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 Jack Burns is a bit disconcerted by some recent news. He writes:
After reading stories about the U.S. government’s program to collect phone and Internet data I’m a little concerned about my email privacy. What can I do to encrypt my email?
I’d first suggest that you take a gander at How To Protect Your PC From PRISM Surveillance from my pals over at PCWorld. As its name implies, it offers some hints on how to attempt to make your computing life more private.
Until recently, if you visited Apple’s iTunes Movies Trailers website, you had the option either to stream trailers or download them. Further, once you selected a trailer, you had a choice of viewing resolutions topping out at 1080p. Not any more.
As of late May, Apple removed the option to download trailers. Downloading may still be available for trailers that predate the change, but not for any newly added ones. At the same time, Apple entirely eliminated 1080p trailers, even for streaming. The highest resolution is now 720p.
Options from the iTunes Movie Trailers site no longer include downloading or 1080p resolution.Read more »
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 Fran Drakes is about to embark on a new audio adventure and seeks advice. She writes:
I know you help with the podcasts at Macworld and wondered if you have any advice for producing clean audio. My friends and I want to start a podcast but after a few tests our sound isn’t very good. I hear a lot of background noise, tapping, lip smacking, and pops.
If my humble advice can make for a world filled with better sounding podcasts, I can sleep soundly tonight.
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 Claire Milton can’t be faulted for lack of effort in regard to a stubborn email message. She writes:
I use Microsoft Outlook 2011 and I have a message in my Inbox that I can’t delete. I’ve tried the Delete command and moving it to a new mailbox but it won’t budge. What should I do?
I’ve had similarly intractable messages and, like you, I’ve found no solution within Outlook. However, after turning to the web I found a solution from one talkingmoose on GitHub that did the trick. It involves AppleScript, but it’s easily done.
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 you can imagine, I get questions. Lots of questions. And many times the answers to those questions are shorter than the queries themselves, making them poor fodder for a readership that feels cheated by anything less that bushel-loads of consonants and vowels by the peck. And so I horde these questions and, once enough have accumulated, drop them with a thump. Like so:
iTunes and 5.1 sound
I have a Mac mini plugged into an AV receiver via an HDMI cable. Some of the movies I have in my iTunes library are encoded to play 5.1 audio, but the sound always seems to come out in stereo. Is there any way to make it default to surround sound?
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 Katz wonders just how safe the data on his Mac is. He writes:
If my computer is lost or stolen—or a person in my office or home just wants to do some digging—can someone log in using their user name (or pull the hard drive and mount it on another Mac) and somehow read my contacts, calendar and email messages by scanning my hard drive?
I’m not sharing any deep dark secrets by telling you that this can be easily done. If someone has physical access to your computer and its hard drive (and time to carry out their nefarious snooping) it’s all over. They can simply mount your computer’s hard drive as an external storage device, log into their computer with a root account, and then rummage freely through your stuff. Any normal protections that were in place will be defeated by their root powers.
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 Ron Sharp has a question that continues to puzzle some Mac users. He writes:
I have an older Mac on a local network that is still using Snow Leopard—so it’s incompatible with iCloud. How can I share calendars between it and my other Mac running Mountain Lion?
This was a popular subject when Mac OS X Lion (10.7) first shipped, as Apple drew a firm line between the new and old ways in regard to data sharing. MobileMe was out and iCloud was in. At that time there were a couple of sneaky ways to make Snow Leopard’s iCal work with iCloud. Allow me to report that I’ve wasted plenty of my time so that you needn’t waste yours. These schemes are broken and it’s very unlikely Apple is going to do anything to make iCloud compatible with Snow Leopard.
