If you’ve never heard that noise before, you’re bound to hear it someday: that amazing, dull crunch as your Mac slips out of your hands or off a desk and makes a date with the ground at 9.8 meters per second squared, gravity having played the role of a yenta-like matchmaker bringing together your computer and an admirably dense surface. The crunch registers in your brain, and you have a sudden mental image of the universe collapsing.

julianbl/neowin.net

Here’s how to make the best of a terrible situation, get as much of your data back as possible, and avoid a similar disaster if your Mac decides to smooch the ground again somewhere down the line.

Pick it up, clean it off

After your Mac falls, calm down, pick it up, look over the damage, and clean away whatever dirt and detritus you can. From there, make sure that your Mac is turned off, and then weigh your options.

If you feel comfortable opening the machine, find a wrist strap and tools, touch a metal object to discharge any static that your body may be carrying, and carefully open the Mac to check for case fragments, damaged parts, or debris that may have ended up in the computer. Don’t turn it on; just focus on the parts that survived the fall and anything that might appear damaged, and clean out the interior as best you can.

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Reader Jack Sanford is being lied to by the Mac App Store and would like to do something about it. He writes:

When I checked for Mac App Store updates on my MacBook Air, it said there were no updates available. But when I clicked the Purchases tab, the button next to iMovie showed Update. I clicked that and got a dialog telling me “You have updates available for other accounts.” But I have only one Apple ID that I use for purchases. How do I fix it?

Developer and all-around-smart-guy Brett Terpstra has the answer you seek. In his Quick Tip: Fixing the “Other Account” Mac App Store Issue he explains that you can clear up this fib by first repairing disk permissions and then rebuilding OS X’s Spotlight index.

To do the first task, launch Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities), select your startup disk in the window that appears, and click the Repair Disk Permissions button near the bottom of the window. In a couple of minutes your permissions will be set right.

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This week, I take an in-depth look at just one question. I get a lot of emails about syncing music to an iOS device, and many people find it difficult to sync when their music library is larger than the space available on their iOS device. So here’s a question about checked tracks, playing albums, and syncing.

Q: I have a lot of music and an iPod. I can’t fit all the music onto the iPod, so I uncheck the tracks I don’t want to sync. This works fine, except when I want to listen to an album in iTunes on my Mac.

I might have the three best songs checked so they get synced to my iPod, and when I go to play the full album in iTunes, it will only play those three songs, unless I check the others. If I do that, however, the next time I sync the iPod, those other tracks will get copied. Even if I create a playlist, it will skip the unchecked songs, so the only way to listen to music that I don’t want on my iPod is to check the boxes and hope to remember to uncheck them again.

How can I get around this problem?

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You’ve probably ditched your paper dictionary, but do you know how to use OS X’s built-in one? This week’s video shows you how.

Transcript

Whether you need to know what a word means or just how to spell it, the days of leafing through hefty paper dictionaries are gone. But few Mac users really know how to make the most of OS X’s built-in Dictionary app. Today I’ll show you five tricks for doing just that.

1. Use pop-up definitions

A useful, and chronically underused, OS X feature is systemwide pop-up definitions. In most Mac applications—including Safari, Mail, Pages, TextEdit, Twitter, you name it—just position your cursor over the word you want to define and press Command-Control-D. A pop-up window appears containing the definition, synonyms, and any relevant Wikipedia entry.

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If you thought the only way you could use your Mac to communicate with other people was to send email messages, I’m about to brighten your day. For years the Mac OS has supported instant messaging, a form of texting similar to sending and receiving messages with a mobile phone.

In days past this was done with an application called iChat. iChat was significantly reworked, renamed Messages to reflect its relationship with the iOS app of the same name, and released in finalized form with Mountain Lion. Messages supports a number of services including AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, and Jabber in addition to Apple’s own FaceTime video messaging and iMessage services. (iMessage is a scheme that allows you to send messages, documents, photos, videos, contacts, and group messages over Wi-Fi and cellular connections to iOS devices running iOS 5 or later and Macs running Mountain Lion. Unlike the SMS services offered by mobile phone carriers, it’s free.)

Messages is relatively easy to use, but it has a certain depth. In this lesson we’ll focus on its interface and basics.

Ready from the get-go

If you’ve added an iCloud account to your Mac, Messages is ready for you to use. Unlike with other kinds of accounts—Google or Yahoo, for example—you don’t have to choose to enable messaging in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars system preference. Your iCloud account is automatically added to Messages. Before we talk about the other kinds of accounts you can add, let’s focus on Messages with an iCloud account.

