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.
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
Attentive reader Sarah Wagner wants more from her Kindle. She writes:
I watched your video on syncing books to Kindle devices and apps and thought it was helpful. But I’d like to sync documents other than ebook files. Is that possible?
It is indeed. In that video I showed you that with the free Send to Kindle application on your Mac you can upload Kindle-compatible ebook files to your Kindle. But the Kindle platform supports more than just these files. Also supported are Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), HTML (.html, .htm), RTF (.rtf), JPEG (.jpeg, .jpg), Kindle Format (.mobi, .azw, .azw3), GIF (.gif), PNG (.png), BMP (.bmp), and PDF (.pdf) files.
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 Steven Harris is trying to do the right thing by his family, but technical barriers prevent it. He writes:
Over the holidays I took your advice to give the gift of tech support by offering my services to my sister. She has an older MacBook Pro running Leopard and wants to upgrade to Snow Leopard (she needs Rosetta to run older PowerPC software). Three problems: Her DVD drive is broken, I have a MacBook Air without a DVD drive, and I have only a disk image of Snow Leopard. When I place that disk image on her MacBook, mount it, and try to run the Snow Leopard installer, I’m told I need to burn it to disc, which isn’t an option. What do I do?
I’m afraid you’re another casualty of the who-needs-media-drives-any-more campaign. While it’s true that SuperDrives are becoming less necessary for many people, there are occasions when a built-in drive is a godsend. This is one such case. Fortunately, there’s a workaround more convenient that purchasing an external DVD drive and a 5-pack of double-sided writeable DVD media. It goes like this:
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
To celebrate Boxing Day I’d like to offer one final gift for 2012. And that gift is a roundup of what I believe were the best Mac 911 entries from the past year. My hope is that it will help you solve those annoying issues that have plagued you over past months and help you start 2013 with a healthier and happier Mac.
Reader Ted Adams was uninterested in some of the Apple-installed applications that shipped with OS X and wanted to delete them. I showed him how in Deleting Files Within Lion’s Applications Folder. (Again, works with Mountain Lion.)
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.
