Latest Posts in Working Mac

Get quick access to recently used items

Your Mac is full of files, folders, and applications, and it’s always an annoyance to spend time looking for the items you need. OS X offers many tools (for instance, the Dock and the Finder’s sidebar) that can help you access things you use day in and day out, but there are also a number of ways you can quickly get to items you’ve used only recently. Learning these techniques will streamline your work.

The Recent Items menu

The first way you can access recently used items is from the not-very-obvious Recent Items menu hidden in the Apple menu. Select Apple menu -> Recent Items and you’ll see a menu divided into three sections: Applications, Documents, and Servers. Your Mac records these items as you access them, so these menus constantly update. When you select a file or application it opens. When you select a server, it mounts and a new Finder window opens and pops to the front.

Clear Recent Items If you ever want to reset this menu, select Clear Menu at its bottom. (Note that if you clear this menu, you will also clear the Recent Items menus in Apple applications, such as the iWork programs.) If clearing the whole menu seems too drastic, you do have some options. You can clear just one of the sections (see this OS X Hint for details). Or, if you’re feeling particularly picky, remove items from the menu individually, by editing a preferences file.

Customize the number of items What if there are not enough items in the menu? By default, your Mac stores ten items in each category. If you want, say, more documents, fewer applications, and no servers, open System Preferences (Apple menu -> System Preferences), click on Appearance, and, in the Number Of Recent Items section, choose the numbers that suit you.

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Migrate a Time Machine backup

If you’ve been using Time Machine for backups, there may come a time when you outgrow your backup disk. It’s easy enough to plug in a larger disk or buy a Time Capsule (or a larger Time Capsule) and choose that as your new Time Machine destination, but doing that means starting over. If you want to move to a larger disk while maintaining the continuity of your backups, you can. It just means taking quite a few steps.

Move your backups to a new Time Capsule

To move your backups from a local disk to a Time Capsule, do the following.

1. Set up your new Time Capsule (according to Apple’s instructions), but leave your current backup disk mounted in the Finder. If possible, connect your Mac to your Time Capsule using an Ethernet cable, which will speed up the transfer process considerably.

2. Open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences, click on Select Disk (or Change Disk, in Leopard), and select your Time Capsule disk as the destination. Click on Use For Backup.

3. Choose Back Up Now from the Time Machine menu in your Mac’s main menu bar and allow Time Machine to begin backing up your Mac to the Time Capsule. Once the Time Machine preference pane shows that the program has finished preparing and is actively copying data, turn Time Machine off by doing clicking the On/Off button in the Time Machine pane of System Preferences.

4. Select your Time Capsule in the sidebar of any Finder window and double-click on the folder inside it (which may be named “Data” or “Backups”) containing your Time Machine backups. If the disk doesn’t mount automatically, click on Connect As, and supply your user name and password if prompted to do so. This folder should contain a single disk image, which holds your recently aborted Time Machine backup. Double-click on this disk image to mount it in the Finder.

5. Open Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities). In the list on the left, select your local Time Machine backup volume and click on the Restore tab.

6. Drag your local backup volume (the indented volume name, not the disk name) from the list on the left into Disk Utility’s Source field.

7. Drag the mounted disk image (named “Time Machine Backups”) from the list on the left into Disk Utility’s Destination field. Make sure the Erase Destination checkbox is selected, as it should be by default.

8. Click on Restore, and click on Restore again to confirm. Now be prepared to wait while Disk Utility copies the files—this process could take hours or even days.

9. When the restoration is finished, quit Disk Utility and eject the disk image from your Time Capsule. You can then turn Time Machine back on, and your backups should proceed normally.

If you’re moving from a smaller Time Capsule to a larger one, you’ll follow essentially the same steps, except that you should connect both Time Capsules at the same time, using the old one as the source and the new one as the destination.

To switch from one Time Machine destination, or turn Time Machine on or off, use the Time Machine pane of System Preferences.

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Troubleshoot your DNS

You use the domain name system (DNS) every time you try to connect your computer to an Internet resource—a Web page, say, or an FTP directory. DNS matches human-readable names like www.macworld.com (which generally stay the same over time) to machine-readable numeric addresses (which would be hard to remember and can change constantly).

The trouble is that DNS lookups (or resolution) can take time—sometimes, a lot of time. Until they’re done, the Web page or FTP directory you want can’t even begin to load. That delay, known as latency, can make your Net connection feel slow.

(When you’re talking about network performance, you have to distinguish latency from throughput. You can think of it in terms of plumbing: Latency is the amount of time it takes for water to go from its source to your tap; throughput is the gallons per minute that spew forth once the water begins to flow.)

