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 Isabel Lorenzo has been asked to sign on the dotted line. She writes:
I’ve received some electronic documents that I’m supposed to sign. I could print and sign them and mail them back, but I’ve heard there’s a way to sign them right on my Mac. Do you know how it’s done?
You have a couple of options, Isabel. If you’re running Mac OS X Lion or later, you can take advantage of Preview’s Signature feature. Alternatively, you can use Adobe Reader. We'll start with Preview.
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
Concerned parent and reader Frank Reilly seeks a way to control his kids’ device use. He writes:
My two children each have an iPod touch and they spend a lot of time with them on Facebook and Instagram. My wife and I try to keep an eye on the time they spend, but we don’t want to be police either. I’ve looked at the iPods’ restrictions but they don’t do what we want, which is to limit the hours they can use these services. Any suggestions?
At the risk of offering parenting advice, the first step is to evaluate how much time the kids are really spending and then determine the harm it’s doing. If it’s interfering with more important activities—homework, chores, exercise, and time spent with the family and friends—it’s time for The Talk. And The Talk, in this case, emphasizes that while this technology is very cool, there’s more to life than staring at a screen and interacting with virtual friends. Then try to set up a schedule where social networking is placed in the context of a recreational pursuit.
One: OS X’s Time Machine can back up a drive to any other drive physically connected to your Mac, internal or external. It can also back up to Apple’s Time Capsule—a device that is essentially an AirPort Extreme with a hard drive built in. The advantage of Time Capsule is that its drive is accessible to any Mac on your local network, allowing you to simultaneously back up multiple Macs to the same drive.
Plus one: AirPort Extreme supports adding a hard drive to its USB port. Once connected, you can enable file sharing, allowing multiple users to share data from the drive.
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 Karl Lacher is the latest to inquire about very old files that seemingly can’t be opened with a very new Mac. He writes:
Genealogy is my hobby and I have many old Microsoft Word 5 documents stored on my iMac. How can I recover the text from these files with my current copy of Microsoft Office 2011?
As you can probably judge by this article's title, this is well-worn territory. And, regrettably, the path is even less smooth than it once was. But give this a go.
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 Greg Wills is thinking of pulling the plug on some well-used gadgets before their time. He writes:
I have several old Apple remote controls—the white ones. I hear they work with today’s Apple gear but all of mine are dead. Is there anything I can do to revive them?
Sure. These things are battery operated and, while it’s not obvious, you can change those batteries.
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 Will Simpson has a comics-related question. He writes:
I’m a wannabe artist, and I have a few of my own “comics” saved as JPEG files. I’d really like to view them in a comics-reader app on my iPad, but I don’t know how to format them. Do you know?
I do. Comics apps such as Comic Zeal are compatible with a couple of DRM-free comic book file formats, namely .cbr and .cbz. Those are both compressed formats, related to RAR and ZIP files, respectively.
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 Alec Lancaster finds it too much trouble to mount a remote disk. He writes:
I’ve attached a USB hard drive to my AirPort Extreme Base Station and use it as a storage location for all the computers on my network. This is convenient but I hate having to manually mount the drive whenever I log out or restart one of my Macs. Is there a way to configure it so it automatically mounts on each Mac’s desktop?
There is. One way to do this is to open a Finder window, select your base station from the sidebar (found under the Shared setting), and mount the drive. Then launch System Preferences, select the Users & Groups preference (called Accounts in earlier versions of the Mac OS), click on the Lock icon, enter your user name and password, and click Unlock. Now click on the Login Items tab and drag the icon of the mounted drive into the list of login items. Quit System Preferences. When you next log in or restart your Mac, the drive attached to your base station should automatically mount.
