I use iCal [actually, it's now called "Calendar" -DT] on my MacBook extensively because of how neatly it syncs with my iPhone calendar through iCloud. I add an event and it's everywhere. Very nice. What I don't like is that if I set an event, tap it as "done" so the reminder vanishes, there's no way to have a post-event alarm or reminder appear. Or is there?

My son is in a band and he frequently sends me songs that they've recorded for me to hear what they're playing. Problem is, my iMac just complains when I try to either drag the FLAC audio files onto iTunes or just double-click them to play. Is there some way I can convert these FLAC files into MP3 or AAC or something else that iTunes can actually play?

Hey Dave. I read your article Audacity can't save mp3 audio files and am still puzzled because I downloaded the LAME Mp3 converter but still cannot convert to mp3. Do I have to put the LAME library somewhere special?

I'm a big fan of the Spaces utility in Mac OS X that lets me have multiple virtual screens [see Set Up Mac Spaces] but one thing that bugs me is that the Dashboard app shows up as a space of its own. I don't want that. How do I stop Dashboard appearing as one of my Spaces virtual workspaces?

Hi Dave. I am looking for two gently used MacBook laptops for my teen daughters. Personal computers would greatly facilitate their studies as they enter their senior year in High School and beyond.

General preferred specifications:
1. 2008 model year or newer
2. 13.3" screen
3. white, black or aluminum body

Please let me know if you or anyone you know has recently upgraded and might be looking to sell their old computer.

I'm baffled. I have a 16GB Kingston USB flash drive that I use on my Mac system and I'm trying to copy a 5GB file onto it. It's empty. But I keep getting the error "can't be copied because it's too large". What's wrong and how do I fix it?

Someone sneaks into my cubicle while I'm at lunch and takes candy out of my desk. Petty, but stupid too. I want to set up something so that my webcam on my iMac takes photos every few seconds while I'm away from my desk so I can catch the culprit! How can I do that in a stealthy manner while the computer is otherwise asleep?

I want to help my Mom enjoy TV shows and movies through iTunes on her Mac computer but she wants to have closed captions (captioning?) turned on and I don't know how to do that. Can you advise? Also, are there any free TV shows she can watch so I can avoid having her charge my account for a show just to have her turn it off after three minutes and tell me how bad it was?

I'm done with email apps on my Mac system and have completely converted to Google Mail (Gmail]. Works great expcept for one thing: in Apple Mail it's easy to have multiple email signatures, but in Gmail, you can only set one and that's now hidden with the new compose window. Frustrating. How do I manage multiple signatures in Gmail?

Will you please give the steps on how to make "ONE" multi-page PDF file from several jpg files on a Macbook running Lion? Thanks, Dave!

Every time I add new people to my Contacts list, I find that there are fields I'll never add, including AIM. What's an AIM and why would I know that about my friends and colleagues? More importantly, how do I change the default fields to match the information I want about my friends in my Contacts cards?

Am I confused? I thought that I could add people's birthdays to their Contacts (Address Book) entry in Mac OS X and then have it show up automatically on my Calendar (iCal) for that day. When I look at a new entry in Contacts, however, there's no field for "Birthday", so what am I missing?

Google Reader is going away. I read your article yesterday [see Export Subscriptions from Google Reader] and now I want to switch to a new app. In fact, you mentioned Reeder as a good application for the task, so I'm going to switch over to that. It's $4.99, but, hey, that's one cup of coffee at Starbucks, I think I can handle it. Got some tips?

Hi Dave! I have your book aimed at OSX Tiger, Learning UNIX, in which there is a section dealing with modifying the .profile to make grep display color. In the book it tells me to add the following to the .profile or .login (shell dependent)

GREP_OPTIONS="--color=always";export GREP_OPTIONS

So far, however, I have been unable to get this to work in Lion. I had no .profile or .login in my home directory but a search of the net said just make the .profile, which I did. (Can I do the same for .login or is that unnecessary under Lion?)

while --color=always does work on the command line it is so useful to me that I wanted to add it as a permanent fixture. Has this changed under Lion? If so how do I add this neat functionality to grep all the time?

I use Pages on my Mac OS X system to generate invoices for clients based on the invoice template included with the program. I like it because it's simple, neat, and has some slick formatting capabilities. Except I have a small table on the invoice page that calculates total invoice price based on hours * rate. For the first time, I've created an invoice that has a fractional hour, and if I click on the cell I see the fractional amount, but once I click out, it's rounded up and I can't send that to the client! How do I fix the formatting in Pages?

Using a Mac OS X 10.8.2 and sent messages disappear after a few days from Apple Mail. I forward msgs from Yahoo mail to my Mac. Both hold the sent items for only a few days before auto delete. How can I keep ALL sent msgs until I choose to delete them?

This is making me tear my hair out, Dave. I bought an Airport Express from Apple a few years ago and I've always just used the Airport Utility to update it, change settings, etc. Nice and easy. Until Mountain Lion, and now it's reporting that the device is obsolete and pointing to a page on the Apple site that actually has no information on how to proceed. I really don't want to buy a new one. How the heck do I update my older Airport Express?

I need to change my wireless wi-fi password on my home network and I'm using an Apple Time Capsule to both run my network and act as the network storage device for my Time Machine backups. How do I change the password with this configuration?

Even people I know who are using iTunes 11 on their Mac systems are learning about its new features and capabilities. And one of my favorites is a spin-off from the mini-player, what I call the iTunes 11 Cover Player. Let's have a look!

Thanks for your article on how to get Spaces set up on my MacBook Air [see: Turn on Spaces on Mountain Lion], but one thing I don't get. I used to assign certain programs to always lauch and operate in a certain specific Space desktop. Now I can create Spaces, but I don't see where I can assign, for example, Excel to always open in Space #2, etc. Can you help with this - am I missing something obvious?

Okay, so I read your article yesterday on how to subscribe to Science Friday in the latest and greatest, iTunes 11 [see: subscribe to podcast in iTunes 11] but now I'd like to see the other half of the equation: how do you unsubscribe from a podcast?

I'm leery about switching to iTunes 11 after hearing how different it all is. One of the main things I do with iTunes is to listen to podcasts, especially NPR podcasts. As part of me considering the switch, can you step me through the process of subscribing to a podcast?

Hi Dave! I have your book aimed at OSX Tiger, Learning UNIX, in which there is a section dealing with modifying the .profile to make grep display color. In the book it tells me to add the following to the .profile or .login (shell dependent)

GREP_OPTIONS="--color=always";export GREP_OPTIONS

So far, however, I have been unable to get this to work in Lion. I had no .profile or .login in my home directory but a search of the net said just make the .profile, which I did. (Can I do the same for .login or is that unnecessary under Lion?)

while --color=always does work on the command line it is so useful to me that I wanted to add it as a permanent fixture. Has this changed under Lion? If so how do I add this neat functionality to grep all the time?

I use Pages on my Mac OS X system to generate invoices for clients based on the invoice template included with the program. I like it because it's simple, neat, and has some slick formatting capabilities. Except I have a small table on the invoice page that calculates total invoice price based on hours * rate. For the first time, I've created an invoice that has a fractional hour, and if I click on the cell I see the fractional amount, but once I click out, it's rounded up and I can't send that to the client! How do I fix the formatting in Pages?

Using a Mac OS X 10.8.2 and sent messages disappear after a few days from Apple Mail. I forward msgs from Yahoo mail to my Mac. Both hold the sent items for only a few days before auto delete. How can I keep ALL sent msgs until I choose to delete them?

This is making me tear my hair out, Dave. I bought an Airport Express from Apple a few years ago and I've always just used the Airport Utility to update it, change settings, etc. Nice and easy. Until Mountain Lion, and now it's reporting that the device is obsolete and pointing to a page on the Apple site that actually has no information on how to proceed. I really don't want to buy a new one. How the heck do I update my older Airport Express?

I need to change my wireless wi-fi password on my home network and I'm using an Apple Time Capsule to both run my network and act as the network storage device for my Time Machine backups. How do I change the password with this configuration?

Even people I know who are using iTunes 11 on their Mac systems are learning about its new features and capabilities. And one of my favorites is a spin-off from the mini-player, what I call the iTunes 11 Cover Player. Let's have a look!

Thanks for your article on how to get Spaces set up on my MacBook Air [see: Turn on Spaces on Mountain Lion], but one thing I don't get. I used to assign certain programs to always lauch and operate in a certain specific Space desktop. Now I can create Spaces, but I don't see where I can assign, for example, Excel to always open in Space #2, etc. Can you help with this - am I missing something obvious?

Okay, so I read your article yesterday on how to subscribe to Science Friday in the latest and greatest, iTunes 11 [see: subscribe to podcast in iTunes 11] but now I'd like to see the other half of the equation: how do you unsubscribe from a podcast?

I'm leery about switching to iTunes 11 after hearing how different it all is. One of the main things I do with iTunes is to listen to podcasts, especially NPR podcasts. As part of me considering the switch, can you step me through the process of subscribing to a podcast?

Every company does it, but somehow when Apple changes the interface on an application, it throws me for a loop. The changes to iTunes for the new iTunes 11 are particularly confusing, and I now have no idea how to even find my iPhone apps in the program, let alone check for updates and update the apps as needed so it'll update the ones on my iPhone 4 when I sync. Help!?

Every time I go to a PDF link in Safari on my iMac I just get a blank, gray screen. At first I thought that they were big PDF files that needed to download, but nope, it's just a blank screen without the document ever showing up. If I view it in a different browser, the document comes up just fine, and if I save it as a file to view with Viewer, it's fine. But I want to read PDF files in Safari itself. Is that no longer an option?

I'm running Microsoft Word on my Mac OS X system and would like to save my journal locked or otherwise password protected so that someone would need to know the secret passkey to read or modify it. Is it possible to encrypt or encipher my Word docs without too much hassle on my MacBook?

I run Microsoft Word on my iMac and every so often someone tells me that they don't actually have Word and would like a copy of my screenplay as a PDF. What's the easiest way to convert a Word ".docx" file into a PDF file?

Just got an AppleTV and I'm pretty excited about it, particular the ability to wirelessly mirror whatever's showing on my Mac screen. Means I can show my Mom how to use Facebook, finally, so she'll stop calling me! I also want to use this setup to watch DVDs but something's broken on my system: whenever I try to watch a DVD with DVD Player and AirPlay is enabled, the video display is a black and white checkerboard graphic rather than the actual movie. How do I fix it so I can watch DVD movies via AirPlay??

Hi Dave, I am trying to figure out how to take pictures from iPhoto and get them onto a Pinterest Board. Any ideas how to do that?

After years of listening to people complain that iTunes was getting long in the proverbial tooth, that it was gaining too much functionality and was becoming increasingly confusing to work with, Apple finally released its rewrite and - somewhat - rethink of the entire iTunes application as iTunes 11.

Initial reaction has been quite positive by people who have spent the time to learn some of the basic functionality of the program, and negative by people who have learned the existing iTunes interface so well that they don't want any change. That's okay, if you're in the latter category, I encourage you to choose "Show Sidebar" from the "View" menu. There's that missing left side bar!

I'm definitely a fan, and the more I poke around in iTunes 11, the more impressed I am with the attention to detail in the program. The user experience team has done a good job rethinking a tired app and making it far more functional.

To show you what I mean, let's just dig around in the Mini-Player view and see all the many features and functions that have been added!

I'm a big fan of the "Find My iPhone" capability in iCloud - it helps me keep track of my Apple devices and even lets me help my wife find her iPhone when it, inevitably, gets lost somewhere during her day. Problem is, as I add new devices, I can't see how to remove old or obsolete devices. Is that possible?

Microsoft Windows. Whether you use it daily or prefer to live on the Macintosh side of the OS street, it's a huge part of modern computing environments, and the release of the new Windows 8 has proven that the company still has some interesting tricks up its sleeve. The interface is completely new, it boots dramatically faster, runs faster on even slower hardware, and has a ton of new features and capabilities.