Domain lookup services are provided by every Internet service provider (ISP); otherwise, their customers would have to use those numeric IP addresses, which would be untenable.

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How to protect your reputation online

Several months ago when Twitter introduced its lists feature, social media consultant Allen Mireles checked to see which lists included her. “I wanted to see if the lists I was on were a reflection of how I wanted to be viewed on Twitter,” she says. She found two surprises: A porn star had included her on a list and another user listed her under “people I’ve seen naked”-a surprise, she says, because she had never met the person.

Mireles responded immediately. First she blocked the porn star on Twitter, which automatically removed her from the list. Then she sent a direct message to the owner of the other list and explained that she uses Twitter for business purposes and didn’t think it was appropriate to include her on it. “He very kindly took me off the list and apologized, saying he had been trying to make some of his lists ‘more interesting,’” Mireles says.

Joe Laratro, president of Tandem Interactive, an online marketing solutions company, experienced a similar situation. About a year ago, Laratro received a Google Alert that included a link to a post from a blogger who commented negatively on Laratro’s handling of work with a client.

Laratro, too, decided to contact the source to respond to the blog post. “I thought I was being proactive with the blogger by engaging with him and being friendly and trying to continue the conversation,” he says. “But once I had his attention, he wanted to further attack me. When I realized communicating with him had backfired, I stopped commenting and let it go away.”

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Five System Preference tweaks everyone should know

Mac OS X’s System Preferences program is the one-stop shop for customizing many aspects of your operating system. Open System Preferences by choosing Apple menu -> System Preferences, or by clicking on the Dock icon that looks like a set of gears. Each preference pane is labeled to give you a clear idea of what type of elements it lets you change: Appearance, Spotlight, Displays, Network, and so on. Many of these preference panes contain settings that can help you save time and make your computing experience better or more efficient. Here are five of my favorites:

1. Hide the Dock

No doubt about it: the Dock is a useful way to access applications, folders, and files, but it also takes up a fair amount of space. That can be a pain, especially if you’re using a laptop. Since you probably don’t need to see the Dock all the time, hide it. Go to the Dock preference pane and select the Automatically Hide And Show The Dock option. Now the Dock will remain invisible until you position your cursor over it. While you’re in the preference pane, check out the other Dock options. Here you can change its size, position, and more. It’s also easy to access these settings from the Dock itself: just Control-click on the Dock’s separator to see a contextual menu.

2. Display the date and day of the week in your menu bar

If you’ve got the clock visible in the menu bar, you might find that just seeing the time isn’t enough. Go to the Date & Time preference pane, and then click on the Clock tab. Here, you can make some changes: choose to show the day of the week, the date, AM/PM, and more. If you tend to forget the date or which day it is, this can help you keep track of time with a simple glance at the menu bar. You’ll also find a setting there to have the clock talk to you, every hour, on the hour.

3. Take control of your Spotlight searches

Spotlight, OS X’s system-wide search feature, lets you make certain changes to the way it provides search results, as well as to the types of items it searches for. For example, do you really need fonts to show in your searches? Probably not. Adjust these settings by opening the Spotlight preference pane and clicking on the Search Results tab. If you uncheck any of the items in the list, Spotlight won’t search for them. You can drag these items in the order you want. When you search, the results will display in that order in the Spotlight menu, which means the items you look for most often will appear at the top.

Here I've unchecked items I never search for, and I've re-ordered the list so that things I do look for will appear at the top of my Spotlight results.

4. Activate Exposé from a screen corner

Apple’s Exposé lets you press certain keys to display all your windows, all windows of the current application, or to show the Desktop. These features let you switch windows easily, or access your Desktop with a single key press.

If you use Exposé often, you can set an “active screen corner,” or hot corner, to activate this feature. Open the Exposé & Spaces preference pane, and then click on the Exposé tab. In the Active Screen Corners section you’ll see popup menus that correspond to the different corners of your screen. Here you can set the corners to trigger Exposé, Dashboard, Desktop, and other features. When these corners have features assigned to them, you need merely move your cursor to the corner to activate it. For example, I have my bottom-left corner set to All Windows, so I can easily view my windows and switch among them without pressing a key. I have Dashboard set to the bottom-right corner, so whizzing my cursor down there shows me all my widgets.