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If you’re like me and happen to have a bunch of vintage Macs powered by Motorola 680x0 CPUs lying around, then you probably like to tinker with them. And what better way to tinker with obsolete hardware than by installing an obsolete version of Linux on it? It’s a difficult and time-consuming procedure with no practical purpose, of course, but when has that ever stopped us?

In this how-to, I’ll install Debian 4 (a Linux distribution) on a 68K Mac. There are some catches, and the road to functioning Linux on a 68K machine can be long and frustrating, so I’ll try to condense the process into a series of easy-to-follow steps. No matter how I simplify it, though, keep in mind that almost everything about this process is antithetical to the traditional Macintosh experience, so it is not for the faint-hearted.

Step 1: Prepare the Mac

Find a Mac that will work with the version of Linux we’re using. There is no hard and fast guide to compatibility, so you’ll have to go by the general guidelines I lay out below. Before you begin, be sure you have a fresh PRAM battery installed.

Gregg M. Erickson

CPU. You need a Mac with a 68020, 68030, or 68040 CPU. The plain 68000 CPU machines (like the Mac SE) will not work with this version of Linux. The list of candidate machines that can use this version of Linux includes most Quadras, the Centris machines, some Performas, many of the LC models, and most of the Mac II series.

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Reader Cameron Chang seeks a simple movie editor. He writes:

I have some video clips that I’d like to lightly edit. For instance, I want to cut the sound track from one and replace it with a different sound file. On another, I want to copy 12 seconds and turn that bit into a separate movie. iMovie seems like overkill for these jobs. Can you recommend something simpler?

I can and will: QuickTime Player 7 Pro.

Wait. You can still buy that? And it’s compatible with Mountain Lion?

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Although iPhoto for iOS isn’t quite as robust as its OS X counterpart, it’s a very capable image editor—and it can do a few cool tricks you simply can’t do on your Mac.

Straighten your photos

iPhoto for iOS allows you to straighten your photos in a few smart ways. The first is by auto-detecting a strong horizon line. Open iPhoto, choose a photo and then tap Edit. Now tap the Crop & Straighten icon in the bottom left. If the photo displays a white line across it with icons at either end, then that means a horizon line has been detected. To proceed with straightening, simply tap the arrow icon at the right.

Unfortunately, iPhoto can’t always detect a horizon line and that means you’ll have to make the adjustment yourself. The Crop & Straighten mode places a dial under your photo, and you can straighten your photo simply by dragging the dial left or right. A grid overlaid on your photo as you turn the dial, lets you straighten with visual cues in your photo.

What happens when your photo has no visual cues, but still feels off-kilter? iPhoto for iOS has one more strategy to assist you, and it’s a lot of fun. Choose a photo you want to straighten and then hold the iPad or iPhone up in front of you. Now tap the dial. iPhoto then calls on the gyroscope in your device to help you straighten the image. Simply tilt the iPad or iPhone to the left and right; as you do, you’ll notice that the photo remains upright. It’s helpful to tilt your head as you tilt the device so that you have a better sense of the final crop. Once you’re happy with the position of the photo, tap anywhere on the screen to lock it in.

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Reader Fred Hendricks wishes to be respectful of others’ privacy but isn’t quite sure how to go about it. He writes:

I’m working on a just-for-fun movie in iMovie ’11 that I’m going to put on YouTube. In one scene you can see a car’s license plate in the background. Is there some way I can cover it up?

As long as the camera or car don’t move, yes. Like so.

Launch iMovie, select iMovie > Preferences, select the General preference, and enable Show Advanced Tools. Close iMovie’s preferences.

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If you like to find new ways to tweak OS X, you sometimes need to look in unexpected places. For example, the Accessibility pane of System Preferences, which houses a number of features to help users who have limited seeing, hearing, and mobility, contains some nifty features that all users should know about. Here are five system tweaks that you might want to try on your Mac.

1. Change the cursor size

If you mirror your Mac’s display to a large-screen TV or use a large (or especially high-resolution) monitor, you may find that the cursor on your screen is too small. You can change the size of the cursor, and make it anywhere from big to huge.

Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences, click Accessibility, and then click Display. Drag the Cursor Size slider from Normal (smallest) toward Large, settling on the size you want to use; the cursor changes size as you drag the slider.