If you want to cover all the operating systems, however, you might have already made the switch from Windows to Mac OS X, keeping a toe in the old world by using the powerful VMware Fusion program to run Windows 7 (or any other release of Windows) in a "virtual machine". Works great, actually!

The question is, can you run Windows 8 in VMware Fusion and will it run quickly so it's usable, or will it be such a dog that it'll prove unusably slow?

A developer friend of mine just sent me a redemption code for his new game in the Mac App Store so I don't have to pay for it. I'm excited to try it out, but while I know how to redeem codes in iTunes, I don't have a clue about the App Store. Can you step me through?

I'm borrowing my sister's new MacBook Pro and noticed it has an HDMI connector on the side. Cool. Now, can I watch some of the movies I own in iTunes on my huge Sony TV using an HDMI cable? If so, what's the trick and are there any gotchas for me to avoid?

I've been running Microsoft Windows 7 within VMWare Fusion and it works great, but I recently noticed that the virtual drive has expanded to take up a whole lotta space on my real hard drive on the Mac. Is there some way to trim it down? I need the disk space...

I was giving a presentation at the office this afternoon and a weird thing happened when I plugged in the projector: that screen became the main screen on my Mac, even having the top menu bar. Every app I'd open would show up there. I ended up "mirroring" displays so I could work on my computer and show everyone the presentation itself. In the future, how do I switch which is the main screen in Mac OS X?

It's the stuff of digital nightmares: you boot up your computer and the drive's corrupt, or you plug in an external drive -- or even USB drive -- and it doesn't appear on the desktop at all, or shows up without the files and data you need. Sure you can restart and hope, but a smarter strategy is to try some disk recovery software. You can use Disk Utility that's included with Mac OS X but it's not going to help you recover the lost data, just fix any easy formatting hiccups on the media, commonly producing a functional but blank drive. Yikes.

Enter the awkwardly named Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery Software application. A quick download, it does a good job of scanning broken or corrupt drives and making recovery of the information thereon a breeze...

Over the last few years, I've added more and more people to my Address Book on my Mac [tip: it's now called "Contacts" --DT] and I'd like to prune things down and get rid of some of the obsolete entries. But I can't figure out how to delete them! How do you delete people or entries ["cards"] from Address Book?

My son's been playing with my iMac and now suddenly the application Dock is not along the bottom any more. Where did it go and how can I get the Dock back on my Mac? Sure hope he didn't break anything!

I'm working on a report for school and my advisor told me that I should add some decorative borders to the opening pages. I'm working in Apple Pages and have absolutely no idea how to do this. Help!

I have a new MacBook Pro from Apple with the retina display and I really like it but I'm a bit confused about the "power nap" mode. Apple says it lets the computer keep doing useful things while it's otherwise asleep, but I want to have some control over it and probably will turn it off so I don't waste power. What's your take?

I have a couple of Mac programs I use all the time and would like to create shortcuts for them on my Mac OS X desktop. How do I easily do that?

I just bought a MacBook and am excited at my shiny fast new computer, but people keep telling me to get AppleCare too, so that Apple takes care of my computer for three years, instead of just one. Okay. But do I have to buy AppleCare from Apple, and when I do, how do I register my computer with the AppleCare Protection Plan program?

I used to have Spaces enabled on my old Mac system and loved it. A different virtual screen for different apps. On Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, however, I can't figure out how to enable it and get Spaces working again and it's driving me crazy. Help!

I was so frustrated when I switched from Snow Leopard to Lion and found that the "Save As..." menu item had vanished! I used that all the time to dupe a file and create another regardless of application, but suddenly it didn't work. Now I'm running OS X 10.8 and I still can't restore it to my "File" menu. Yes, I know that if I hold down the Option key it magically shows up, but jeez, is there a way to restore "Save As...", even third party software?

I just handed my friend a USB drive with some files on it when he asked me "why don't you use AirDrop when you're copying files?" Dave, what's AirDrop and how would I have used it to copy files from my MacBook to his MacBook Air?

I'm running VMWare Fusion and read on a discussion board that there's a way to disable debugging in the application so that my Windows virtual machine runs faster. How do I disable that debugging feature?

My daughter sometimes loses track of her older MacBook by taking it to a friend's place and leaving it there. No harm done, it eventually shows up again, but I was wondering if there's a service similar to Apple's "Find My iPhone" that would let us find her computer?

Okay, so I kind of dove deeply into your tutorial on how to create virtual drives for VMWare Fusion on my Mac system. Fun. But now I have four extra 2GB drives in my virtual Windows system. What's the easy way to delete these virtual Fusion hard drive images?

I have so many darn calendars it drives me crazy. I want to just consolidate everything on iCal so that it automatically sync's with my iPhone as well as my laptop and desktop systems. But as far as I can see, there's no way to actually subscribe to a Facebook calendar in iCal. Am I right, or is there a trick to ICal + Facebook?

I'm baffled. I'm running VMWare Fusion on my Mac and it works well, but I want to set up a second virtual drive for it so I can test some software that copies files back and forth, keeping folders in sync. What I'm doing doesn't matter, though. What matters is that I can't seem to figure out how to add the second drive. Help!

It's a problem that few people talk about, but it's real: when you're using a wireless network, most of your data is traveling through the air "in the clear" (that is, unencrypted) and anyone with the right software could easily be tapping into the data stream and stealing your information, email messages, passwords, credit card numbers, and anything else you might be sending, viewing or receiving. Sure some sites now offer a secure connection, but there are a lot more sites that don't, leaving it your responsibility to ensure that your information is safe.

There are a number of ways to solve this problem, some expensive (your own personal encrypted mifi hotspot) and others complicated (only connect online through your own private network), but there's also a slick solution that automatically encrypts every single byte of data you send or receive by creating what's called a virtual private network or "VPN". Put one of these in place and dubious hackers and stalkers will always be stymied trying to "sniff" your data packets and all your information will be safe. Smart.

Problem is, getting a VPN set up can be complex. Enter Hotspot Shield by AnchorFree, Inc. Even better, you can either opt to use it for free -- in return for a small advert popping up -- or for a small fee you can subscribe to the service.

Let's have a look.

It's about ten seconds after you empty the trash on your Mac OS X system that you realize you haven't had a successful backup for two months and that critical report for the boss is no longer on your Desktop. If it went into the Trash and you then emptied the trash, you're out of luck. Time to get some Red Bull and pull an all-nighter recreating the document.

Or is it? With the addition of Time Machine, Apple has a nice built-in file backup system that also helps with version tracking, but if you don't have it set up properly or simply haven't run a backup between when you created and accidentally deleted the file, it's not going to help you out.

That's why I was enthused to install and experiment with Remo Software's popular Recover Mac program (they have a matching app for Windows users too). To test it, I deleted various files and tried to recover them a few minutes, hours, or even days later from the file system.

I've been using laptop computers for so many years that it seems odd to need any sort of external peripheral, let alone a mouse that replaces the effective and built-in trackpad on my MacBook Pro. Still, great design is great design and when Logitech sent us one of their tiny matchbox-size Cube mice, I was interested in giving it a whirl, and was pleased to find out that it's far more useful than you'd expect at first glance.

When I used to work on a Linux system, there was a utility we had that would let me take screen captures every 30 seconds while my computer was otherwise unattended, as a way to see if anyone else was using it or not. I liked it. Now I'd like to do the same on my Mac system. Possible?

I might be misremembering, but it seems to me that my MacBook used to automatically switch timezones when I traveled from the East Coast to anywhere else in the United States, but now it's constantly disconcerting when it stays stuck to New York time even as I'm in Chicago or Los Angeles. Is there something I have to do for my Mac OS X system to automatically switch timezone when I'm traveling?

My brother upgraded to a 3TB Apple Time Capsule and gave me his old 500gb Time Capsule. Why you can't just pop the drive and put in another one I don't understand, but meanwhile, I want to reformat or reset the older unit so I can make it my own and set it up in my dorm room. How do I reset the Time Capsule?

Someone from IT just sent out a company directory as a PDF, which is great, but the PDF is encrypted, which is a pain in the butt. Is there any way to remove the password from the PDF file on my Mac OS X system?

I'm a professional copyeditor and spend a lot of time marking up documents for clients. I've historically used Microsoft Word, but I'd like to migrate to Apple's Pages program since it's becoming more popular in the field. I know Pages supports revision markup tracking, but how do I enable it for a specific document?

I like the iCloud service that lets me automatically synchronize photos between my different Apple products, my iPhone, iPad and MacBook, but while it works surprisingly well (just like the ad!) there are definitely some photos that I don't want to have shared across everything. Can I delete individual photos from the photostream?

I enabled the Apple iCloud service "Photo Stream" on my iPhone, but the pictures don't magically show up on my MacBook Pro like they do in the TV advert. Presumably, there's something I have to do for it to work on my Mac. What's the trick? And is there a Photo Stream app??

I created a six page contact sheet in Aperture as per your instructions, but the resultant PDF file is crazy big, too big for me to email to a client. What happened and how do I shrink it down?

I'm a professional photographer and in the old days, I'd share sets of photos with clients by sending them proof sheets, a single print that would have ten or more thumbnails on it. Now I'm working digital and there's a lot I like about the change, but I haven't figured out how to create PDF proof sheets or contact sheets to send to clients. What's the easiest way to do this in Aperture?

The DVD drive on my MacBook Pro has died and I don't want to spend almost $200 for a replacement. My sister had a MacBook Air and while she sold it, she still has the external Superdrive that looks like a USB-based CDROM / DVDROM drive. It worked just fine with her Air, but when I plug it into my MacBook Pro, it's dead. Is there a way to use it, or is the drive really dead?

My brother just bought me a cool new Logitech wireless speaker and I'm eager to try it with my MacBook Pro, but it's not Airplay, it's a bluetooth speaker. I think my MacBook has bluetooth, but how do I pair the speaker and use it with my Mac OS X laptop?

Hello I have purchased an Apple laptop. It's offering me a choice of 6 WiFi networks to connect thru. I don't have a clue as to which one to use. Can you please point me in the right direction. Thank you!

Another question about the built-in Mac spell dictionary. (I did read the previous question How can I forget or edit a learned word in the Mac spelling dictionary?)

Under User>Library>Spelling> I have both LocalDictionary and en.

What is the relationship between these two? Adding a great number of specialized, technical words one at a time as they appear in my writing is taking a lot of time. Is there a way to add a great number of (specialized) words to one of these?

Every time I go to Amazon.com I see that the Kindle version of a book I want to buy is less expensive than the print edition. Coupled with it being more environmentally friendly (no shipping, no printing, no hassle with it taking up space on my shelf) I'd like to switch over. But I don't want to buy an actual Kindle device. Is there a way to read Kindle ebooks on my Mac or PC system?

I take a lot of photos. So many that Aperture is starting to bog down. I was talking with a fellow photographer and he said that he splits his Aperture library every six months. Sounds like a good idea. How do I create a new Aperture library or, better, move a project into a new library?

I need to test out some Web site programming on a Linux system and have determined that the Ubuntu distribution is ideal. My question: what's the best, easiest way to install Ubuntu Linux on my Mac system so I can run all my tests?

I am constantly running commands in Terminal.app on my MacBook and then copying and pasting the results into email messages or documents. Yes, I'm a tech writer. What I'm wondering is if there's any way to actually copy and past into the Mac system wide copy/paste buffer directly from the command line?

I know that there's a slick iPhone and iPad app store [ed. note: generally this is called the "iTunes Store" or "App Store", depending on your preference] but I understand that there's also a similar online software store for Mac OS X applications and games too? Cool. Where is this Mac App Store and how do I use it to buy and download games and other apps?

I don't know how it works, but most of the time when I insert a music CD and go to rip it into my iTunes library, all the track information is present. I always figured it's something encoded on the disc itself, but maybe I'm wrong. I recently went to import a new music CD in iTunes and it had zero track info. Is that something I can fix?

I remember that there used to be a cool equalizer feature in iTunes that let me compensate for my rather treble-heavy headphones by boosting the bass on my songs. I looked on the Controls menu, however, and it's gone. Is it really gone or have they hidden it?