5. Disable Caps Lock

You’ve had it happen before: you’re typing something, and all of a sudden everything appears in capital letters. You’ve hit the Caps Lock key—the one just above the Shift key on the left of the keyboard—and now you have to go back and erase what you typed and type it again. What if you could turn off the Caps Lock key entirely, and never have that happen again? No problem. Open the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane, click on the Keyboard tab, then on click Modifier Keys. Select the Caps Lock Key menu and choose No Action. Click on OK. Now, whenever you press the Caps Lock key accidentally, your Mac will ignore that keypress. You’ll have to go back to this preference pane to turn Caps Lock back on again.

Do you find yourself hitting Caps Lock accidentally? If so, you can use the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane to turn this key off.

Senior contributor Kirk McElhearn writes about more than just Macs on his blog Kirkville.

LinkedIn Tip: Monitoring who's viewed your profile

Located about halfway down your LinkedIn homepage on the right-hand side is a box—Who’s Viewed My Profile—that gives you two statistics: how many times your profile has been viewed in the last seven days and how many times you have appeared in search results in the last seven days.

Clicking on this link will bring you to a page that displays vague statistics related to who has viewed your profile, such as “Someone at XYZ company,” “Someone in the technology/new media function in the Greater Boston Area,” and “Vice President at XYZ company.” You'll only view more-detailed descriptions of who’s viewed your profile if you are a paid LinkedIn member.

Why Who’s Viewed My Profile is important: “Perhaps you've reached out to someone at a particular company to pursue a lead or applied for a job through LinkedIn,” says Eve Mayer Orsburn, CEO of Social Media Delivered, a social media consultancy. “You can use [this function] to see if someone from that company is checking out your profile and you can follow up accordingly,” she says.

Another way you can use Who’s Viewed My Profile is to gauge your reach on LinkedIn. “Right now, it might say that two people have looked at your profile and you have appeared in results 10 times in the last seven days,” Orsburn says. “Challenge yourself to get these numbers up so your message and profile is being exposed to more people,” she says (for example, by using Network Updates to broaden your reach).

How to edit your Who’s Viewed My Profile setting: LinkedIn gives you three settings that determine what’s shown when you view someone else’s profile: “show my name and headline,” “only show users my anonymous profile characteristics” (which is the default) and “don’t show users that I’ve viewed their profile.”

To change your settings, go to Who’s Viewed My Profile and click Edit Visibility Settings. This will bring you to your Profile Views page where you can make changes.

[CIO staff writer Kristin Burnham covers consumer Web and social technologies for CIO.com.]

Five secrets of Open and Save dialog boxes

It’s easy to never go beyond the basics of Open and Save dialog boxes, despite their being perhaps the most-used feature of the Mac interface. Instead of simply working with the basics, make these dialog boxes work for you. (The last two tips here are Snow Leopard-only.)

1. Use Spotlight to search for missing files

You go to open that Quarterly Report you just copied over from a thumb drive, but you’ve totally forgotten where you put it. Let Spotlight come to the rescue, right in the Open dialog box. You don’t even have to reach for your mouse: Activate the Spotlight field by pressing Command-F, and then type in the search term for a file or a folder that you’ve misplaced. (There’s a Spotlight field in the Save dialog box, too.)

Using Spotlight keywords makes searching from within these dialog boxes even more efficient. These special terms limit your searches so that you don’t get as many unwanted results. For example, instead of typing quarterly in the search field when you’re looking for that report, type name:quarterly so you won’t find documents that simply contain the word quarterly. (When you use keywords, make sure there’s no space between the keyword and the colon that follows it; you can leave a space after the colon.)

The two keywords I use most are name and kind. Use name to limit a search to only file names (instead of also looking through a document’s contents). Use kind to specify the file type. When I’m looking specifically for a folder, I type kind:folder FolderName or FolderName kind:folder to avoid scrolling through a long list that includes files with similar names.

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Treat a misbehaving Time Capsule

If the hard drive in your Mac starts misbehaving, you can run Apple’s Disk Utility (or any of numerous third-party utilities) to repair it. But what if the drive in your Time Capsule develops errors—as anecdotal evidence suggests is quite common? Although Apple has not yet provided a way to repair your Time Capsule disk directly, there are a few techniques you can try that often bring a wayward disk back to life.

If Time Machine consistently reports errors when backing up to a Time Capsule, or if your backup volume won’t mount at all, here are some things you can try:

Try repairing the disk image

Time Capsule stores Time Machine backups on disk images. Although Disk Utility can’t repair the Time Capsule disk itself, it can be used on these disk images, which more often than not are the source of the problem. To check your disk image, follow these steps:

1. Open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences and turn off Time Machine.

2. Select your Time Capsule in the sidebar of any Finder window and double-click on the folder inside it (which may be named “Data” or “Backups,” or something else of your choosing) containing your Time Machine backups. If the disk doesn’t mount automatically, click on Connect As in the dialog box that appears, and supply your credentials if prompted to do so. This folder should contain one disk image for each Mac you back up with Time Machine (and nothing else).