This setting will change the standard mouse pointer, as well as other cursors (the text input cursor, for example), though it won’t work in all applications. It will even make the hand pointer, which displays when you hover over a link in Safari, much larger.

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Occasionally, maybe once every few weeks, TextEdit refuses to save any documents I currently have open. Any changes I have made to these documents seem in danger of being lost. When this symptom appears, any new documents that I open in TextEdit will similarly refuse to save. It’s as if TextEdit decided to go on strike. I’ve seen this happen with a couple of other applications, but most often it’s TextEdit.

Selecting Duplicate doesn’t work around the problem, as you can’t save the duplicate copy. Similarly, trying to use Save As is also fruitless. It just doesn’t work.

Others have reported a similar symptom that appears due to a permissions glitch, but a permissions issue is not the root cause here. Happily, the short-term fix is a simple one. Select “Quit TextEdit” from the File menu. TextEdit should quit immediately, without any prompts to save open documents first.

A brief aside is necessary here. Go to the General system preference and note the option to “Ask to keep changes when closing documents.” I keep this option enabled. This forces a prompt to manually save changes when closing.

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I meet a lot of people with Automator anxiety: they think using OS X’s built-in workflow-maker is a lot more complex than it really is. The truth is that Automator workflows are (a) pretty simple to assemble and (b) great for simple but repetitive tasks that you do all the time anyway.

To show you what I mean here are five workflows that I think pretty much every Mac user should have. They do things we all need to do: Wrap text in quotation marks, for example, or count the number of words in a selection of text. There might be other ways of doing the same things, but Automator is built into your Mac and you can implement them yourself for free in a couple of minutes.

Wrap text in quotes

This one works with selected text to wrap it in quotation marks.

To start, create a new Automator Service workflow and configure its header area to process selected text in any application. Click the Output Replaces Selected Text checkbox so the result of the workflow—the wrapped text—will be inserted in place of your selection.

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Whether it’s to pay the bills, replace furnace filters, or take the ferret to the vet for its annual cleaning, we all need reminding from time to time. Yes, you can accomplish this through a calendar event and alarm, but a calendar is too broad a tool for this kind of thing. What you really need is the digital equivalent of a scrap of paper onto which you write notes and shove into a handy pocket. Such is exactly the purpose of Mountain Lion’s Reminders application.

This is another OS X application originally rooted in Apple’s iOS. And it differs very little from its iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad counterpart. Fire it up and here’s what you see.

☑ The overview

Reminders is made up of two major areas by default. On the left side of the window you find any lists you’ve created. For instance, you might find Work and Home headings here. If you’ve configured your Mac with an iCloud account (or other services that support reminders including Yahoo, Exchange, and Hotmail, but not Google Tasks), you’ll see headings for those services, under which will be lists associated with them.

On the right side of the window are the reminders that are associated with the selected list. For example, if you’ve created a Home list, when you click it you’ll see the Take Out The Trash, Tune The Piano, and Eat More Leafy Green Vegetables reminders you’ve created for that list. If you’ve ticked off (and by this I mean “completed” rather than “angered”) any reminders in this list, you’ll spy a Completed entry at the top of this list (you may need to scroll up to reveal this entry).

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At one time, the computer was the computer and the TV was the TV and never the twain should meet. Yet increasingly computers are being used for entertainment purposes and televisions are packed with more smarts than ever before. Our own Chris Breen decided to bring the two together by incorporating a Mac mini into his home media center. He joins me to talk about the experience.

Download Episode #354

Show Notes

If you’d like Chris’ written impressions as well, check out his The Computer in the Living Room: Setting Up a Mac mini Media Server. And how has the mini changed in the last three years in this regard? Chris’ 2010 article Beyond Cable: The Mac mini Media Machine may provide a hint.

You can subscribe to the Macworld Podcast by clicking here. Or you can point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader at: http://www.macworld.com/column/mwpodcast/index.rss

You can find previous episodes of our audio podcasts at Macworld’s podcasting page.

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Forum member DeathRobot (who is probably nicer than his or her name implies) is interested in FTP and Automator. It writes:

I’ve created a folder action in Automator, where any files I drop onto it upload to a favorites folder on my FTP server via Panic’s Transmit. I would like to change the workflow so that when I drop a file on the folder a dialog box comes up that asks me to input a folder name. It would then create a new folder on the server with that name, and drop the files in it. Is this possible?

