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
A reader who doesn’t wish to provide his name (for reasons that soon will become apparent) has a problem with office etiquette. He writes:
My company has a few different divisions and each division has its own group email list that includes everyone within that division. There’s also a company-wide address. The problem is that every so often we hire a new person or the company softball teams wins a game and these group addresses are used to send out strings of “Welcome” or “Woo-hoo!!!” messages and the endless replies from these things bombard my inbox. I find this really distracting. Any way to stop it?
I’m big on education as a means for short-circuiting problems like these. If you can find a way to politely inform the company’s employees that their email client has both Reply and Reply All buttons and (explain the difference between them and how annoying this kind of public backslapping can be), I’d consider that a good first step.
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 Dave Eng can’t seem to broadcast his mug over the Internet. He writes:
Every so often I use Skype for multi-participant video conferences and when I do, I use my FireWire DV camcorder rather than my Mac’s built-in camera. I launched Skype the other day and it immediately crashed when I switched on my camera. I restarted my Mac, reinstalled Skype, but the same thing happened every time. What’s going on?
The current version of Skype (at least as I write this) has a bug that causes it to explode (okay, without the fire, smoke, and noise) when you connect a FireWire camcorder to your Mac and switch it on. The folks at Skype are aware of the issue but the most recent updates haven’t fixed the problem.
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 Kenneth Walsh's Mac has gone strangely quiet. He writes:
I woke my MacBook Pro from sleep today and when I tried to play an iTunes track the Mac made no sound. I then noticed that the sound icon in the menu bar was gray. I went to the Sound system preference and it showed Digital Out in the output area and no listing for the Mac’s internal speakers. What the heck?
The background on the issue is that there’s a small sensor switch inside the headphone port. When you insert a headphone jack, the sensor understands what's what and changes the sound output setting to Headphones. If you insert a jack for digital audio output, the device changes to Digital Out. When you remove the jack completely, it should read Internal Speakers.
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 Matthew Rotter asks a common question about Apple’s Mail. He writes:
Can you send email to multiple email addresses listed under a single contact’s name?
Pardon me if I assume that what you really mean is whether it’s possible to easily add to an email messages multiple address from a single contact. And the answer is, not really. Regardless of the solution you settle on, it requires a bit of futzing. Now, let’s go over those solutions.
The other day, someone I know very well (I shall not reveal his identity) called me for some emergency tech support. He had been importing photos from his iPhone to iPhoto on his Mac. A lot of photos. Just over a thousand photos, to be precise. After the import had apparently completed, a message popped up stating that the original photos were being deleted from the iPhone. During this process, iPhoto crashed.
Upon relaunch, all of the supposedly just imported photos were MIA. The photos were similarly gone from the iPhone. Over a thousand pictures, spanning more than 18 months — potentially up in smoke. Time to panic.
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 Simon Hansen finds his Mac slow to do his bidding. He writes:
My Mac has been running very slowly lately and I wanted to see how much faster it would be if I disabled its startup items. But when I try to start up in Safe Mode, it shows the progress bar, but that bar never fills up and my Mac doesn’t boot. What’s going on?
For the benefit of readers who are unfamiliar with Safe Mode (also known as Safe Boot mode), let’s back up and explain how to access Safe Mode and exactly what it is.
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
Macworld forum visitor lobsta43 has a question that follows up on my recent Mac 101 column regarding Parental Controls. The crustacean writes:
I use Parental Controls with my grandkids and it works well. The problem is that when they walk away from the Mac the clock keeps ticking on their time limit. Is there some way for them to stop the clock?
Yes. When you’ve configured a time limit based on the amount of time that the Mac can be used over the course of a day (from half-an-hour to eight hours) the clock can be stopped by logging out of the controlled account. So, simply instruct the grandkids to choose Log Out from the Apple menu when they want to go off and do something else. The Mac will switch to the login screen and the ticking timer stops.