3. Double-click on the disk image corresponding to the Mac that’s experiencing Time Machine errors, and wait for it to mount. This sometimes takes a while; be patient.

4. Open Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities/). In the list on the left, select the disk image. Click on the First Aid tab, and then click on Repair Disk. Disk Utility examines the disk image and—if it finds any errors it can repair—fixes them. Because Disk Utility is examining a network volume, be prepared to wait much longer than you would for a comparable repair of a local volume.

Disk Utility can't see your Time Capsule disk itself, but it can see (and often repair) the disk images that contain your Time Machine backups.

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Five proven ways to get retweeted

We all like to think we're interesting. And on Twitter, that's often measured and validated by how frequently other people retweet your posts. Maybe you're looking to hear feedback on your recent blog post. Or you've found an interesting article or a funny YouTube video that you want to share with others. Aside from the instant ego boost that being retweeted provides ("Hey! They like me!"), retweeting also helps you reach a greater portion of the Twittersphere than you'd be able to on your own.

Dan Zarrella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book, knows his Twitter stats. He's combed through tens of thousands of tweets and compiled a report detailing his findings. Read on for his five tips to help you craft the kind of tweet that will get you noticed.

1. Time and day matter

Zarrella's research shows that to increase your chances of being retweeted, you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends. More specifically, Friday yields the highest number of retweets, while retweeting occurs much more frequently from 3 p.m. to midnight.

2. Choose your words carefully

Zarrella has found that the most retweetable word is "you." "The word 'you,' while very common, seems to occur especially often in retweets, indicating that if you're talking to 'me,' I am more likely to retweet it," Zarrella says. The least retweetable words: game, going, haha, lol, but, watching, work, home, night and bed. "The lesson learned here is that if you're trying to get more retweets, don't just engage in idle chit-chat or tweet about mundane activities," Zarrella suggests.

3. Include a link

In a random sample of tweets, Zarrella found that about 19 percent included a link. Compare that to a sample of retweets, and the percentage almost triples—57 percent included links, suggesting that the presence of a link may increase a tweet's chances of being shared.

4. Get friendly with bit.ly

The most successful URL shortener, according to Zarrella's research, is bit.ly, followed by ow.ly, most likely because they are newer and contain fewer characters, he says. The least retweetable URL shorteners are the older and longer tinyurl.com and twitpic.com.

5. Less is more

"New data I've been working on seems to indicate that the more frequently you Tweet links, the fewer clicks you'll get," Zarrella says. If you tweet several times an hour, you decrease the likelihood of being retweeted. Keeping your tweets to one per hour will increase your chances of being retweeted.

Staff Writer Kristin Burnham covers consumer Web and social technologies for CIO.com. She writes frequently on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. You can follow her on Twitter:@kmburnham.

Working with multiple browsers

Thanks to a lively market of third-party Web browsers, it’s not at all uncommon for Mac users to move back and forth between different browsers. For example, I regularly switch between Apple’s Safari and Mozilla Firefox over the course of the day, using each for different tasks—and occasionally open any of ten or so other browsers when I want to use one of the features it excels at.

Once you’ve decided to use more than one browser, you can treat each one independently (giving each distinct settings and bookmark lists) if you prefer. However, unless you dedicate each browser to a specific site or task (for example, to increase your security), you’ll probably want to share at least some kinds of information between browsers. Here are the top areas where you’ll want to keep your browsers in sync:

Passwords

If you let Safari remember user names and passwords for Web sites you visit (choose Safari -> Preferences, click AutoFill, and select the User Names And Passwords checkbox), it stores this information in your keychain. Other WebKit-based browsers such as The Omni Group’s free OmniWeb () (and Devon Technologies’ $50 DevonAgent () can then access those same credentials, and so can Camino (even though it uses the Gecko rendering engine). However, all the other Gecko-based browsers—including Firefox and Flock ()—store credentials independently, as does Opera 10 ().

If you want a single, system-wide repository for Web site passwords that works in virtually every browser, install Agile Web Software’s $40 1Password, which supports most popular browsers (as well as the RSS reader NetNewsWire) and also includes tools for creating strong passwords, storing secure notes, and keeping track of data such as software licenses and credit card and bank account information.

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