Lex uses a MacBook Pro, an iPhone 5, an iPad mini, a Kindle 3, a TiVo HD, and a treadmill desk, and loves them all. His latest book, a children's book parody for adults, is called "The Kid in the Crib." Lex lives in New Jersey with his wife and three young kids. More by Lex Friedman
You can have a lot of fun with Siri, the artificially intelligent, voice recognition-based assistant built into newer iPhones and iPads. But fun though Siri may be, it turns out the little voice inside your iOS device can also help you become increasingly productive. From reminding you to perform a task, to sending meeting invitations, to keeping track of book recommendations—Siri proves to be surprisingly helpful for taking care of everyday things. Here’s an assortment of tasks to get done with Siri.
1. Schedule reminders
Though Apple’s Reminders app isn’t the most full-featured or powerful app around, I still rely on it for simple to-do list management. I almost never type in new reminders on my iPhone or iPad; I use Siri instead.
You click Print, and then wait a moment. Nothing happens. Your attempt has clearly failed. A brief check confirms that the problem is not limited to one document or one app. You can’t print anything. Now what?
The number of causes and fixes for print failures runs wide and deep across the Mac troubleshooting landscape. Here’s a checklist of the more common solutions.
Senior Contributor Joe Kissell is a best-selling author of print and electronic books about Apple products and a popular speaker at Mac-themed events. He also serves as the Senior Editor of TidBITS. More by Joe Kissell
If your Web browser, email program, or any of a hundred other Internet-connected apps on your Mac starts complaining about not having a connection, you may have to do a bit of sleuthing to figure out the cause. After all, a disruption anywhere along the chain between your Mac and a distant server could cause an outage, and it’s not always obvious where to look.
I suggest trying each of the following steps, in order, until you’re able to connect again.
Your hard drive churns. Every click sets off a spinning beachball. Disk Utility doles out the bad news. When your hard drive’s end is near, your best hope is a good backup. Of course it is. But, what if you don’t have a backup? Or what if you thought you had a backup and it failed? At this point, someone will say, knowingly: “You should have had redundant backups.” Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda. You shoulda, you didn’t. So, what now?
Keep calm and consider your situation. The fact is, intentionally or not, you probably do have backups of at least some of your data.
Senior Contributor Joe Kissell is a best-selling author of print and electronic books about Apple products and a popular speaker at Mac-themed events. He also serves as the Senior Editor of TidBITS. More by Joe Kissell
One of the scariest things that can happen to your Mac, short of actual flames and smoke billowing from the case, is a failure to turn on at all. You press the power button and nothing happens—no startup sound, no light, nothing. If this happens, you can check several things before hauling your Mac to the nearest Apple Store for repair—as often as not, this seemingly difficult problem might have a simple solution.
Electricity, e-lec-tricity
First, make sure that your Mac is getting juice. To do this, you may need to trace the entire flow of electricity to your Mac. Check your Mac’s power cord to ensure it is firmly seated where it connects to the computer as well as where it plugs into the wall. If it goes through an outlet strip or a UPS, make sure that’s also connected and turned on. Also check that any surge protectors are still working—a power surge might have knocked them off.
Senior Contributor Joe Kissell is a best-selling author of print and electronic books about Apple products and a popular speaker at Mac-themed events. He also serves as the Senior Editor of TidBITS. More by Joe Kissell
Crashes and freezes in OS X are mercifully rare, but they do occur. Fortunately, most of them can be resolved readily; and even though a crash or freeze may have any of numerous causes or symptoms, the same procedure works for troubleshooting most of them.
Crashing apps
Your first step should be to determine the scope of a problem. Is just one application having difficulties, or is the whole system affected?
Senior Contributor Joe Kissell is a best-selling author of print and electronic books about Apple products and a popular speaker at Mac-themed events. He also serves as the Senior Editor of TidBITS. More by Joe Kissell
Most crashes on a Mac affect just one application. But you may encounter a type of system-wide crash that brings down your entire Mac: a kernel panic. When this occurs, there’s no warning and no way to save your work or do anything else without restarting. And, because kernel panics can have many different causes, diagnosing the problem and preventing its recurrence are difficult.
How do you know if it’s a kernel panic?
If you’re running OS X 10.7 Lion or earlier, kernel panics usually result in your screen dimming from top to bottom, and a message appearing in several languages telling you that you must restart your Mac (by holding down the power button for several seconds to turn it off, and then pressing it again to turn it back on).