Sure. Transmit installs a few Automator actions. Among them is Mount, which you can use to mount a directory on your FTP server. But you can save yourself some trouble by instead using Transmit’s Transmit Disk feature that lets you mount an FTP directory as if it were a local disk. Then configure Automator this way:

Create an Automator folder action. Then create a folder on your Desktop and give it an intuitive name such as “FTP Upload.” Drag this folder to the pop-up menu at the top of the workflow (where it says Folder Action Receives Files And Folders Added To). You now have your source folder.

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Keeping up with just one social media account is tough enough. But if you personally hang out on even one or two more services, or are in charge of socializing with your business’s customers online, juggling it all starts to feel a lot more like work, and not the fun kind. Here are a few tools and tricks—some for power users, others for business cases, and even a slightly nerdier option—that can help take the drudgery out of managing social media.

Get started posting with OS X

Depending on your needs, there is, of course, always OS X itself. As of Mountain Lion, Apple added some much-needed integration of a handful of social media accounts right into OS X. Go to Apple menu > System Preferences and select Mail, Contacts, & Calendars. Here, you can add multiple Twitter accounts, one Facebook account, and Yahoo, Vimeo, and Flickr accounts.

OS X’s social media integration mostly makes the process of sharing out to your accounts much easier. If you mostly just need to post status updates, links, and media, having these tools built into most of your apps and even having the good ol’ fashioned right-click menu can simplify a lot of your social tasks.

Try Tweetbot for heavy tweeting

But what if your needs are greater, as they might well be if you’re using social media for both work and play? In addition to your personal Twitter account, you may have another for your blog or business, a parody account for your favorite TV character or meme, and more. If logging in and out of each account at Twitter.com is getting dizzying, give Tapbot’s $20 Tweetbot for Mac a try.

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Trot back to the 16th century and corner famed prognosticating monk Nostradamus, and it’s quite likely that when posed the question: “Will those living in the year 2013 be able to call up any media programming they like from a single box?” he’d respond with an enthusiastic “Mais oui!”

Sadly, we know only too well where this one sits in the cleric’s win/loss column. Progress has been made, via cable and satellite services that deliver a trillion channels plus on-demand programming, as well as set-top boxes that have access to online music and video services. But the ultimate goal—watching exactly what you want to watch when you want to watch it—remains elusive.

In search of a solution, some people have turned to the most powerful media device in their home—their computer. Not only can it play locally stored music, video, and slideshows, but it can also bring you any media found on the Internet, including streaming TV programming, movies, and music.

But sitting in front of a computer monitor—regardless of its resolution—can be limiting. It makes for a less-than-satisfying group-viewing experience, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re, well, sitting in front of a computer. What many of us want is a device as intelligent as a computer but one that’s at home in the living room, attached to a big-screen TV. Turns out that Apple produces a device fitting that exact bill: the Mac mini.

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Reader Patricia Whitney has done the Bad Thing to her iPad and wonders if there’s a way to make it Good. She writes:

I dropped my first-generation iPad and now the screen’s colors are all wrong. Blacks are green and there’s a lot of “static” in all the images the iPad displays. Is there anything I can do to fix it?

In the days of classic sitcoms there was an old wheeze where Main Character A would suffer a bump on the head, causing said A to lose his or her memory. After the ensuing hijinx, the arrived-at solution was invariably to bean them again, thus restoring their memory. Those penning today’s sitcoms avoid such advice, understanding the litigious society we now live in.

I offer this stroll down the hoary path of television history to suggest that while our ancestors may have lived in a black-and-white world, they knew a thing or two about fixing misfiring systems. Take your iPad, for instance.

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When you’re working in a deeply nested folder (a folder within a folder within…), the Finder provides several options for moving back up through the hierarchy. But only one option provides both at-a-glance info and powerful shortcuts for working with files: the Path Bar.

Open a Finder window (Finder > New Finder Window) and then choose View > Show Path Bar. The Path Bar appears at the bottom of all your Finder windows, showing the complete path from your computer to the current folder. (A path is the series of subfolders that leads to a specific folder or file.)

This is the only way you can see a folder’s path when a Finder window is in the background, but that’s merely the most obvious of the conveniences the Path Bar provides.

1. Access folders in the path

Is the path too long for its folder names to show? Just point—no clicking necessary—to a truncated name, and it expands so that you can read it. This point-and-expand technique works even on background windows, whether you’re in the Finder or in another app. Double-click a folder in the Path Bar to see its contents in the current window. Or, open a folder into a separate window with a Command-double-click on its miniature in the Path Bar.