I constantly take photos with a pocket camera and slip the SDCARD into the slot on my MacBook Pro. Nothing happens, which is fine. Problem is, I don't want to use iPhoto to import the pictures, most of the time I just want to email them to someone without any archiving or library software involved. Suggestions?

I have a huge library of music, Dave, and want to be able to enjoy it on all my Apple devices, but am tired of having to pay for the biggest possible storage on each so that I have space. I've read about iTunes Music Match [ed: actually, it's called "iTunes Match"] and want to know if it'll solve my storage problem while still giving me access to all my tunes?

I've been tasked with writing a series of tweets for a Black Friday marketing campaign and am finding it a bit tricky because I don't know how to easily check line length for a long series of lines. I'm on a Mac and can get around in Terminal. Is there some script you can share with me to check this, Dave?

I recently upgraded to OS X Lion and your earlier method of recovering a wifi network password [see Recover wifi passwords in Mac OS X] does not work. Double clicking on my network does nothing. Any ideas? I'm trying to connect my apple TV.

Hi Dave! Can you please tell me how can I delete a page from a PDF document? Some pages are blank and I want to delete them but don't know how.

Some forty years ago I played with an "old time" string band. We performed at a concert, a reel to reel tape of which has recently surfaced and been converted to a CD which I have downloaded onto my iTunes. The tunes, now part of a play list, show as "track 1", "track 2", etc. and I can`t for the life of me figure out how to add titles. "Grace Notes" is of no help. Let me sneak in a second question. Another old tape to CD has been put into iTunes (twice!) and I can`t find the thing anywhere! Ideas? Thanks so much for helping out an old geezer who should probably be kept at a distance from anything more complicated than a dial phone.....

I just upgraded from MobileMe to iCloud and I don't see much different, except my iCal calendar is now empty! This is a huge problem as I use it to schedule patients and, well, it's made me rather anxious. Help!!

I've been on MobileMe for years now, and love that it could automatically sync calendars on my iPhone, iPad and computers, even to where I could access my calendar (and contacts, lest I forget) from any Web browser in the world. Very handy for someone who lives and dies by his calendar. Now there's a new player in town, iCloud, and it's a mandatory upgrade for all MobileMe users.

How can you most easily upgrade your MobileMe account to iCloud?

I'm really enthused about the possibility of wireless sync on my iPhone with the release of the new version of iTunes and iOS 5 for my iPhone 4, but rather than just thrash around I am hoping you can tell me how to quickly set up this feature on my Mac?

Hey Dave, is there a way to change the default weather site on the Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) dashboard widget?

I'm sick of Flash eating up all my resources when I'm on a page that includes some Flash content and want to just completely remove it from my Mac OS X system. Is that possible, and if so, how do I remove Flash from my MacBook Pro?

I'm running a copy of microsoft office on the iMac I just bought and I've noticed it still carries the old owners name when saving files. Is this easily changed?

I am running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and it's very cool, but I don't run Time Machine for proper backups. I know, I know, I should do so, but I don't have any external computers on the network to host the drive. Anyway, I can see that Lion includes version control and am wondering how you actually use it with a file. For example, if I'm editing a photo, save the edits, then change my mind the next day, can I back up to the previous version of the file?

I've just upgraded from VMware Fusion 3 to the latest 4.0 release since I'm running Lion and the company says it's a lot faster, but now it's complaining that Windows 7 is out of date and needs to be updated? What's going on and how do I fix it?

I want to start exploring the new Microsoft Windows 8 developer preview that was released but I don't want to overwrite the OS on my Win7 laptop. Instead, I was wondering if I could successfully install Windows 8 DP on my MacBook Pro using the latest version of VMWare Fusion (v 4.0)? Possible?

What's the fastest way to install a new font on my iMac if I'm running Mac OS X Lion?

I find myself in a situation where I want to share a few galleries of photographs with clients, but don't want to send them the originals -- that's my lifeblood as a pro. In the old days, I'd be showing them a contact sheet or proof sheet, but now that it's all digital, I'm a bit stuck. Can I produce a contact sheet within Aperture?

For my job I constantly have to convert from Euros to US Dollars, with some other currencies thrown in by overseas customers to keep things complicated. I've been using an app on my iPhone for this but I'm confident that there's a smarter solution for currency conversion on my computer. What's your suggestion, Dave?

I've used iPhoto for a long time on my iMac and one of its best features is the ability to select a pile of photos and share them with my Facebook friends. I've recently shifted to Aperture and like its additional power and capabilities but can't get it to connect with my Facebook account any more. If it matters, I did set up the Facebook 2-step verification security, as you recommended. Are these related?

I'm bored with the desktop images and screensavers on my iMac, Dave. I work for NASA and would like to have a random set of space and science images used instead, and am fine if it's the same photo library for both the desktop and screen saver. How do I set that up without buying a screensaver library?

I installed a demo of Microsoft Office 2010 before I realized that the Apple iWorks suite gives me everything I need, between Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Now I want to remove Microsoft Office from my Mac OS X system, but there's no "uninstaller". Um, how do I completely, cleanly remove Office?

I really am liking Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion". Lots of cool new features, more of the elegant Apple touch on the operating system, but there's one screen that just bugs me: the boring background grey image when I go to log in to the system. What's up with that? How can I fix it??

I've finally got our new Mac Mini (running Snow Leopard, not Lion) configured as a file and print server for the legal office and it's great except for the fact that when I mark folders open for sharing, sometimes we find that folders within that folder [ed note "subfolders"] are still blocked from access. This is upsetting some of the paralegals and making my life hell. How do I fix this without having dozens or hundreds of sharepoints?

I'm really working on better organization and management of my email inbox and archives, and want to know now that I'm using Mac OS X Lion's new version of Apple Mail, whether I can rename or otherwise customize the "flags" that are included in the program?

I'm diligent with my backups. Probably more so than just about anyone who reads this. I have a constant backup to a 500GB network hard disk via Apple's set-and-forget Time Machine and I do manual monthly backups to a different 1TB drive, snapshots of my entire disk. Insurance.

But my backup strategy has the same limitation of most people's approach: if something happens to my house (a thorough break-in and theft, fire, meteor strike, etc) (alright, the last is less likely than the former!) then I'm hosed. Worst case scenario: Someone rips off my laptop while I'm on a business trip and simultaneously there's a fire and my house burns down. No backups. Nothing. Including the literally tens of thousands of irreplaceable photos of my children and our lives together, as well as my travels, manuscripts for my books, and much more.

The solution is something that wasn't an option even five years ago: a backup into the so-called cloud, where the data all lives in a secure data storage facility. I've looked at options, but with almost 400GB of data in my personal document folder, pictures, movies, etc., the cost was prohibitive. Then a friend mentioned she really liked Backblaze and I saw that they offered unlimited backup space on their cloud servers for $5/mo. That's cheap enough. But does it really work?

I've read that one of the cool new features of Mac OS X Lion is that you can add digital signatures to PDFs in the Preview app. I sign a lot of contracts and agreement letters and would love to avoid the print -> sign -> scan -> recycle cycle. How do I get this feature hooked up for my Mac system?

I'm trying to burn a CDROM disk with the data that's contained on a disk image (.dmg) file that I've downloaded. I know enough to open up Disk Utility but can't quite figure out how to burn the image once it's loaded. A friend said I should convert the .dmg into a .iso first, but that seems needlessly complicated...

I just switched over to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and am kinda weirded out about what happens when I go to edit a file that's more than a few weeks old. Instead of letting me edit the file like the computer used to do, now I get an error that the file is locked "because you haven't made any changes to it recently"? What's the story and how do I disable this feature?

Upgraded my iMac to Mac OS X Lion and I really like it so far but one thing's driving me bonkers: the icons in the sidebar of my Apple Mail are way the heck too big and I can't for the life of me find where to tweak or change them. It's just not part of the Mail preferences. HELP!

I've just started using Aperture on my iMac rather than iPhoto because I have been told I have too many photos for iPhoto to work well and I was definitely seeing a slowdown in performance. I really miss the output options in iPhoto though, most especially the ability to make photo books and order prints. Can I do any of that in Aperture?

I just bought an adapter and HDMI cable so I could hook my MacBook up to the HD TV set in my mountain cabin and it looks great, but there's no sound! Do I need a separate sound cable for this to work? I thought that HDMI could handle audio and video?

I've been experimenting with a beta release of Apple iTunes on my Mac system and decided I didn't really want to use it after all. When I went back to my regular iTunes app, however, I hit an error and don't know how to proceed. It said "The file iTunes Library.itl cannot be read because it was created by a newer version of iTunes." How do I fix it?

I'm fixing up some data records in our customer database and find that I am constantly converting uppercase letters to lowercase letters. The entire system is Web-based, so I'm working in Mac Safari. Is there some way to speed things up or automate the conversion of the text?

I'm frequently asked by people for recommendations on computers and while I generally encourage people to always go for the fastest, newest they can afford, I've also started to appreciate the amazing deals you can find with factory refurbished gear. Whether you're an Apple fanboy or a PC person, all the big manufacturers find that they have excess stock when they roll out new models, and those 12-18 month old models can be great deals!

The biggest limitation for modern computing, however, and this is true whether you're running Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows or even Linux, is the amount of memory you have in the system. Known as "RAM" or random access memory, it's what all the running applications use to manage and process data. Have too little and you'll find that you can only run one app without things slowing down, but have a lot and every application you use will run faster, often noticeably faster.

That's why even though I had 4GB of RAM in my mid-2010 Apple MacBook Pro, I was very interested in an upgrade to 8GB from Otherworld Computing, a company that's long been a friend of AskDaveTaylor. My concern was how difficult it would be to disassemble my tightly integrated MacBook, pop out the old memory cards and insert new ones without messing up the rest of the system.

I need to record a narrated movie of me solving a problem on my Mac OS X system and am a bit stumped about how to proceed. I read on one site that Quicktime Player has this capability, but don't know how to use it. Can you help me out of a bind by showing me how to make a screen recording in Quicktime Player?

It's not the first time that malware of some sort has reared its ugly head in the Mac OS X world, but MacDefender -- and its variants MacGuard, MacProtector and "Apple Security Center" -- are particularly onerous because the programmers have figured out how to install the software on your computer without you having to enter your admin password. There's a simple tweak you can make to your Web browser that makes you far, far less likely to get into the digital blackmail of a program that requires an expensive upgrade to remove unnamed viruses from your computer though...

I have a CD that a musician friend of mine sent and I am eager to listen to it, but it's all in some weird format that my iMac can't understand: "FLAC". What is FLAC format and how do I convert it to a format that iTunes (and my iPod) will understand?

I am trying to have a completely wire-free office because I've spent way too many years suffering through a tangle of cords. Works great, and my new iMac works great with the Apple wireless keyboard and Apple Magic Trackpad. Except for one thing: I can't get the computer to wake from sleep by using either peripheral, so I end up having a USB keyboard plugged in for just that purpose. Seems lame. Help?

This is probably like remedial Mac OS X 101, but I just got a new Magic Trackpad and am excited to use it, but can't figure out how to have my iMac know it's there. Since it's wireless, there's gotta be some trick, but my wi-fi / airport system never sees it?

I don't have much spare money, but now when I check the battery status on my MacBook it doesn't just show the remaining time (which is always alarmingly short!) but it says "Replace Now". Yikes. Can I ignore that, or do I need to replace my MacBook battery, and if so, how much does it cost??

If you're a Mac person and do lots of presentations, you've probably already learned the many benefits of migrating from old-school Microsoft PowerPoint to the slick Keynote presentation application from Apple. It's part of the iWork suite and with very little effort just makes your presentations that much more attractive and polished.

What you might not realize is that there are some very compelling reasons to run it dual-screen rather than the simple, rather retro "mirrored screen" mode when you have a projection system or bigger screen plugged into your computer.

I move around from office to office and would love to be able to use their local printer on occasion rather than carry my own or send things to the local Kinko's Office facility and pay per-page. I know the Mac can see local printers, but how do I tap into that for my own printouts?

