Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Apparently my recent Mac 101 column on using Mountain Lion’s Calendar has unearthed a lot of questions. Reader Michael Wolfson has one about Calendar and holidays.
I was wondering if there is a way to get the holidays to show up in Calendar (on Mac and/or iPhone). It would be nice to know these things when I look at the calendar.
There is. By default Calendar doesn’t come equipped with a holiday calendar, but it’s easy to add one through calendar subscriptions. The manual way to do this is to cruise the Internet until you locate the kind of calendar you seek, copy the URL for that calendar, choose File > New Calendar Subscription, and in the sheet that appears enter the copied URL and click Subscribe.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Pete Curry has come thiiis close to stumping Mac 911 with a question concerning contacts and Calendar. He writes:
I read your recent Mac 101 column, Introduction to Calendar, and it reminded me to ask a question that’s been bugging me for awhile. I want to use Calendar’s Address Panel to add invitees but when I open it, it doesn’t show me my contacts. What’s happening?
Yep, Address Panel is confounding. You’re frankly better off choosing Window > Contacts and inviting people by dragging contacts from the Contacts application to the Invitees field. But here’s what’s happening.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Cathron Brewton, like many of us, would like to organize her old email in an efficient way. She writes:
I have many folders in Mail that I would like to move out of that application but keep for future reference. I’d like to keep them similarly organized to the way they currently are within Mail. Could you describe an efficient process for moving a hierarchy of folders (e.g. from a recently completed project) to Documents or Dropbox or Evernote or some other repository? Examples would be a home remodeling job involving multiple contractors and suppliers or a wedding with multiple vendors.
This can be done quite easily. Create a mailbox (choosing to save it to your Mac rather than iCloud) for each project and drag the appropriate messages to each one—so, your remodeling messages to a New Kitchen folder and wedding-related missives to the Here’s Your Dowry folder. Create a master folder for these folders, call it something like Archived Export, and place the project folders into it.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Robert Cullers, like many people, faces the bitter realities of streaming media. He writes:
You keep telling us how to use the Internet for entertainment, which results in more and more usage. I suddenly find that my provider has imposed a monthly data limit of 250GB. Three weeks into the month and I’m about 20 percent over this limit. Much of our use is streaming movies from Netflix although there are a number of other downloads like that of the entire Adobe suite. How can we more efficiently use the Internet since it may soon be impossible to download or upload many large files if these limits are rigorously enforced?
I wish I could simply reply “Use a different provider that doesn’t impose data caps” but that’s largely unrealistic if you want the kind of lightning-fast connections you can get from cable where an unmetered fiber connection isn’t available. Though not termed “monopolies” by those who should be watching over these things, that’s exactly the kind of stranglehold cable companies such as Comcast, Time-Warner, and Cox have in many markets. They each have data caps, which they claim are reasonable for all but the most extreme data hogs. But in the age of media streaming services and software distributed via download this is nonsense. The cynical suggest these companies impose caps simply to protect their media divisions.
Do you use third-party Mac applications to access video or photo files? If you are using versions of these apps obtained from the Mac App Store, have the apps been crashing lately, often on launch? If so, here’s what’s likely going on:
Numerous video-related software packages, such as Flip4Mac Windows Media player and CamTwist Studio, are either comprised almost entirely of QuickTime components or install QuickTime components as part of a larger application. If you have any QuickTime components installed, you’ll generally find them in the /Library/QuickTime or ~/Library/QuickTime folders.
These components don’t work only with QuickTime itself, but may similarly interact with other video- and photo-related third-party software. And here’s where the app-crashing problems usually crop up. These crashes have been especially a bother for Boinx software, the maker of several popular video-based programs, such as iStopMotion and FotoMagico. Boinx claims this QuickTime component conflict is the cause of a “significant portion of the crashes reported with the sandboxed versions of FotoMagico and iStopMotion.” After some detective work, Boinx determined precisely why this was happening.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader David d’Angelo has a camcorder and Mac, but can’t make a desired connection between the two. He writes:
I read your recent article about Skype and a crashing camcorder and it reminded me of a problem that’s frustrated me for awhile. Like that reader, I have a FireWire DV camcorder that works great with some video applications, but I can’t make it work with Google Hangout. Any ideas?
After reading your question I gave the setup a try with my Sony DV camcorder, and you’re right. Google Hangout tells me that no such camera is connected even though Skype and Messages sees it. Given that, I’ll lay the blame at the feet of the plug-in necessary to use video in a Google Hangout.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Reader Walt Czeka’s iPad has suddenly turned a blind eye to his local network. He writes:
After using my iPad for a short time this morning it suddenly wouldn’t recognize my AirPort network, even after I switched it off and on. I picked up my iPhone and it sees the network perfectly well so I don’t think it’s a network problem. What should I do?
There are a variety of things you can try and they work with any router. The first (and the one most likely to meet with success) is to shut off your iPad, pull the power plug on your AirPort base station to power it down, wait half a minute or so, plug the base station back in, wait for its green light to shine, and then switch on the iPad. This can clear out some funk in the routing portion of the base station, which allows your iPad’s network connection to return.
