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
Faithful reader Dick Fiddler has a question regarding cordless phones and Wi-Fi interference. He writes:
I’m having interference issues with my AirPort network and cordless phone. Repositioning has helped some, but I’d like to pursue restricting the channels used by the Extreme. Unfortunately, I need a little more information to make it work. My Uniden phone says only “5.8 GHz” with nothing in the specs at all. The Airport Utility seems only to list channels without much reference to which are which. Any ideas on how to figure out which channels to use?
After researching the subject in greater depth I’m going to take the advice of my betters—and pass that advice along to you.
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 Michael Burke dutifully accepted my counsel but came up with unexpected results. He writes:
I followed your advice in How to Sign Digital Documents for capturing my signature in Preview, but it came out 90 degrees from horizontal. I would like to know why my signature came out vertical, not horizontal, and how to fix that.
I haven’t had this problem, but it’s not unknown to me. Why? It's a bug. How? Like so:
Occasionally, my 1080p Apple TV (ATV) loses interest in connecting to my local network. More specifically, if I go to the Network setting I find no IP address listed. That’s right. The IP address listing is empty. There isn’t even an invalid self-assigned (169.x.x.x) address. Not surprisingly, when this vanishing act occurs, the ATV can no longer access my iTunes Library or any of the ATV’s Internet-based services.
The Apple TV is hooked up to my network via a wired (Ethernet) connection. I had thought this would make for a more reliable connection. Apparently, not in this case.
Some quick diagnostic checks determined that the source of the problem was almost certainly the ATV itself. All the other networked devices—whether connected by Wi-Fi or Ethernet—were functioning as expected. My AirPort Base Station and Internet modem both showed all-systems-go. Even my second ATV, connected to another television, was working just fine.
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
Apparently my recent Mac 101 column on using Mountain Lion’s Calendar has unearthed a lot of questions. Reader Michael Wolfson has one about Calendar and holidays.
I was wondering if there is a way to get the holidays to show up in Calendar (on Mac and/or iPhone). It would be nice to know these things when I look at the calendar.
There is. By default Calendar doesn’t come equipped with a holiday calendar, but it’s easy to add one through calendar subscriptions. The manual way to do this is to cruise the Internet until you locate the kind of calendar you seek, copy the URL for that calendar, choose File > New Calendar Subscription, and in the sheet that appears enter the copied URL and click Subscribe.
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 Pete Curry has come thiiis close to stumping Mac 911 with a question concerning contacts and Calendar. He writes:
I read your recent Mac 101 column, Introduction to Calendar, and it reminded me to ask a question that’s been bugging me for awhile. I want to use Calendar’s Address Panel to add invitees but when I open it, it doesn’t show me my contacts. What’s happening?
Yep, Address Panel is confounding. You’re frankly better off choosing Window > Contacts and inviting people by dragging contacts from the Contacts application to the Invitees field. But here’s what’s happening.
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 Cathron Brewton, like many of us, would like to organize her old email in an efficient way. She writes:
I have many folders in Mail that I would like to move out of that application but keep for future reference. I’d like to keep them similarly organized to the way they currently are within Mail. Could you describe an efficient process for moving a hierarchy of folders (e.g. from a recently completed project) to Documents or Dropbox or Evernote or some other repository? Examples would be a home remodeling job involving multiple contractors and suppliers or a wedding with multiple vendors.
This can be done quite easily. Create a mailbox (choosing to save it to your Mac rather than iCloud) for each project and drag the appropriate messages to each one—so, your remodeling messages to a New Kitchen folder and wedding-related missives to the Here’s Your Dowry folder. Create a master folder for these folders, call it something like Archived Export, and place the project folders into it.
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 Robert Cullers, like many people, faces the bitter realities of streaming media. He writes:
You keep telling us how to use the Internet for entertainment, which results in more and more usage. I suddenly find that my provider has imposed a monthly data limit of 250GB. Three weeks into the month and I’m about 20 percent over this limit. Much of our use is streaming movies from Netflix although there are a number of other downloads like that of the entire Adobe suite. How can we more efficiently use the Internet since it may soon be impossible to download or upload many large files if these limits are rigorously enforced?
I wish I could simply reply “Use a different provider that doesn’t impose data caps” but that’s largely unrealistic if you want the kind of lightning-fast connections you can get from cable where an unmetered fiber connection isn’t available. Though not termed “monopolies” by those who should be watching over these things, that’s exactly the kind of stranglehold cable companies such as Comcast, Time-Warner, and Cox have in many markets. They each have data caps, which they claim are reasonable for all but the most extreme data hogs. But in the age of media streaming services and software distributed via download this is nonsense. The cynical suggest these companies impose caps simply to protect their media divisions.
