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 Dwayne Norris has a problem with Dropbox links. He writes:
A friend sent me a link to a movie file they’d like to share with me on Dropbox. The link appears in this form: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1234567/test.mov. When I click on the link, Safari launches and the movie starts playing. I’d like to download the file directly but can’t find a way. Do you have any advice?
Starting the week with one of this column’s shortest answers, I do indeed.
It began innocently enough. I helped a friend set up a Skype account and phone number. All seemed to go well—until we tested out the phone number. I dialed the number from my landline phone and kept getting a busy signal. I couldn’t even leave a voicemail message.
Trying to figure out the ultimate cause of this frustrating symptom led us down a dark tunnel that, at times, seemed to have no light at the end. If you can guess the final answer before I reveal it, you’ve earned a Bugs & Fixes gold star.
The proximate cause of the busy signal was easy to locate. We navigated to the Privacy section of Skype’s Preferences. The options to “Allow calls from” and “Receive calls to my Skype Number from” were set to “Contacts” rather than “Anyone.” This meant that anyone not in my friend’s Skype Contacts list (which was empty at the time) could not call her. Apparently, when such calls are blocked, the caller gets a busy signal.
Reader Kurt Schwartz prefers some of his text spoken rather than written. He writes:
I have several text files that I’d like my Mac to read to me using its speech software. I know that I can use the Speak command within TextEdit to have that text read to me, but I’d love to be able to save that text as an audio file. Is there a way to do that?
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 Paul Lomauro is receiving email that he’d rather not. He writes:
I am getting unsolicited mail from a source that has blank sender email address. How do I set up a new Mail rule on my iMac to totally block it or send this type of email to the trash?
I’m going to expand this one a bit to tell you how to filter any message that may have missing or faked information. When you select a message in Mail you see some of the message’s header information including the contents of the From, To, Subject, Attachment, and Body fields. There are times when some of this information is missing—when someone forgets to enter a subject heading, for example. And, of course, spammers and other digital ne’er-do-wells routinely fake some of this stuff. That makes it difficult to filter email when using only the entries that appears here because that information may not be accurate or the filter is too broad.
Reader Craig Moyer longs for a Finder feature he could once invoke via clever hack. He writes:
I’d like the Size column to always appear before Date Modified in Finder windows displayed in List view. Many years ago I was able to modify the com.apple.finder.plist file to do this, but that’s no longer an option as that file has changed. Is there still a workaround?
While this may elicit one or two “Well, duh!” responses from the less sensitive members of our forums, this is something I haven’t bothered to think about in… well, ever. And so this came as a surprise as much to me as it may to you.
I recently stumbled over two Safari-related problems. In each case, specific features of a website did not work as expected. While my precise symptoms may be limited in scope, the overall problems are general ones and the solutions apply to a wide variety of similar situations.
Extension prevents Flash video from running
One of my guilty pleasures is the NBC series Smash. I’m especially a fan of the show’s music. That’s why I was glad to discover that NBC offers video clips showcasing the musical numbers from the series.
Reader Caroline Anders finds Calendar’s default settings a little inflexible for her tastes. She writes:
I use Calendar on my Mac running Mountain Lion (and used iCal before it) and I find I have to fiddle with events after I create them—changing all-day events to events that last a couple of hours and changing their start times. Is there a better way to create events so I don’t have to spend so much time editing them?
There is. First, it’s important to understand how Calendar creates events. If you double-click on a date when in Month view, you will create an all-day event by default unless you enter a time or specific event in the New Event field. For example, Meeting with George 3PM or Lunch with Dan. Otherwise you’ll have to edit the event if your intention was to create an event that lasts just an hour. If you want just that hour-long event, change to the Week or Day view and then double-click on a time. An hour-long event will be created at the time you chose.
