Apple Keynote featuring Craig Federighi and an array of images with features of Apple Intelligence

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote was a lightning-fast (even in the full 1:44-long video—or try the 3-minute recap) look at what Apple is bringing to the software side of the Apple experience in the next year. Although some past keynotes have introduced hardware like new Macs and the Vision Pro, this year’s keynote stuck to new operating system features before previewing a suite of AI features collected under the umbrella term “Apple Intelligence.” Read More from “At WWDC, Apple Unveils Apple Intelligence and Previews New OS Features”

Monitor Recommendations

Monitor with laptop

Would you like some guidance on selecting a new monitor? Clients often ask me to recommend a good monitor or tell them which monitor they should buy. These requests are actually surprisingly difficult for two reasons. First, there are numerous monitor manufacturers and each company makes a range of models so it’s tough to track the entire market. Second, people’s individual needs vary. Consequently, rather than recommend one or two particular monitors, I often start by outlining the range of monitor features to help people select an appropriate monitor for their needs.

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Select Non-Contiguous Text in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers 14

Window of a Pages document with lorum ipsom text. Every other paragraph is selected.

The latest versions of the Mac and iPad apps in Apple’s iWork suite—Pages 14, Keynote 14, and Numbers 14—have gained a helpful feature: non-contiguous text selection. By holding down the Command key, you can select chunks of text that aren’t next to each other. For example, imagine you want to make the first part of each item in a bullet list bold. Instead of bolding each one separately, hold down Command as you work to select all of them and then apply bold to the entire selection with a single command. Non-contiguous selection is particularly helpful when applying formatting, but you can also copy non-contiguously selected text or work with it in nearly any way you would interact with a contiguous text selection. (Note that while holding down Command, you can double-click to select words or triple-click to select paragraphs, just as you can normally without holding down Command.)

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Social Media: A new feature in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers lets you select bits of text that aren’t next to each other so that you can, for example, format them or copy them all at once.

Display an Album of Photos on Your iPhone or iPad Lock Screen

screenshots of three iPhones side by side. All show the time 11:57. The first background is above a canyon with trees below. The second is of a hot air balloon shown behind some trees. The third is of footprints on a sandy beach.

A popular feature of iOS 16 was the Photo Shuffle option for customizing the iPhone Lock Screen. It used machine learning to select photos in four categories—People, Pets, Nature, and Cities—and rotated through them when you tapped, on lock, hourly, or daily. If you didn’t like the automatic selection, you could pick photos manually, but it was clumsy. In iOS 17 (and iPadOS 17, which also added customizable Lock Screens), you can now point the Lock Screen’s Photo Shuffle wallpaper at an album. Touch and hold the Lock Screen, tap Customize, tap the blue ⨁ button to create a new wallpaper, select Photo Shuffle, select Album, choose the desired album from the pop-up menu, set a frequency, tap Use Album, and tap the Add button at the top. Then tap Set as Wallpaper Pair or Customize Home Screen to choose a different image for the Home Screen wallpaper. Read More from “Display an Album of Photos on Your iPhone or iPad Lock Screen”

Where Can You Control Automatic Smart Quotes and Dashes in macOS?

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Most people like smart quotes and dashes, at least most of the time. Your Mac is probably set up to turn the single (‘) and double (“) hash marks and double hyphens (–) that you type into the apostrophes (’) and single smart quotes (‘’), double smart quotes (“”), and em dashes (—) used in professional publications. However, in some situations, like programming, smart quotes and dashes are problematic. Read More from “Where Can You Control Automatic Smart Quotes and Dashes in macOS?”

How to Display the Battery Percentage in Your Mac’s Menu Bar

Picture of the top right corner of a Mac computer screen with several icons in the menubar, including the battery indicator with a percentage.

By default, the battery icon in your Mac laptop’s menu bar shows how full your battery is. Clicking it reveals the exact percentage, but you can also set macOS to display the battery percentage next to the icon. The setting isn’t where you might expect in System Settings > Battery. Instead, you’ll find it in System Settings > Control Center, where you need to turn on both “Show in Menu Bar” and “Show Percentage.” Read More from “How to Display the Battery Percentage in Your Mac’s Menu Bar”

Apple’s iCloud Keychain Password Management Is All Many People Need

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Apple’s iCloud Keychain Password Management Is All Many People Need

We constantly recommend using a password manager like 1Password, BitWarden, or Dashlane. But many people resist committing to yet another app or paying for yet another service. Isn’t Apple’s built-in iCloud Keychain password management good enough? Read More from “Apple’s iCloud Keychain Password Management Is All Many People Need”

Did You Know Most Mac Apps Keep Versions of Your Documents as You Work?

Screenshot of a document on the left and a stacked series of the same document from previous saved versions on the right

We all make mistakes, which is why Undo exists. Immediately choose Edit > Undo or press Command-Z to undo your last change. Most Mac apps support multiple levels of Undo, so you can keep pressing Command-Z to revert change after change. However, suppose you delete a table in your Pages document, but 30 minutes and many changes later, you decide you want it back. Undo won’t help because you want to keep all the other interim changes, and Time Machine backups may not help because a backup may not have occurred at the right time. Read More from “Did You Know Most Mac Apps Keep Versions of Your Documents as You Work?”

Apple Introduces New iPad Air, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil Pro, and Magic Keyboard

person leaned over an iPad using an Apple Pencil to draw.

After no new iPads throughout 2023, Apple has unveiled new 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Air and iPad Pro models, plus a more capable Apple Pencil Pro and a redesigned Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. The company also refined the iPad lineup by dropping the ninth-generation iPad and reducing the price of the tenth-generation iPad to $349. Read More from “Apple Introduces New iPad Air, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil Pro, and Magic Keyboard”

Audit Your Trusted Device Lists for Greater Security

MANAGE YOUR RISK written in foreground with yellow highlighter behind it. Behind that is a blurred image of a person in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie with hand outstretched holding the highlighter.

One of the ways companies protect critical account information is by remembering the devices you use to log in as “trusted devices” or “authorized devices.” Those logins will usually have been protected by two-factor authentication or another mechanism that guarantees the device is being used by you, its owner. Subsequent logins from those devices may be more convenient for you due to requiring only a username and password, and trusted devices may automatically receive two-factor authentication codes. That’s how Apple ensures you are who you say you are when you log in to your Apple ID on a previously unseen device. Read More from “Audit Your Trusted Device Lists for Greater Security”