This is kinda complicated, but I have a cool new Samsung ML-25x series printer hooked up to my Windows computer and it works great. Really happy with it. My boyfriend has a Mac laptop and when he's at my place he wants to be able to print on it too, without emailing me the printouts beforehand. I figured out how to "share" the printer on my XP system, but he can't figure out how to hook it up wirelessly on his MacBook. Tips? Hints? Thanks!

I've been learning more about Pages (part of Apple iWorks) and am wondering if there's a template document, premade layout or similar that will let me quickly create an attractive invoice to send to clients?

I'm getting into my new MacBook and am excited to try out the new Apple Mac App Store. I'd like to also get FaceTime so I can have video chats with my wife, who has an iPhone and is constantly on the road. How do I buy FaceTime (or any other App for that matter) from within the Mac App Store?

I have been trying to make the switch from Microsoft Office to Apple iWorks and it's been going well but I just hit a problem in Pages that I can't figure out. Is there any way to sort text in a Pages document? I can't figure it out...

I'm hugely grateful that my children's school publishes an iCal calendar so I can have school events integrated into my business and personal calendar. Problem is, when I subscribed iCal picked a color that is exactly the same as my business calendar color. Can I change the color of a subscribed calendar in iCal?

As someone who has both an iPhone and an iMac, I've become quite a fan of Apple's Address Book utility. I know it can keep track of birthdays too, but I don't know if something's broken or what, but I never get a "birthday" field to fill in. How do I enter a birthday into someone's Address Book entry?

I really like Aperture, but I have to say that it's pretty crazy slow when I start it up, often taking a few minutes before I can use it on my iMac. That can't be right, even with a lot of photos in the library. Are there any ways to speed Aperture up??

I have switched from Microsoft Word on my MacBook and iMac to using Apple's Pages document editing program. I like it a lot but can't figure out how to create password-protected files, which is important for the work I do as a therapist. I searched on Google and found a bunch of people saying it's not possible, but Apple wouldn't have created a program like Pages without including this feature, would they? How do I password protect or encrypt a Pages file, Dave?

I have my iMac set up so that when it wakes up from sleep you need to enter my password to use it, which works great in preventing my kids from using it without permission. Problem is, they've realized that if they just restart the computer it automatically logs in to my account, no password required. Not good. How can I fix this loophole and keep my Mac system more secure?

I used to leech Internet access from a neighbor, but after they gave me grief about it, I set up my own wireless network and am paying for my own Internet. Good citizen, right? Problem is, every time I start up my trusty old MacBook it automatically picks my neighbor's network and I have to explicitly switch it to use my own. Isn't there some way to fix this annoying wifi network behavior??

I would like to have iTunes automatically start up every time I restart my iMac. I know there's a way to do that on my Mac OS X system, but I don't know how. Can you explain, please?

I've been working on some documents with a colleague in London and it's driving me a bit bonkers that his spellings constantly trigger the spelling filter in iWorks. He just ignores it and blames it on me having created the document here in the States, but can't we just switch it to use British English?

At a conference last week i saw someone make some sort of finger motion on his MacBook Air trackpad and have the screen "zoom in" and get bigger, so he could explain something to his listeners. Awesome. I want. How do I do this?

Today's the day, Apple released the Mac App Store, which I'm pretty psyched about. Finally, the ease of buying and managing applications that makes my iPad a breeze available for Macintosh apps too. But how do I get started, I don't see it magically showing up on my desktop!

When I download apps that are distributed as virtual disks (.dmg), the background of the Finder window is often different and pretty darn cool. I want to be able to tweak the background of some of my Finder windows just like they do. What's the trick?

Every so often one of the game I like to play gets stuck and becomes unresponsive on my Mac system. I can't select it, clicking on its window just produces a spinning wheel, and I end up having to reboot. Sucks. Is there an alternative solution?

While I was shopping for presents last Christmas, I kept having family members wander by and closely eyeball my screen. Not good. I know if I leave the mouse alone for a few minutes that my screen saver will launch, but is there a way to have it immediately launch to keep my screen away from prying eyes?

I run Internet Explorer on my work PC and Firefox on my Mac at home and would love to have their bookmarks stay in sync. I have a Mobile Me account that I got with my Mac and seem to recall that can work with Windows systems too. Can that be used to keep my browser bookmarks in sync across Windows 7 and Mac OS X?

I have a nifty wireless wifi speaker setup in my office where we use AirPlay on our Apple devices to send music to the speakers from iPhones, iPads and our Mac computers. Works awesome and it's built around an old Airport Express, but I realized that anyone can find and access the speakers, not just people in my office. Is there a way to password protect the speakers?

I need to go into the Apple Store to talk with them about my broken iPod [ed note: see my article how to fix your broken iPod first, perhaps it'll help?] and was told that it's far smarter to make an appointment at the "Genius Bar" than to just walk in and hope that there's space in the schedule. How do I make a genius bar appointment?

I use Safari on my MacBook and have noticed something really frustrating with how it handles bookmarks in the "Topsites" area: they don't stick around! When I quit the app and restart it, the pages I've saved as topsite bookmarks have vanished. What's the story and how do I get topsites to work properly, Dave?

I read about the addition of a new feature called AirPlay with the latest update to iOS, the operating system on my AppleTV unit (and my iPad, if I'm correct), but for the life of me, I can't find it nor can I figure out how to use it. Supposedly I can push audio directly from my computer or iPad to my AppleTV, but I'm lost. Can you help?

I've been reading along on your series about the Find My iPhone [iTunes link] application and its slick remote security features [ed: start with How to use Find My iPhone on an iPad, then read How to Remote Lock your Apple iPhone] but for reasons I don't reall understand, when I signed in to my Mobile Me account to use the service, it listed a bunch of devices I no longer have. I want to clean the list up, but I just don't see how to do it on my iPhone??

According to Apple, I can now use the "Find my iPhone" feature to make sure that I never lose my new iPad. Nice, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how to turn it on, even with the latest iOS iPad firmware updates. What's the secret, Dave?

I'm confused: on my Mac when I go to install new software sometimes I just drag and drop it and everything's fine, but other times I get "item in use" errors and have to reboot before I can install the new app. What's up with that?

My Dad gave me a spare external disk drive and while it's something I imagine will be useful, it's really slow to work with. My Mac pal said it's because it's formatted for a PC and that I need to reformat it to be in Mac OS X disk format. How do I do that?

This is kinda crazy, but if I have my MacBook Pro running when I'm controlling my new Apple TV with the little remote, it actually also responds to the button pushes. Where this gets crazy is if I'm looking for a video or popping around on Netflix: suddenly my laptop starts playing music too! Is there some way to disable this weird feature?

I have an Apple TV and like the little silver remote that's included, but a buddy told me that I can actually use my iPhone to control the device if I'm in the house and skip the remote gizmo entirely. Cool. How do I do that??

I use paperless billing to save on mailing costs, but would really like to have copies of my bills directly on my computer. My concern is that it's a lot of confidential data if I were to ever lose my laptop. Is there a way to save those PDF reports in a way that requires a password to read them?

I saw a demo of a video chat using FaceTime where one person was on their MacBook and the other was on their iPhone 4. Incredible! How do I set up my Mac so I can have face to face chats with my girlfriend, even when she's on the road with her iPhone 4?

I'm so darn frustrated! Every time I try to open up a Microsoft Office document in Apple Pages, Apple Keynote or Apple Numbers, I get a warning message about fonts Calibri and Cambria being unavailable. Every time. Yet the documents aren't using the typeface anyway. What gives and, more importantly, how can I fix it so I don't see the $#@$# missing font errors?

I'm probably going backwards compared to most people, but I have been using Firefox and am tired of it crashing all the time, so I want to go back to Safari on my MacBook. Problem is, I don't know how to copy across my bookmarks bar and it's pretty tweaked for the way I browse.

I have fallen in love with my Apple iPad. It's so much more fun and interesting than a Kindle, but there's one thing I haven't figured out yet: how can I copy and read PDF files on the iPad? I know you can do it, I just can't figure out how to copy and read PDFs?

I've made the switch from Microsoft PowerPoint to Apple Keynote, but when I open some of my old presentations, they look terrible and are too small. How can I fix them without redoing the slides one-by-one?

I've been hearing a lot about Ping, the music-based social network that's been added to Apple's iTunes 10 system, but don't really get it. Can you show me how to get started and share some thoughts on whether it's worth the effort to join or not, Dave?

I read your earlier article on how to subscribe to RSS feeds in Safari - thanks! - but now I have the opposite question: How do I unsubscribe to RSS feeds with Safari?

I get so much email that I find that sometimes I miss events from my favorite Meetup group. Is there some way to actually just import the calendar events into my iCal calendar? Or, better, subscribe to the group's calendar so that it's always up-to-date? Thanks!

I listen to a lot of audio books on my train commute into Boston, buying used CDs and ripping them into iTunes, then copying them onto my iPhone. Problem is, I can end up with 80, 90, 100 or more tracks and sometimes it's crazy how they aren't played in order, driving me insane! Not good. I have heard that there's a better way to import audio books into iTunes, something about consolidating or merging tracks, but don't know how to do it. Do you know this secret, Dave?

I get a lot of Facebook event invitations and while it's not too hard to go to the Facebook site and see my calendar there, I'd love to have the events show up on iCal on my iMac. Is that possible?

I've been working with windowing systems on computers, graphical user interfaces, for over twenty-five years. My first taste was the MIT X Window System back when Apple was selling the Lisa and Microsoft was trying to get people interested in something called Windows 3.1.

One of the very best features of the X Window Systems (or "X Windows") was its virtual workspaces, where you could "virtually" have as many monitors as you wanted, and could use simple keystrokes to switch between them.

This feature is included in Mac OS X and has been for a long time, and it's called "Spaces". If you don't already use it, you're really missing out on one of the gems of the Mac system, a feature that's pure gold for productivity in my opinion...

I will appreciate you explaining how to forget words from the Mac speller. That is, I use the spelling checker in Mac OS X and click on "Learn Spelling" as I go so that it doesn't flag people's names, etc. Problem is, I accidentally told it to learn a word that isn't misspelled and now I want to have it "unlearn" the misspelling.

I have a conference call every morning - same number, same access code. I'd like to set up iCal so that as one of the "reminders" Google Voice calls my phone and connects me to the conference call automatically. This should be possible... Can you figure it out?

How do you hide files and applications from showing up in the today, yesterday, and past week section of the finder sidebar?

My brother sent me some really cool wireless bluetooth speakers for my computer and I can't figure out how to make them work. Is there some secret to getting a MacBook to use a bluetooth speaker system?

I'm freaking out: I just launched iTunes on my Mac and it popped up a window saying "This copy of iTunes will expire in 77 hours". WTH? How can my copy of iTunes expire? I'm running Mac OS X 10.6.2, if that makes a difference...

As part of some user interface testing I'm involved with on an Ubuntu Linux system, I find myself frequently having to rename groups of files in a sequential manner. That is, I'll have files like "output mm-dd-yyyy at hh:mm:ss" and need to rename them to "testrun-xx-file-yy". Is there any way to automate this so I don't have to go crazy typing?

I'm enamored of MobileMe, the data sharing and sync service from Apple, but $99/year seems pretty steep. Is there a cheaper way that I can renew my MobileMe membership and save a few dollars?

I downloaded Safari 5 for my Mac OS X system - an iMac - and am stymied. How do I install any sort of extensions for Safari 5?

This is so weird: I just bought a new 500GB external hard drive but when I hook it up to my iMac, I get a little "not allowed" symbol every time I try to copy anything onto the device! Digging around, it appears to be connected "read only". HELP!

By default, there are some pretty nice screen savers on my iMac, but I'm wondering if there are any third-party apps available, and if so, what are some of the best? Do you have a screensaver running, Dave, and if so, which one?

Just picked up my new MacBook Pro yesterday. The dashboard came with Cupertino, CA defaulted as weather and time. I can't figure out how to get my home town as the default location, even though I marked it as such numerous times in the Yahoo weather page. Any suggestions as to how I can change this default setting?