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Sometimes you want to listen to a specific episode of a podcast without subscribing to it. Sometimes you’ve been pointed to an audio file out on the Internet and, while you can’t listen to it immediately, want to save it for later. And sometimes a mean ol’ podcast producer will do what I did recently and post an audio file outside of the podcast’s usual RSS feed. (Mine was an enhanced AAC version of my podcast’s special radio-drama episode.)

What’s a podcast fan on a mobile device supposed to do with these files? iOS users could add them via iTunes, so long as they’re still syncing media via iTunes regularly. Users of some podcast apps, such as Downcast, may be surprised to discover there’s a place to paste in file URLs.

But there’s an easier way, a service that is to audio files what Instapaper and the like are to podcasts. It’s called Huffduffer, a free service created by Jeremy Keith.

Here’s how Huffduffer works: You sign up for an account and drag the Huffduff It bookmarklet into your browser’s toolbar. (There’s also a Safari extension.) When you visit a webpage containing an audio file you want to save, you click the Huffduff It button, add some optional metadata, and press the button. You can also just visit Huffduffer.com and add any file URL manually.

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My favorite TextExpander snippets

If you asked Macworld editors to name their favorite utilities, many of us would mention TextExpander. If you type for a living, as we do, TextExpander—or a similar app such as TypeIt4Me or QuicKeys—quickly becomes indispensable.

As you probably know, TextExpander and utilities like it enable you to insert fixed bits of text—which TextExpander calls snippets—by typing in short abbreviations. So, for example, you could create a snippet called Date that inserts the current date whenever you type in an abbreviation (I use .date) followed by a designated delimiter (I use the backslash key \). Once you start building a library of snippets, they quickly become an integral part of your workflow.

If you are already using TextExpander, I’m sure you already have an extensive library of snippets. But if you aren’t, or if you just got started, I thought I’d try to give you some idea of what you can do with the app, by showing you some of the snippets I use the most.

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Creating playlists in iTunes can be as simple as dragging a few songs, or as complex as creating smart playlists that refer to other playlists and use nested conditions to pick songs that meet specific criteria. In this week’s column, I answer three questions to show just how complex smart playlists can be. While perhaps not the same as the smart playlists you want to make, they are good examples of the complexity that is available with smart playlists in iTunes.

Q: I have a collection of jazz music that is bigger than a single 160GB iPod classic can hold. In total, I have over 6800 albums on four iPods, so I will soon face this problem for other genres too. How can I easily set up two 160GB iPods to hold only jazz music, such as having artists with names from A to L on one and M to Z on another?

The easiest way to do this is set up each iPod to sync a single playlist, and to create two standard (not smart) playlists by dragging all the music from the first group of artists to one playlist, and all the music of the second group to the other.

However, you probably want to be able to sync future additions to your library as well—and that’s where things get more complicated. You can’t create a smart playlist in which the beginning of artists' names are from A to L, for example.

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In weeks past we’ve talked about configuring the Mail and Calendar applications. Without the third leg of this personal information trio—Contacts—using the first two could be a lonely proposition. In this lesson we’ll look at the cans and can’ts of Contacts.

Contacts was called Address Book in previous versions of the Mac OS, and that’s still its most descriptive name. What with its faux-leather border and stitched pages, it reminds you of something in which your parents might have added a new neighbor or business contact. But, old-school though it may look, it has more powerful features than its paper-and-glue counterpart.

Contacts overview

Now that you’ve had the chance to admire Contacts’ leather look, let’s peer beyond the obvious. Contacts is broken into three main sections—from left to right, groups, members of the selected group, and the card for the currently selected contact. For example, when you select All Contacts at the top of the group pane on the far left, you’ll see every contact that you have in the second pane. If you select one of those contacts, that person’s information appears in the third pane. (If you don’t see the group pane, choose View > Groups.)

When you launch Contacts for the first time, what you see depends on whether you have an iCloud account and whether that account is configured for your Mac. If both are true, Contacts will include any contacts you’ve added on another iCloud-compatible device. If you’ve created any groups on such devices, they too will appear in Calendar. Such is the power of iCloud syncing.

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Ever hear a Mac's desktop fans go into overdrive under normal operating conditions? Or felt a Mac laptop go from a normal temperature to a more-than-toasty lap roaster in under a minute? Those are times when a Mac was running hotter than it should have been.

