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 Kenneth Walsh's Mac has gone strangely quiet. He writes:
I woke my MacBook Pro from sleep today and when I tried to play an iTunes track the Mac made no sound. I then noticed that the sound icon in the menu bar was gray. I went to the Sound system preference and it showed Digital Out in the output area and no listing for the Mac’s internal speakers. What the heck?
The background on the issue is that there’s a small sensor switch inside the headphone port. When you insert a headphone jack, the sensor understands what's what and changes the sound output setting to Headphones. If you insert a jack for digital audio output, the device changes to Digital Out. When you remove the jack completely, it should read Internal Speakers.
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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 Matthew Rotter asks a common question about Apple’s Mail. He writes:
Can you send email to multiple email addresses listed under a single contact’s name?
Pardon me if I assume that what you really mean is whether it’s possible to easily add to an email messages multiple address from a single contact. And the answer is, not really. Regardless of the solution you settle on, it requires a bit of futzing. Now, let’s go over those solutions.
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Ted Landau Senior Contributor, Macworld
The other day, someone I know very well (I shall not reveal his identity) called me for some emergency tech support. He had been importing photos from his iPhone to iPhoto on his Mac. A lot of photos. Just over a thousand photos, to be precise. After the import had apparently completed, a message popped up stating that the original photos were being deleted from the iPhone. During this process, iPhoto crashed.
Upon relaunch, all of the supposedly just imported photos were MIA. The photos were similarly gone from the iPhone. Over a thousand pictures, spanning more than 18 months — potentially up in smoke. Time to panic.
That’s when my phone rang.
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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 Simon Hansen finds his Mac slow to do his bidding. He writes:
My Mac has been running very slowly lately and I wanted to see how much faster it would be if I disabled its startup items. But when I try to start up in Safe Mode, it shows the progress bar, but that bar never fills up and my Mac doesn’t boot. What’s going on?
For the benefit of readers who are unfamiliar with Safe Mode (also known as Safe Boot mode), let’s back up and explain how to access Safe Mode and exactly what it is.
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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
Macworld forum visitor lobsta43 has a question that follows up on my recent Mac 101 column regarding Parental Controls. The crustacean writes:
I use Parental Controls with my grandkids and it works well. The problem is that when they walk away from the Mac the clock keeps ticking on their time limit. Is there some way for them to stop the clock?
Yes. When you’ve configured a time limit based on the amount of time that the Mac can be used over the course of a day (from half-an-hour to eight hours) the clock can be stopped by logging out of the controlled account. So, simply instruct the grandkids to choose Log Out from the Apple menu when they want to go off and do something else. The Mac will switch to the login screen and the ticking timer stops.
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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 Tim Kisanuki is a bit late to the party and is unsure what to expect when he arrives. He writes:
I’ve been running Snow Leopard on my iMac since it was released. I’m finally ready to upgrade to Mountain Lion. Before I do, can you tell me about any serious problems or odd behaviors I might encounter?
I recently moved one of my Macs that remained on Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion so the experience is fresh in my mind. The few things that popped out at me soon after I restarted with my freshly installed version of the Mac OS include:
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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 Elsa Pederson finds her Mac mysteriously out of memory. She writes:
Today I saw a message I’d never seen before. It indicated that my Mac had run out of application memory. In order to keep working I had to force quit some of my open applications. Is there a way I could have known which application was causing the problem?
Yes. In some cases, the misbehaving application will appear in red, followed by the words “Not Responding.” This strongly hints that this application has gone on a RAM binge and has consumed so much of the stuff that it can no longer move. One way to tell if that’s the problem application is to force quit a different application. If the once-red application starts responding again, it tells you it’s now happy because it has more RAM to chew on.
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