Hi, when I switch our Mac on it automatically starts Pages up. This is really annoying as it is hardly ever Pages we want to be in. I have looked on various menus to try and stop this happening but I am still none the wiser how to stop it and still don't know why it started doing it. Please help.

I have an iPad and a MacBook Pro and it struck me that it should be possible for me to use the iPad as a second display. Can I do that? If so, what's the best solution that doesn't cost an arm and a leg?

This is just weird. I've been using Aperture 3 on my iMac for quite a while and it's been going great, I love this program! Problem is, I just got an iPad and want to drop some photo projects onto it from Aperture on my iMac and when I click on "Sync Photos from Aperture" I get an error about the library not being visible and previews needing to be shared? But I can't figure out what needs to be tweaked for things to work!

I'm finally selling my old PowerBook in favor of a new MacBook and while I'm excited, I am also worried that I get rid of every trace of myself on the system. Most importantly, I've heard that I need to unauthorize [ed: deauthorize, actually] iTunes on my system. How do I do that?

I have a folder full of important files that I want to share with my Dad, but it's too much to email and I don't want him to have to figure out something like dropbox. Instead, I want to use the old fashioned approach of creating a CDROM on my new MacBook. But there's no "burning" app so how do I proceed?

I've been experimenting with different photo management applications on my new iMac system and am impressed with Aperture. Except for one little glitch: sometimes when I plug in my camera it automatically shows up in Apple's Aperture, and other times it doesn't. When it isn't showing up, how can I find my DSLR digital camera in Aperture?

I have a protected [secured] PDF document that my lawyer sent me and I want to save it on my iMac but I want to change the password from what she thought would be memorable to something I know I'll remember in six months. How can I easily do that?

I did an iCal export on my iMac in "Export" format, moved it to an older computer and am trying to import the iCal data, but it's taking forever. I mean, like it's run overnight and it still hasn't finished the calendar event import. That can't be right, it shouldn't be this slow! Is iCal broken? How the heck do I fix things?

A pal of mine who is a developer sent me a redemption code so I could check out his app on my new iPad. Problem is, I don't know how to redeem a redemption code and don't want to ask him. Suggestions?

I downloaded like 5 apps off of iTunes to put on my iPhone. But, when I unplugged my phone from the computer, the games weren't on there!! I don't know what 2 do?? Plz help. Thanks!!

I'm a bit baffled: I already paired my Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard with my new iPad 3G [ed: see pair a bluetooth keyboard with an iPad] but for some reason when I try to hook it up a second time the iPad sees the keyboard but can't pair to it. What's going on and how do I fix it??

I have a new Mac Mini and really want to set up the cool Apple Wireless (bluetooth) keyboard with it. Is there some simple way to do that or do I need to call a tech friend of mine for assistance?

I'm psyched to finally own a copy of the film Inglorious Basterds, a DVD I bought at Target this afternoon. On the box it says "includes free digital copy" and says I can also watch the movie on my iPhone. Perfect. But how do I actually do it?

In our dorm, we have a desktop Apple iMac (my roommate) and a MacBook laptop (mine) and we want to share our iTunes libraries without actually copying any files back and forth. Is that easy to set up?

I've been experimenting with the Mac Snow Leopard Screen Sharing capability and it's really terrific for managing our workgroup server, but every time I want to run it I have to launch Server Tools, then select the server, then choose "Screen Sharing". Isn't there a better way?

The more devices I get that can access the Internet, the harder it is for me to keep track of all the accounts and passwords I've set up for access. I know I don't want to use the same password on multiple sites, but I can't remember what's what. I've heard good things about Agile Software's 1Password app for password management, and I can see that there's a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad version. Cool, but can they sync?

Hi Dave. I have a question that I don't think you've ever written about: I have a folder with confidential information and want to encrypt or password protect it. I can see how to create a ZIP file from it with the Archive feature, but that's not password protected either. Is there any way to accomplish this in Mac OS X Snow Leopard?

A friend of mine gave me a copy of the movie Tomb Raider (I already own the DVD, but I want to watch it on my iPhone 3GS while at the gym) and I can't figure out what to do with it. The file is in ".avi" format and when I double-click on it I get an error from QuickTime Player, and have no idea how to copy it onto my phone. HELP!

This is weird. I have Mac OS X Snow Leopard (specifically 10.6.2) running on my MacBook and want to install Quicktime Pro for some video work. I bought a license key off the Apple site but it says to go to the System Preferences and enter the data into the Quicktime preference pane. But, um, there isn't one. What the heck??

I'm a young student preparing myself for film classes. I decided that if possible I'd get Final Cut Studio over express. Problem is that I'm buying a macbook pro with that and I to get it to run might be a hassle. Will the 13 inch 2.53 work, or will I need a better one (i heard some conflicting arguments about needing a discrete graphics card which is only available in the higher end models)?

The thing is that if I am unable to run programs like color and motion (basicaly the whole package) with the 15 inch model then I would rather just go for a cheaper mac with express.

I have switched from Microsoft Office on my Mac OS X system to Apple's iWorks package, which works great except every so often someone complains that my files are in .pages format, not .doc, which is what they want to see. I can't see how to save a file in Pages as an MS Word doc file, but I know it can be done. Help?

I've been a big fan of Time Machine, the backup system on my Mac OS X computer, but sometimes the backup is slow. I use VMware Fusion for some testing and have been recently wondering if that's affecting things adversely?

I feel like a total chump: a few months ago I changed all my system passwords to ensure my girlfriend didn't mess with things (we were fighting a lot, we're no longer seeing each other). Not a problem on my iMac or Mac Mini, but on my MacBook Air that I promptly slipped into the closet anyway? I have no idea what the password is and can't log in to use it any more! How do I reset my account password in Mac OS X Snow Leopard on my MacBook Air??

I don't know how it's happened, but I seem to have a bunch of duplicate tracks in my (huge) iTunes library and it's annoying as heck. I can remove them by hand, but it's tedious and I'm afraid of user error. I checked out the "Show Duplicates" feature in iTunes, but it seems to think that songs with the same name by different artists on different albums are dupes. Uh, no. So what's the solution, Dave? Oh, if it matters, I'm on an iMac.

This is weird, but all of a suddenly my MacBook Pro is running really hot and the fan keeps turning on. Not a big deal, but I'm used to it being quiet and smooth without ever even being aware of its temperature. Is there a power supply problem, as my Dad suggests, or is it something else going on? I'm just afraid that my Mac is about to die and that'd be a disaster!

My friends are all into playing the game "FourSquare" and when I checked it out, it looks like it's only for smartphones like the iPhone. Kinda stinks because I don't have a "smart" phone, just a regular cellphone. Am I stuck in the cold, or is there some way to play FourSquare from my Mac laptop?

I'm experimenting by switching from Safari on my Mac OS X system to Google's new Chrome system (well, actually I am running Chromium, the software build release that includes support for extensions) and the one thing I really miss is 1Password. Is there any way to add that to Chrome??

I have a writer who produces content for me on a weekly basis, content that includes photographs or other pictures. Very helpful, but he submits his material in Apple Pages format and I have no idea how to get the image out of the document and into a separate file when I want to save it to my blog.

I've been hearing rumors for months about Apple releasing a tablet computer but they give me very odd looks when I ask about it at the Apple Store. Then at Christmas dinner someone told me that it's on the way and it's going to be called the iSlate. What? How could they know, and what's your best information about what an iSlate will be?

I got a very nice card from my grandma that included $10 "to buy some music for my new apple phone". It wasn't a gift card, though, so I figured I'd just buy the music directly in the iTunes Store on my iPhone and drop the $10 in the bank. Did it, but now I'm baffled: how do I copy that purchased music onto my MacBook Pro laptop? Do I need to download it again from the iTunes Store, or can iTunes just pull it from the phone?

I've been working extensively in Apple's GarageBand on my MacBook Pro and it's always worked great, except this afternoon I got the error message Core Audio: Disk is too slow (Write) (-10002). What does it mean and how do I fix it? Do I need a new disk drive??

I know this is a totally newbie question, but when I'm writing an email to someone in Apple Mail, I see certain words underlined with a squiggly red line, but if I click on them, nothing happens. Looks like it's the spelling system telling me that I have mispelled a word, but not always. What's the story? What can I do at that point?

I've set Thunderbird as my default email program and set Apple Mail program preferences to use Thunderbird as the default program.

But here's the thing. When I open saved emails from my hard drive the Mail program opens them and says it's the default. But Thunderbird receives all emails and sends them?

I've been buying different applications for my iPhone and would like to start leaving some ratings and reviews of those that I like. I can't figure out how to do it from my iPhone 3GS, however: what's the secret?

In April 2009 Stanford University announced that its iPhone Application Programming course had broken the 1 million download mark from the Apple iTunes site. And it did it in record time - less than seven weeks.

The course is nothing more than a series of classroom videos being taught by a team of Apple engineers. But the price was set at that very attractive price point of "free." One catch though, only people who were enrolled at Stanford University received credits for the course.

With over 200,000 courses from over 200 different institutions to pick from on iTunes U, and all of them free to anyone who wants to take them, Apple is quickly becoming the world leader in courseware aggregation. The obvious question to ask is "what is Apple's motivation for doing this?" and "how do they intend to make money?"

History of iTunes U

Shortly after Apple opened its iTunes Store in April 2003, the company started receiving requests from colleges to post courses on the site. Initially the requests were directed to the podcast section, but as the numbers grew, Apple devised a strategy for adding an entirely new division.

iTunes U was formally in May 2007. The service was created to manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content for students within a college or university as well as the broader Internet.

I'm trying to set up a secure wireless network in my house and want to filter devices based on their "MAC" address. What the heck is a MAC address and how do I find it on my Mac Pro desktop and MacBook Air?

With all of us being so energy-conscious these days, it natural to want to have your Mac use as little power as possible. But when you get up to walk away from your computer, even for a few minutes, it continues to use power to light up your screen, optimize your hard drive and perform low-level tasks while it waits for you to touch your mouse or keyboard again. Isn't there a solution?

Ever get a .doc (Microsoft Word) file as an email attachment on your Mac, only to find that you can't seem to open it or do anything to view the contents of the file?

While your Macintosh is a fantastic audio editing machine, you may have noticed that Garageband can only see one microphone at a time. All is not lost - Apple includes a tool that can be used to create an "Aggregate Device." An Aggregate Device is what Apple calls a virtual input device - a device that looks like a microphone, but as you'll see is actually more than one microphone combined into one option. How to do it, though?

My kids are driving me a bit crazy: they keep opening up my MacBook Pro and messing around with it, even when I tell them not to. Since I can't hover over it like an eagle, I need a software solution: how do I require a password to be typed in - to password protect the computer - on either wake from sleep or going from a screen saver to the regular desktop on Mac OS X Snow Leopard?

The clipboard is a very simple tool that hasn't changed much in 20 years. You can use Command+C to copy a piece of text or something else into the clipboard. Then you can use Command+V to paste it somewhere else. But what if you need more...

A friend of mine sent me a copy of his film on the computer as an "AVI" file and Quicktime complains and I can't watch it on my Mac. Rather than look like a clueless twit I'd rather figure it out before I ask him for help: Quicktime complains that the movie is "not in a format Quicktime Player understands". Can you help me out?

I've been using Keynote for presentations for a long time (Keynote's part of the iWork package from Apple and only runs on Mac OS X). Recently a friend told me about "Keynote Remote", an app that runs on the Apple iPhone and lets you control the presentation, even if you're not facing your computer. Sounds cool, and I downloaded it, but can't figure out how to get the two to talk together.

I've been learning more about Apple iPhoto, partially thanks to your great tutorials on the subject, but am stumped. Instead of wanting to grab images directly off my camera, I find that I need to pull in a folder full of photographs from a friend so I can have them as an event. How do I import photos into iPhoto, Dave? If it makes a difference, I'm running Snow Leopard and have Mac OS X version 10.6.1.

I just noticed that when I start to type in a search query in Google that it pops up with suggestions based on my partial typing fragment. This isn't so useful and actually bugs me because my wife occasionally uses my computer too and, well, I don't want her to see all my random searches. How can I fix it? I'm using Firefox on a Mac, if that makes a difference.