What are the long-term effects of overheating on a Mac? Beyond warmer temperatures and additional noise from the fan working overtime to cool its operating environment, you can expect to see slower performance. Long term, damage to core components may occur—for example, heat can affect battery life on a laptop.

While current hardware uses internal temperature sensors to shut itself down before parts become dangerously overheated, it still helps to keep an eye on things before your Mac gets too hot. To this end, Bjango's $16 iStat Menus application is excellent, with a temperature gauge in the Finder's menu bar as well as readouts for your incoming and outgoing Internet bandwidth, hard-drive capacity, and RAM and CPU usage. iStat Menus told me that my MacBook Pro's temperatures swung between 130 and 177 degrees Fahrenheit while I was installing World of Warcraft, so the software gives you an idea of just how warm things can become under the hood of your Mac.

Ventilation

Your Mac is not alive, but where heat and airflow is concerned, it's essentially a breathing thing—give your Mac some room to breathe.

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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.

Leave it alone.

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Rapidly rotate an image

In the Windows OS, you can right-click on an image and choose a Rotate command. The Mac OS lacks such a feature, but you can produce something darned close with Automator.

Launch Automator (in your /Applications folder) and in the template chooser that appears choose Service. Click Choose. In the resulting workflow window, configure the pop-up menus at the top of the window to read Service receives no input in any application.

Select the Files & Folders library and drag the Get Selected Finder Items and Copy Finder Items actions into the workflow area (in that order). Now select the Photos library and add the Rotate Images action to the workflow. Create a new folder on the desktop and call it Rotated Images. Drag that folder to the Copy Finder Items pop-up menu. In the Rotate Images action, choose the kind of rotation you want the workflow to perform—left, right, or 180 degrees. Save the workflow (File > Save) and give it an intuitive name such as Rotate.

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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:

You could accept that your Mac is mucking things up and instead of holding your signature in front of the camera in the normal way, hold it vertically. Snap the shot and it will come out rotated to the horizontal.

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If you’re switching from a PC to a Mac, one of the first things you’ll want to do is to move all your data to your new computer. The process is fairly simple, but you can go down any of several paths depending on your setup and your needs.

Consider what’s in the cloud

Before deciding on a data-transfer strategy, consider the extent to which the data on your PC is already mirrored in the cloud. For example, if you already store most of your personal files in a folder that syncs to the cloud via a service such as Dropbox, you can install the corresponding Mac app, log in with your existing account, and sit back while your files sync automatically.

Likewise, if you store all your email on an IMAP server, you need only enter your credentials for that server in a Mac email client such as the built-in Apple Mail, and all your messages will download to your Mac. And if you rely on Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets, your documents will be right there in whichever Mac browser you choose.

Take a quick mental inventory of your data. Be sure to consider personal data such as email, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks; media such as music, photos, movies, and TV shows; and documents you’ve created or downloaded. If most of that is already somewhere in the cloud, the path of least resistance may be to connect to the same cloud services on your Mac, and then manually transfer any remaining items that live on your PC’s hard disk and nowhere else.

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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.

Even the now troublesome Apple TV had been working for over a year without incident. The network loss popped up only in the last month or two. This made me wonder if the cause might be a bug in a recent ATV firmware update.

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Your Mac’s keyboard makes it easy to type any of the standard characters—the ones used most frequently in everyday typing. But OS X lets you use hundreds of special characters that don’t appear on your keyboard’s keys. This week’s video explains three ways to access special characters in OS X.

Transcript

Your Mac’s keyboard makes it easy to type any of the standard characters—the ones used most frequently in everyday typing. But OS X lets you use hundreds of special characters that don’t appear on your keyboard’s keys. These include special symbols for currency and punctuation, symbols, and much more.

Earlier this year, I reviewed a great utility called Characters that makes it simple to find and type special characters using a systemwide menu. But you don’t need third-party software: Here are three ways to access special characters in OS X.

Holding down keys If you’re running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, you can type some characters—specifically, those that are accented or modified versions of common letters—by simply holding down the base character. For example, if you need to type an accented E, just hold down the E key for a second or so; you’ll see a popover displaying the available variations on the letter E. Click one, or press the number corresponding to it, to type that character. On a U.S. English keyboard, this trick works for A, C, E, I, L, N, O, S, U, Y, and Z.

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