Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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.
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Reader Mary Andrews finds fault with Safari’s Bookmarks Bar. She writes:
I recently purchased a 27-inch iMac and while I love it, I find some text on it small. In particular, Safari’s Bookmarks Bar is very hard for me to read. Is there anything I can do to increase its size?
I’m afraid not. I’ve searched the Web for an extension that increases its size and I’ve come up empty. You can, of course, change the resolution of your iMac within the Displays system preference so that everything on the screen is larger, but you’ll find objects less crisp. Another option is to open the Accessibility system preference, enable the Use Scroll Gesture With Modifier Keys to Zoom option, and then hold down the Control key while using the mouse wheel (or two finger upward swipe on a trackpad) to temporarily zoom your display in and out.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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 Pinkston has family abroad that he’d like to chat with via FaceTime. He writes:
I’m a casual user of FaceTime, and it seems to work well most of the time. However, I’ve just noticed that I can’t establish a FaceTime connection with my daughter who’s traveling in the United Arab Emirates. She has her iPhone 4 with her, and we’ve been successful with FaceTime sessions using this gear here in the U.S. Can you shed some light on what’s going on and how to get FaceTime working for us?
The UAE’s Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRA) restricts access to portions of the web as well as person-to-person video communication such as Apple’s FaceTime. This is not controlled on the handset but rather via the country’s carriers. Any IP address originating in the UAE is subject to this censorship, which explains why you can’t establish the connection with your daughter.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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 Andy Jensen likes his web browsing to be distraction free. He writes:
Lately I’ve visited a few web sites that automatically display and play videos. I find this really distracting when I’m trying to read the article I came to see. Other than clicking the Stop button on each of these things, is there some way to disable them?
I’m with you. I can ignore flashing elements and pictures that change from time to time, but once you introduce audio, you’ve crossed the line. If it’s the audio element that’s the most distracting, you can just punch your Mac’s Mute button. I often do that when trying to watch a YouTube video and an ad is forced on me before I can see the content I’m interested in.
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Ted Landau Senior Contributor, Macworld
Apple’s latest updates to its MacBook Air laptops have been getting rave reviews for their incredible battery life: the 13-inch model clocks more than 12 hours on a single charge. Unfortunately, these new Airs have also been getting some unwanted attention for a potential Internet connection failure. In particular, numerous users report that their Internet connection drops out within minutes of them getting online. A bit surprisingly, this occurs even though the computer’s Wi-Fi connection still shows a normal strong signal.
I first became aware of this matter via a Gizmodo article that provocatively asked: “Is Your New MacBook Air’s Wi-Fi Crappy?” The article claims that “a couple of thousand disenfranchised Apple customers seem to have descended on the Apple Support Forums.” Given that there were less than 150 posts in the cited Support Communities thread, Gizmodo’s claim of “a couple of thousand” complaints seems to be a significant exaggeration. Still, as there are likely many affected users who have not posted their dismay online, the claim is probably true in the larger sense.
Although the new models support 802.11ac Wi-Fi, the problem happens primarily, if not entirely, with older connection technologies. More precisely, the dropped connections appear to occur most often with third-party routers as opposed to Apple AirPort routers, especially routers that are too old to have even 802.11n support. This means that if you take your Air to a Genius Bar at an Apple Store, the Air will likely work fine (as many people have confirmed). This, in turn, means that the Genius will most likely conclude that the problem is in software rather than with the Air’s hardware. However, in my view, a hardware cause remains a possibility; it may be one that only gets triggered when connected to certain types of routers.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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 prefers to remain anonymous has some movies that he’d like to turn into an entirely different kind of media file. He writes:
I have some MPEG-4 music video files and all I want to do is lift the soundtrack from them and burn that music to CD. What’s the secret?
There are many secrets to this one. Allow me to run down a few of them that are built into the current Mac OS and Apple applications you likely have on your computer.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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 wishes to remain anonymous is curious about the structure of DVDs. He or she writes:
A friend has a DVD that he needs to turn into a QuickTime movie. He’s used a program that copies the contents of the DVD to a folder on his Mac. Inside this folder are VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders. The audio folder is empty, though. Does that mean that the converted movie won’t have audio?
No, it doesn’t. The original DVD standard didn’t include an AUDIO_TS folder. All content was intended to be found within the VIDEO_TS folder. (In case you’re curious, the TS stands for title set.) This includes video as well as the audio that accompanies that video.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
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 Andrew Ainsbury can’t seem to wait for the future. He writes:
I watched Apple’s WWDC keynote address the other day and loved the idea of adding tags to my files. Is there a way I can do something similar with Mountain Lion?
Sort of. A large part of what’s going on here is that you’re adding a keyword to a file, which you can then use to catalog your data. There are a couple of ways to do something similar in your current version of OS X.
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