I'm going crazy: I travel a lot on business and when I move to a different timezone, I dutifully change the timezone on my MacBook Pro to match. I just noticed, however, that iCal automatically switches to the new timezone and adjusts all my events. Eek! How do I not have iCal do that?

I've been recording my daughter's singing with Audacity, a great open source audio recording and editing app, and it's fun and makes it pretty easy to chop and organize audio tracks. Problem is, I want to save the output as an MP3, not as a WMA file. but when I try to export the audio file in that format, it just pops up an error. How can I fix it?

I have Mac OS X 10.5.8. When I try to change my unix shell prompt by putting the line:

  export PS1='mac> '

into my .bash_profile, the prompt is changed but the cursor is in the first column (over the "m" of my prompt) and any typing overwrites the prompt.

Hi Dave. My contract with my current client ends in three weeks. Since I'll finally be a free agent I am going to spend several months in west Africa as I have a good friend living in Sierra Leone. I'm looking to teach, freelance or do whatever paying gigs come my way.

I have the 17in MacBook pro which is great even though I've had it since December 2007. I've been considering selling it for cash toward a new 13 inch MacBook Pro so that I can blog, do podcasts, etc. However I don't know if getting the new one is the right choice considering there's no slot for another battery. I'll be without power for about five hours a day in Freetown.

I'd feel safer having an additional battery in case the power is out for an extended period of time. Should I just look for the previous version of the MacBook? Would I be sacrificing a lot of power?

My computer network has an old Mac Mini running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), acting as a file and network printer server, along with a number of desktop computers running the newer version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. For those computers, everything's fine, but when a colleague hooked up his Vista laptop, he couldn't see the file server at all. How do I enable that?

I just read your information on how to clear search history on a Safari (see how to clear your Safari browser history). It was easy to read and understand. Do you have information on how to clear it on Firefox I have a Macintosh OSX? I can't figure it out.

Now that I'm working in an office setting, after spending a year or so in the kitchen of my house doing contract work, I see that some of my office mates have their music libraries available on the network. Nice, lets me listen to their tunes and learn more about their musical tastes too. I'd like to share my own music library on my Mac too: how do I do that?

I move around quite a bit as a road warrior and though I don't often need to print, sometimes being able to produce a hard copy is definitely helpful. Problem is, I don't want to bother people in different temporary offices with configuration details: I'm running Mac OS X Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro, is there some easy way to add printers on the go?

I've made the transition and now am working exclusively with iCal, but my colleagues are still stuck on Google Calendar. How can I subscribe to their calendars so that they show up on iCal rather than me having to log in to Gcal to see what's going on?

I teach classes and like to have my handouts be as short as possible, so I will often print them "two up" or "three up" from PowerPoint or Keynote on my Mac OS X system. What I'd really like to do, however, is have the first page be full size and all the subsequent pages be the smaller slides, as a prebuilt PDF file, so that the title on the front looks good. Can I do that on my MacBook or iMac?

I've taken the plunge and installed Snow Leopard (aka Mac OS X 10.6) and was pretty psyched about the fact that it's a 64-bit operating system, until my brother said "yeah, but I bet you're still running in 32-bit mode". How can I tell if my Snow Leopard computer is now running in 32-bit "compatibility" mode or as a true 64-bit operating system?

I'm running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and everything's going smoothly except for some reason I find that not all my default folders are showing up on the left side of Finder windows. Specifically, where's my "Movies" folder??

Just upgraded to Mac OS X Snow Leopard and am a bit baffled: the icon on the top menu bar for airport wifi service now has an exclamation mark through it. What does that mean?

I have a pretty large music collection that I've poured into Apple's iTunes program and am wondering if there's a way that I can tell it to only play that subset of my music that I haven't heard before? Do you know what I mean? I know it keeps track of how many times I've played a song, so it seems theoretically possible. How do I get iTunes to do this, Dave?

We have been pitching a large corporate client on our marketing services for a while now, and and after putting a ton of time into a killer Powerpoint deck, they suddenly want to disseminate it to their staff before signing our contract. I'm not too sure about this, and am thinking that instead of just sending them the preso we could send them a secure PDF, ideally one that would prohibit them copying any data out or printing the content. Is that doable, and if so, how do we get our iMac to do it?

I have been figuring out how to work with Google Gmail and it's generally being going well, but I'm wondering if there's any way to save an entire thread of email messages in a file? Plain text would be nice, a PDF would be awesome, but I could handle HTML too, if that's my only option, Dave.

I've been reading all of your earlier articles about how to work with Apple's iPhoto (see iPhoto help) but what I haven't seen is a piece about how to publish photos from iPhoto directly onto Facebook with vast amounts of hassles. Is that doable? If so, how? Thanks, Dave!

Slowly but surely, I've been dragged kicking and screaming (well, not screaming, per se) into using Apple's iCal application on my Mac, though I'd rather just use the calendar in Microsoft Outlook on my XP box. I've figured out a lot of iCal but can't figure out how to have a weekly recurring event that's not tied to a specific time segment, though.

I really like how iPhoto works with my Apple MobileMe account on the Web and the gallery it produces is very cool. My friends, in particular, really tell me they think it looks cool and makes it fun for them to see the photos I upload. Problem is, sometimes I want to create password-protected private albums, not just have everything I upload available to the general public at large. How do I do that in iPhoto?

Now that I am importing photographs into iPhoto taken by different members of my family, I'd like to be able to see which camera (e.g., which photographer) was responsible for a given picture. I believe that information is stored in the "exif" information, but how do I view that in iPhoto on my Mac?

I can see that there's a "Flickr" button on the bottom of the iPhoto pages in Apple's iPhoto program, but I have no idea how to use it. Can you step me through the process so I can learn how to publish my pictures on Flickr since I don't have Mobile Me?

I read through your article on How to create an iPhoto Smart Album and have been finding it pretty slick indeed. Problem is, after I've created a Smart Album I find that the photos aren't always what I want: is there some way to tweak or modify an existing Smart Album in Apple iPhoto without having to recreate it?

I've finally imported a few years worth of photographs into iPhoto and it's very cool - I'm having fun organizing things - but in addition to how it has organized everything, I'd also like to have convenient access to photos by when they were taken. I don't know whether that'd be a new Event or an Album or even a "smart album" (whatever that is), but what's the easiest way to have a subset of my iPhoto photographs show up based on date?

I'm really starting to learn about how to do cool stuff with iPhoto, but Im' still baffled about one thing: if there's a picture in iPhoto that I want to upload to a Web site or use outside of the world of iPhoto, how do I do it? That is, how do I pull a photo out of the iPhoto universe?

I use Mobile Me with my iPhone now, and am finding that the gallery feature is pretty cool, but it's tedious as heck when I have to upload them one at a time. Isn't there a smarter way to do this on my Apple iPhone 3GS?

I'm sick of tapping into wifi signals where I can find them and being stuck without any Internet access when there isn't one, or when it's password protected. So I sprung for a Verizon Mifi2200 device that they tell me will met me connect from my MacBook Pro to the Internet anywhere, any time. But how do I get it all set up on my Mac?

I've been organizing photos with Apple's iPhoto program since I first got my iMac, but I've wished for a long time that there was a way to tweak the pictures, rather than just organize them. Is there some trick to accomplishing this, or does iPhoto simply not give me editing and photo tweaking capabilities?

Now that I have an iMac and an Apple iPhone 3GS I am thinking I should also sign up for Apple's Mobile Me service so I can have wireless syncing and be just a bit safer in case I lose my phone too. How do I proceed?

I have mac os x 10.4.11 -- There are two yahoo widgets on my desktop--analog clock and weather that I did not put there and I can't get rid of--I need the Jobulator one that I did put on there...How do I get rid of these -- Macs have dashboard widgets so who needs them..

I just bought a used iMac and am frustrated to find that it identifies itself as "Susie's Q" on the network. Since I'm not Susie - and never have been! - I really want to change this. How do I change my iMac's name in Mac OS X on the network?

Every time I buy a new computer, I go through extraordinary levels of hassle copying files from the old computer to the new one, and this time I am determined to do something smarter. I heard from a friend that since I use Time Machine (actually, I have a Time Capsule for network backups) that when I get my new MacBook I can just tap the Time Machine backup of my existing system and have it restore every single file and config onto the new system and have it a perfect clone. Rockin'. How do I do that??

I can still remember the first Mac I used: it was a 512K unit that the fine folk at the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link loaned me when they hired me to hack their discussion system and make it faster. At the time I'd just left my job at Hewlett-Packard and had no computer of my own (back then people didn't have computers unless they were hardware hobbyists or could handle cassette backups).

To the proffered loaner Macintosh I can recall saying "uh, no thanks, I don't really need a toy computer. I'll figure out another way to connect to your computer network." At the time, I was living in Los Altos, basically southwest of Palo Alto and due north of Apple headquarters in Cupertino, and the WELL was located north of the Golden Gate bridge in beautiful Sausalito. Way too far to drive for the work. So I had to get a computer of some sort.

I reluctantly accepted the dorky little fishbowl unit that was reminiscent of the Osborne my Dad had won in a sweepstakes a year or two earlier, and...

I'm trying to organize the million bookmarks I have on my "Bookmarks" menu in Apple's Safari 4 but can't figure it out. I see "Show All Bookmarks" and various ways to add a bookmark on the menu, but no way to "manage" or "organize" bookmarks. Surely there's a way to do so in Safari?

I've been using a separate application to keep track of all my RSS channels on my Apple iMac, but now that I just downloaded the shiny new Safari 4 browser from Apple, I'd like to switch over to using its built-in RSS reader. Problem is, I can see how to read an RSS feed, but I can't see much else of how to work with RSS within the browser.

This is a guest article, written by Tim Beyers.

Rarely do I need access to Windows programs. For the times when I do, I've switched from a Parallels virtual machine running XP to CodeWeavers' CrossOver for Mac, a virtual environment that simulates the Win32 API, one program at a time.

What CrossOver for Mac is

CrossOver is built on the open source Wine project, which proposes to re-implement the Windows architecture for Unix. Thus, systems that draw from a Unix kernel -- Mac OS X and Linux, notably -- can use Wine to run Windows programs as if they were native to the underlying architecture.

I still have a few old friends who prefer AIM so I use it as one of my instant messenger options (though through Adium, not the dismal AIM application from AOL). Problem is, I sporadically get IM messages from porn site owners and other dopes. Blech! How do I block all of these jerks so the only time I ever hear from AIM is when it's one of my friends?

I kind of hate to admit it, but I've been using my son's Skype account on my Mac because I can't figure out how to sign up for a new one. You're a master of technology, however, Dave, so can you show me how to easily get a new Skype account?

I just completely reformatted and restored my laptop and am now hitting the error "This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 95.9 GB but only 63.2 are available" when I try to use Time Machine to back up to my Apple Time Capsule network backup device. This stinks: I need to be able to keep backing things up!

I talked with a few people and they suggest that the easiest solution is to wipe the Time Capsule drive and start over. How do I do that?

This is just the weirdest thing: I got a new Apple iPhone after my old one broke and now when I hook it up to my iMac, it sees the phone, but I can't copy the photographs off the camera. In fact, there aren't even thumbnail preview images when I check with ImageCapture. What's going on?

I've been experimenting with Microsoft Windows 7 beta on my Mac OS X system through using VMware Fusion and while I don't know of anyone else doing this, I have read on the Internet that it's a viable combo. Problem is, when I actually try it, I find that there's no Internet access and Windows 7 complains that there's no "Ethernet driver" installed? How do I fix that?

I'm helping my Dad out with installing some software on his MacBook Air but since he didn't spend the money to buy the additional external CDROM drive, I'm kind of stuck. Is there some sneaky way to read CDROM or DVD disks on the Air even though there's no drive actually hooked up?

Like a lot of people, I have a printer at home along with a couple of high-end printers in my office. Not infrequently I find that I press "Print" in one of my Mac OS X applications just to watch it queue up for the wrong printer, invariably the one that's not where I am. I know how to delete the print jobs but is there some easy way to just redirect them from the wrong printer to the right one?

