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
As I clack out these words, Christmas is just a day away, and many of you are (or soon will be) nestled comfortably in the embracing bosom of your family and friends. May I suggest that rather than tossing another pair of wooly socks or reindeer-themed undergarments at these folks you instead share some of the technology skills you’ve acquired over the years?
If you’re reading these words, it’s highly likely that you’re the geek of the family. When a sister’s, brother’s, mother’s, father’s, second cousin’s Mac, iOS device, wireless router, or printer goes bad, it’s you who are called in as the first responder. Given your expertise, now would be the perfect time to give of yourself and, while visiting family, take a turn through their technology. That includes:
Update their stuff: Fire up their copy of the Mac App Store (or Software Update if they’re using an older version of the Mac OS) and see what’s on offer. More often than not, your loved ones haven’t a clue about what a software update contains and so they ignore it. You be the judge of what is and isn’t worth updating. When doing this arm yourself with the Mac’s administrator’s password, run Software Update, and see what’s waiting. Install those updates that matter (particularly security updates).
Sometimes, you can’t win. The very thing you do to prevent potential trouble winds up causing you grief instead. Such was the case for me in today’s episode of Bugs & Fixes. It’s a story that also features a surprise ending.
Whenever I leave on a trip, I turn off almost all the equipment in my office. Computers, printers, scanners, and most other peripherals… they all get powered down.
The main reason for doing this is to save energy. I see no need to run all of my computer equipment 24 hours a day while no one is home to use it. Yes, this means I won’t be able to use the remote software on my iPad to check in with my Mac, but I almost never need to do this anyway.
Dan has been writing about all things Apple since 2006, when he first started contributing to the MacUser blog. Since then he's covered most of the company's major product releases and reviewed every major revision of iOS. In his "copious" free time, he's usually grinding away on a novel or two. More by Dan Moren
Mountain Lion’s new Mail VIP feature is among my favorite improvements of the update; it gives me just the right amount of control over notifications and filtering to make sure I see what I need to and don’t get overwhelmed by an email deluge. But shortly after upgrading I noticed a peculiarity: Sometimes, Mountain Lion would pop up two notifications for the same message—the first segueing directly into a second.
I realize that these contacts are Very Important—after all, that’s the way I marked them. But I couldn’t help but think that one notification of their email would still be plenty, no matter their importance.
I let it go for a while, hoping it would work itself out, but after several months my patience wore thin. After doing some research, I discovered that Mail and Mountain Lion aren’t the only culprits here, though they have their parts to play.
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 Daniel Gilbert seeks to make better use of Dropbox. He writes:
Because I travel fairly often, I’m trying to make my Mac’s important documents available to me regardless of where I am. And I think I’ve settled on Dropbox being the way to do that. The problem is that I often forget to save these files to my Dropbox folder. Can you suggest any ways to make saving files to Dropbox easier?
I’d be happy to. Let’s start with files from the Finder.
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 Evan Marcus is interested in getting into the podcast business. He writes:
I’m going to start a podcast and have a question. I notice that some podcasts have chapters and others don’t. I’d like to add chapters to mine so that people listening can quickly move between chapters. How do I create chapters?
First, good on you for wanting to add chapters. We’ve offered the Macworld Podcast for years as an enhanced podcast (the name for podcasts that include chapter marks and artwork) because we want to give listeners the freedom to bounce between segments. Asking your audience to scrub through a single long audio file when a podcast offers discrete segments is, in my view, unnecessarily burdensome.
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 Ian Brazzi finds Back to My Mac’s performance inconsistent. He writes:
At one time, Back to My Mac worked well for me. But in the last year or so, I find it rarely works when I’m on the road. Any reason why?
I’ve had the same experience. And, at least in my case, one reason it didn't work is because I hadn't set up my base station correctly.
iTunes 11 arrived on the final day of November, barely in time to meet Apple’s self-imposed November deadline for availability of the update. Actually, Apple had originally announced an October release but delayed the launch due to “engineering issues.”
Whatever Apple needed to fix, it appears to have done the job. While there are bugs in iTunes 11 (as there are in virtually every piece of software), they appear to few in number and relatively minor—especially when you consider that iTunes 11 is a major redesign stuffed with new features and interface changes. At least that was the impression I had after browsing through Apple’s Support Communities iTunes threads in search of user complaints.
The biggest complaints regarding iTunes 11 were not about what wasn’t working. Rather, they were about what was no longer there—desirable features in iTunes 10 that are MIA in iTunes 11.