As part of my work, I take tons of screen captures on our test Apple iPhone for documentation, but my boss wants me to use SEO friendly file names and it's a huge hassle to rename them one by one. Is there some sort of script I can use on my Mac to fix things?

I'm in one of those most annoying hotels where they charge by the laptop, rather than by the room, and my buddy and I are aren't very happy paying $25/day for Internet! Isn't there some way we can use one of our Macs to share the connection?

I've become a big fan of my Apple Time Capsule. WIth the Time Machine backup software, it lets me keep all of my computers backed up without ever having to think about it, which is awesome! I just read about a firmware upgrade, however, and am baffled: how do I upgrade the device?

I just upgraded VMware Fusion from 2.0 to 2.0.2 and now when I try to run my Microsoft Windows XP virtual machine, it doesn't run, it first tells me that I have an old virtual machine and need to upgrade it, then tells me that VMware Fusion cannot connect to the virtual machine. What's wrong and how do I fix it?

This may be a bit of a mundane question, but I'm wondering exactly what disk drive is included in my Apple Macbook. How do I figure out the exact hard drive model number and size?

I've been reading on the various weblogs and sites about Apple releasing a new beta of a pretty radically different Safari web browser. But as is typical, they don't include any links and I don't really know how to go about finding it and downloading it if I want to experiment.

My colleagues at the university send me PowerPoint presentations all the time, these pesky ".ppt" files, but since I don't have PowerPoint on my computer, I can never open them. Surely there's some sort of solution that doesn't involve me paying hundreds of dollars?

I administer a network of about twenty computers and would like to have more control over how system updates are applied on the machines, so I always know the state of each system. Is there a way I can disable automatic updates on the computers and instead just save the updates on a central server and apply them manually?

My kids are really into High School Musical and Miley Cyrus, to the point where we bought them the soundtrack and they promptly broke the CD squabbling over it. I know I could buy a couple more but that's pretty expensive! Is there a way to just use iTunes to dupe a music CD so they could listen to the copy and we'd keep their Hannah Montana music (etc) safely stored away?

Just joined a new company, moved into a new office and now that I'm bringing my laptop into work I need to be able to hook up to their printer. How do I do that in Mac OS X? They're all PC people here...

After a few months of using my new camera, I want to transfer a few files off of it and wipe it clean, but don't see the camera under the 'drives' in Finder. How do I access the files on my camera from my MacBook Pro?

I just got a new Apple MacBook Pro and am totally excited about it. As a member of AMPAS, however, I watch lots of "screener" DVDs and commercial DVDs and before I launch the first one, how do I set the regional encoding properly on the Mac?

I've bought a fair amount of music from the iTunes store and have also ripped much of my old music collection too. Now I want to make a few audio CDs of favorite songs that I can listen to in the car. How do I do that?

I am a brand new user of a Mac/Entourage and I can't find how to instruct the mail send/receive facility to do a timed receive scan. My PC version of Outlook enabled me set a timer (every 2 minutes or so) on receipt of emails. Can you help please?

I need to send in my laptop Apple for repair. They asked for my password but I don't want to give it to them because that password is also the password for some of my file on my computer. What should I do?

So problem here is that I have accidentally removed the application shortcut from the left hand menu in mac os x finder. The one that opens all the installed program shortcuts. I searched prior to writing this, but I only got how you restore the springy url terminal activator. Mac OS X, version 10.5.4

A friend showed me how she can recover deleted files on her Mac OS X system using some utility or the other and it got me to thinking... how do I delete files on my own Mac so that she - or anyone else - can't recover them later?

I want to use my Mac as a sort of digital video recorder (DVR) by capturing movies from Hulu and other streaming services, then saving them for later viewing while on plane flights. Is that doable? If so, what's the easiest solution?

I was in the Apple store the other day and watched as an employee slipped a music CD into the iMac and had iTunes automatically launch. Very cool. How did they set that up? When I put in a music CD it starts up Disk Utility, which is annoying as all get out!

What's going to be the big announcement at Macworld this year, Dave? You have an inside track on these things, right?

I just got a new iMac, after years of working on Windows XP systems, and a pal was telling me that one of the coolest features of Mac OS X is that you can redirect any printout and turn anything into a PDF. That's awesome because I constantly send Web pages to clients and PDFs will be a lot more reliable than the HTML source. Can you show me how to do this?

My kids think it's quite a lark to add goofy words to the spelling dictionary in Microsoft Word on my MacBook Pro, which I don't mind except now I find that some of the words that I commonly misspell aren't be flagged as misspelled either. Not good. How can I clean up Microsoft Word on my Mac so that it doesn't have bogus words?

I have a spreadsheet that I created a while back with both an open and modify password but now want to share it with someone without a password blocking access. How do I turn off the password protection in Microsoft Excel for Mac?

I have a Mac OS X setup in my office that includes an Apple Time Capsule in the middle of the network, streaming backups of every computer and laptop in our organization. One of the laptops was stolen, however, and I can't figure out how to access the backed up data from it on the device.

I found "Image Capture" (you didn't mention it was an application, so I searched and found it) and tried what you suggested. When I click on download, however, nothing happens. Tried this with just one photo selected, as well as "Select All." Any suggestions?

I don't know what's changed, but in the past, when I wanted to see revisions and changes to a document in Microsoft Word on my Mac it showed me what was inserted and deleted. Now, however, it has zillions of little balloons on the side of the document. What the heck? How do I change Microsoft Word so revision tracking shows up the way I prefer?

I am always listening to music on iTunes - I love, love, love it! - but since I make extensive use of Spaces, it's frustrating to have the iTunes control window always in the wrong place. is there some way I can download or otherwise make it a little controller that can be neatly tucked into the corner of ALL my Spaces?

I read your commentary about the new Genius feature in Apple's iTunes 8.0 and am curious to try it. I enabled it as per your earlier blog entry (see Start working with iTunes Genius), but now I'm not entirely sure how to actually use it to create these fabled Genius playlists?

I've heard a lot in the last week about Apple's iTunes 8.0 and its new Genius feature, which is supposed to recommend music similar to what you're hearing. Sounds interesting, a smart recommendation engine. But how do you turn it on and get it working?

I've been using Microsoft Entourage as an email client on my Mac system for a few years now and suddenly find myself needing to add a second account. Since there's no setup wizard to do it, I'm a bit stymied. Can you help?

I really love Miley Cyrus and want to turn her great song "Life's What You Make It" into a ringtone for my Mom's cellphone so that when I call, she hears Hannah Montana (well, Miley) singing, letting her know that it's me. I've heard that's not too hard but have no clue how to proceed.

This is so frustrating! I'm staying at a hotel where they only have wired Internet connectivity in my room and a tiny four foot Ethernet cable. Well, I don't want to work on their little desk with my back to the TV. So I always carry an Apple Airport Express, which is great except it can't connect either because it needs to "accept" the hotel's Internet pricing. So what can I do to get a wifi network running for my MacBook Pro?

When I first got my Macbook (actually, it's an iBook, I think) I tried to connect to a neighbors wireless network, before I got my own network set up. Problem is, every time I start up my computer, it wants to connect to her wifi network, not my own. How do I fix this?

I have a couple of movies in iTunes that look great when I view them on my computer, but when I copy them to my new iPhone, I can't watch them: the phone complains "format not supported". How can I fix that?

I sent my iMac into Apple for service and was rather distressed to get it back with the OS reinstalled and everything else wiped clean! I said "restore from Time Machine", but it never saw my Apple Time Capsule. What's the trick, Dave?

This may be obvious and I'm just not seeing it, but how do I initiate an audio or video chat with someone in Apple's iChat program as included in Mac OS X?

I followed along on your article yesterday about how to add cover art to a video I have in my Apple iTunes library, but what I don't see how to do is to move a video from the "TV Shows" category to the "Movies" category: for some reason a few of my movies are misfiled and I can't drag and drop them.

I've been adding videos to my Apple iTunes library, but almost all of them end up with a black box as the visual image, which is less fun than box covers, like my albums have. How do I add artwork to my video files?

I was in a Starbucks the other day and noticed that they had cards offering free songs from the iTunes Store, cool, but what was really cool was that it was a track from the new Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis album Rainy Day Blues. I want. But how do I get?

I just heard that there's a software update for the Apple iPhone 3G. I want it! But I'm confused: how do I update the software on my phone?

I'm excited that the Olympics are coming up and thrilled that NBC is going to have thousands of hours of additional video footage available on its Web site NBC Olympics.com, but highly bummed that I can't watch it on my Mac! Apparently you need Microsoft Silverlight, which is only available on Windows systems?

After many years of using a PC, I've finally switched to a Mac and am now running Microsoft Windows Vista within the VMware Fusion environment. I have heard from a bunch of people that it's better than Parallels. Anyway, be that as it may, can you tell me how to install the VMware Tools, which apparently I need?

A really hardcore Mac geek pal of mine tells me that it's better to install the incremental system releases rather than occasionally apply a multi-increment installer. I don't really understand why, but assuming he's right, is there any way I can tell what I've done?

I've become a big fan of Apple's Spaces system which lets me have a bunch of virtual screens on my laptop. This is particularly helpful when I'm playing games and (trying to) working at the same time. Thing is, I really want to have a few apps appear on all my Spaces, not just one. Is that possible?

I downloaded Firefox 3 like many other folk and really like it, but for reasons I don't really understand, when I click on a URL in an email message, it launches Camino, my old browser. How do I make Firefox my default browser?

I just upgraded to Firefox 3.0 on my Mac OS X system, along with millions of other people apparently, and just realized that one feature I've lost is the ability to view PDF files within the Web browser. I don't want to launch Preview or Adobe Reader, I want to view PDF documents I encounter within Firefox. Is there a solution?

This is a very niche Mac question, but I'm wondering if there's any way to have the slick Quick Look feature in Mac OS X show me the contents of folders rather than just the folder name?

My computer desktop is driving me crazy, Dave! Whatever I do to organize things, I find that I have so many icons and files that I lose track of important documents on a daily basis. Surely there's some way to tame this chaos?

While Microsoft Vista's built-in search mechanism might not be winning fans (see the extensive and quite critical commentary here: How to use Windows Vista search), Mac OS X has a splendid search system built-in to the operating system called Spotlight. But if you're just using it for one or two word keyword searches, you're missing out on a huge amount of its power and capability!

As part of migrating from an older iMac to my new Macbook Pro (which I love) I went through and axed a ton of unwanted email from Microsoft Entourage. I know that I can copy my mail archive, address book, etc, by moving the contents of Documents:Microsoft User Data:Office 2008 Identities, but my question is whether there's any way to compact, compress or rebuild my archive before I do so?

Bad news. Every time I try to reboot my Microsoft Vista virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my Mac, it says tht something's corrupted and it can't proceed. What the heck can I do about it?

A few months ago I switched from Safari to Flock as my main Web browser and generally I'm happy with the program and love the additional social networking capabilities, but I'm puzzled by one thing: how do I edit my bookmarks? In Safari there's a handy little "book" button, but there's no equivalent in Flock!

I'l like to be able to download messages in Entourage manually. Instead, every time I launch Entourage (Microsoft Entourage 2004 for Mac) all the messages are downloaded automatically. Things is, I want to do it manually.

I'm on a kick about learning all the sneaky and secret shortcuts buried in Mac OS X and have heard that there are quite a few in the Leopard version of Spotlight, the utility that lets you find files on your Mac. Do you know some, and can you share?

I saw your article of a few days ago about changing the Mac user account. You set up an account for "James Bond" and accidentally didn't use Daniel Craig's photo, even though you commented about "the one true Bond". Weird. Anyway, how did you set that picture?

Dave, I purchased a used macbook from a friend and need to change the Home Icon (House) name from his to mine, but I can't find information anywhere to do this. It is driving me crazy. Can you possibly assist?

I need to be able to send my parents a copy of some documents I have in PDF format, but I want to ensure privacy and encrypt them first. Is there some easy way to do this?

Okay, I bought a new Time Capsule from the Apple Store and it's a great wireless base station but... I want to use it for Time Machine backups too and am a tiny bit lost on how to get that set up. Can you help me out?

I'm a busy guy, constantly doing twenty things at once. I am also a heavy user of Google Calendar and find it annoying as heck to constantly have to get to the Calendar page before I can add something to my schedule. Is there some neat Mac gizmo I can run so I can click on it, type in my appointment, and be done with it?

I've never had this problem before: I upgraded Firefox on my Mac OS X system and now any time I'm on a page with a "mailto:" link, those links are not clickable. Any other sort of "href" works fine, but email links do nothing. I looked through the preferences, but nada. How can I fix things?

I'm a recent convert to Twitter (thanks partly to your own twittering, actually!) but can't decide between the two major apps on the Mac: Twhirl or Twitterific. Which do you use, and why?

I used to program my TRS-80 in BASIC when I was in high school, and took a class in Pascal in college. Now I want to try to write applications for my Mac but don't know where to start. Help!

I am going to be selling my 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4 soon. I would like to sell it with some of the programs included (Office and Adobe CS2 - I figure I should make a few extra bucks including them) but without exposing any personal information. What's the best way to do a thorough cleaning of my Mac without actually losing everything. Additionally, will I be able to use these programs if I reinstall them on a new mac? What's the easiest way to just do a clean sweep of a mac and reinstall applications that I have now - do I need the original software CD/DVDs? Other suggestions?

I read your article on the power of the Leopard X calculator but for some reason my "Convert" menu is all grey - I cannot select anything to convert!

I wonder if you can help me with a problem i am having regarding editing an excel spreadsheet, which is driving me mad: I use a Mac Powerbook that has the Microsoft Excel 2008 programme installed. My secretary has a PC upon which is stored all the work files. My Mac is networked to her computer, so I can access all the work files and edit them, print them etc. No worries.

The problem I have is this. My secretary types an excel spreadsheet with 5 columns. She can print it and all 5 columns appear on the page. I can access it and look at the page and all the 5 columns appear. However, if I go into the document and edit it, by say correcting an error, I notice that as soon as I go into the document, a dotted line appears down the right hand side of the page, between the 4th and 5th columns and then if I print it, only four columns appear on the first page and the fifth appears on its own on a separate page.
I have looked at the widths etc of the page set up and they appear the same.

Any ideas as to how I can get it to print all the text on the first page ? I am thinking it is a simple setting adjustment but for the life of me, I cannot work out what to do.

How can I change the picture on the background of my Mac? I know it's probably easy, but I have no clue.

My digital camera has a cool feature: it can take little movies. They're not as good as a real video camera, but my kids love mugging for me and the results are often quite hilarious. Like "America's Funniest Home Videos" caliber. How do I put them on my Apple iPhone so I can share them with my friends?

I thought I had turned off the "guest" account on Leopard, but was then darn surprised when a friend showed me that when he looked at the Network in our office my computer showed up. Worse, he could poke around on my file system as Guest!

I've been running Memeo LifeAgent on my computer for a few months with very good results, but recently wanted to add a specific folder to the existing network backup and was stumped. How do you add or change an existing backup schedule?

Regarding the "Stocks" dashboard widget that comes with Tiger and Leopard. I deleted the Dow Jones and NASDAQ symbols from my Widget Menu (in an attempt to reinstall and fix the thing). Is there any way to successfully reinstall this widget (Stocks) and again display the Dow Jones and NASDAQ numbers. Would also like the S&P 500. Can't find a way to do this. Since Yahoo wrote the thing, I have tried them with no success either.

I know this is a pretty niche question, but I use Apple's slick Preview application to look at images and when I open more than one at a time, it shows them all with a nice sidebar, but the sidebar elements are sorted by name, which messed me up: I want them sorted by when I actually created the graphic.

I had my old Mac laptop, an iBook, stolen and now that I have a new one, I realize that I can't get the music off my Apple iPhone which is driving me crazy! Is there some way to sync the iPod music and video portion of my cellphone without having to start from scratch again?

I have no idea what happened, but I had Microsoft Windows XP running just fine within the VMWare Fusion application, as you documented (see installing Vista in VMWare Fusion) and now it crashes without an error when I try to run it. Help! I need to get this working!

I seem to recall a long time ago that when you installed Mac OS X you also got a bunch of cool Unix command line developer tools, including a C compiler, debugging tools and much more. I'm taking a C programming class at the local community college and would like to install these tools, but have no idea where they are any more. Help?

I know you've written rather extensively about Parallels as a virtual machine environment for Mac OS X, but I'm wondering what you think of VMware Fusion and whether you know if it works properly with Microsoft Vista?

I have a Mac mighty mouse [ed note: actually, it's an "Apple Mighty Mouse"] device and am going crazy without my right-click capability. Is there some solution or something I can hack, or am I stuck having to buy something third-party?

I just got a MacBook Air and have been enjoying having the world's lightest laptop. It's an amazing piece of engineering and while it appears to have some critical features missing (like a DVD drive or Ethernet port) the fact is that I never used those features on my older MacBook Pro laptop either so it's not anything I miss.

Frankly, with my Corsair 8GB flash drive, it's just a super-modern version of "sneakernet" and was a breeze to jump onto the new device and use it full-time.

Even better, it gave me an opportunity to really pay attention to what I change on a stock Mac laptop to make it work for me. And that's what this article is about. Let's call it Dave's Guide to Critical Mac Software...

I'm running Mac OS X Leopard and the transparent menu bar is slowly but surely driving me batty. Isn't there some way to make it opaque and white again? Man, it's darn hard to read much of the time!

Today I tried to use Mail to send an e-mail to someone. Everything looked fine until I got an alert saying CANNOT SEND MESSAGE USING THE SERVER SMTP.MAC.COM. I have the option to choose another server, however, the drop-box does not have my account as one of the options. What the heck?

My sister and I share a Mac computer and I'm tired of her looking at my files. Is there some way I can protect or hide my folders without downloading any software she'd notice?

Not to sound like a complete chowderhead, but when I have a USB disk drive hooked up to my Mac and then unplug it, I always get a scary warning. How do I avoid that and eject the drive properly before unplugging it?

Every time I copy a music CD out of my collection onto my computer, it shows up with "Track 01", "Track 02", and so on. What the heck? Surely I don't need to manually enter all the track names for each of my hundreds of CDs as I rip them?

After reading about the Gizmodo bloggers wandering CES and flicking off TVs left and right, my company is paranoid someone will do a similar stunt to our displays in our Macworld exhibit booth. That'd would be a huge problem. Short of duct tape, is there some way to prevent this problem?

A friend told me that on the Mac anything that I could send to a printer could also be easily saved as a PDF file on my computer, to examine or even print later. I have no clue how to do that, but it'd sure be useful. How do you print to a PDF on a Mac?

My dashboard is displaying three copies of the weather widget. How can I delete the extra ones and just keep one?

I've been getting into trouble lately for not seeing email that my husband's sending me. I don't get a huge amount of email, but when a wave comes in, his mail does, well, get lost in the shuffle. Is there some way I can change the color of his messages in Microsoft Entourage on Mac OS X so that it stands out more?

I've been using my Mac to record simple audio snippets, pretending I'm a radio announcer, but I want to trim them down to remove my stumbles, stutters, and breathing. How can I do that?

I'm migrating from an old Mac computer to a shiny new MacBook Pro and want to be able to join my brother's network, except we don't remember the password! But my old computer can connect. Is there any way to dredge up that password from Mac OS X so I can enter it anew? I do have Leopard running on both systems...

I'm loving Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, but there's one "feature" that's driving me crazy: when I print anything, the printer application hangs around until I quit it. In the good old days (Panther) the printer would quit and vanish once the queue was empty. Is there some way to restore that behavior?

My parents are always checking up on what Web sites I visit and it's getting really old. Is there some way to have Firefox hide where I go so they can't keep tab on me?

I'm a big fan of Google's Calendar program, but am finding it annoying that I have to always have my Web browser running on my Mac to remember events. Is there some sort of notification system that will let me keep up with my Calendar events without having a page perpetually on Google Calendar?

I just upgraded my G5 mac to the latest Leopard software and am leery about syncing my iPhone with my computer because I'm afraid I'll lose data. However, I really need to get the photos off the phone and don't want to email them to myself, one by one. Your suggestion?

I have an Airport Express device and would really like to use it to enable a wireless printer on my local network. I know it can do that, but I have no idea how to hook it all up. Can you advise? I have a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4.9 and an older Apple Airport Express.

A quick question--I have an administrator in my school district that sends email from her mail program on an osx machine and often gets response from a parent that the email comes w/weird \302 \302 \302 in it. Do you know waz up w/that?

All of a sudden I have an American flag on my Mac menu bar, along with what looks like some sort of tangram puzzle. In fact, when I look at different Macintosh, I find that people have lots of different tiny icons on their menu bar. What the heck are they and how do I trim them down?

Someone switched my default settings so that all my jpegs have graphic converter icons and automatically open in graphic converter. I'd like to switch back to the old photoshop or preview icons, and can't figure out how to do that. I was also worried that if I send these images to a client it might not open for them. Is that true? And how do I switch back?

I don't know what the story is, but sometimes I go to places and my Mac automatically connects to the wireless network, but other times it requires that I select the network. The password to the network is in my "keychain", but something's still missing... ?

Hi Dave. I run a network of Mac computers at a high school in Oregon and find that the kids often leave their computers running after class. This means the next time someone goes to use the computer they're in the wrong account. Lots of lost files! Any way to remedy this?

Given the choice, I'd much rather watch DVDs on my Mac with the great free app VLC rather than the lame "DVD Player" that is included with Mac OS X. How the heck do I do that?

I'm a huge fan of Apple's iChat program and use it all the time with my friends. A couple of my friends also have cool tweaks where they have amusing status messages and one even shows what she's listening to on her computer. How do they do that?

My kids are constantly harassing me about being able to chat with them via instant message, via "AIM". What's AIM and how do I get started?

About 6 months ago I was playing around on my iBook G4 and I found the option to change the format that Apple+Shift+4 saves in. For some odd reason I choose JPG-2000 (picture.jp2). Of course, now I can't find how to change it back!

I want to take a picture (capture) of my screen while running certain programs on my Mac so I can email the screenshot to a friend but have no idea how to do so. Is it even possible?

I have a ton of mp3 format audio files on my Mac OS X system and want to chop a short segment out of it to use as a custom ringtone for my Apple iPhone. What's the solution?

I keep getting errors about not being able to establish a secure connection with my mail server in Entourage because of a bad root certificate. My ISP has sent me the necessary "trusted root certificate" file, but I have no idea how to install it. Help!

Dave, I saw your earlier article about how to convert a DVD for your iPhone, but that was written for Windows XP users [see How to put your DVDs onto your iPhone]. Do you have a similar article about how to convert DVDs on a Mac OS X system? I don't have a PC around...

It's the worst thing I can imagine happening!! I took a trip to Brazil with a group of friends and took my new Canon camera with me. I got home and hooked it up to my Mac to show my parents, except my young daughter somehow monkeyed with it and deleted all the pictures!!!! Is there any way to recover deleted pictures from the flash card (compact flash, if it matters) of my Canon digital camera?

I use Microsoft Word on my Mac every day, and every time I create a new document I change the default typeface from Times 12 point to Papyrus 13 point. Surely there's some way to change the default typeface in a new document and save me this hassle?

Hopefully you can help me. i was in a divorce and the name of my laptop is x y's computer. I have a white apple laptop running os x. unfortunately, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to change it so i won't be reminded that i was married everytime i go to log into my computer or when i poke around my computer... thanks for your help

Kind of a strange query, but I run Parallels extensively and often find that I need to email data files I've created therein -- within Windows XP -- to my colleagues. I don't want to have any mail program running in WinXP, however, I want to just use Apple Mail. Is there an EASY way to do this?

My computer will not play dvd and I dont know if said computer has a dvd player or not.

I have a macbook pro. Recently I installed parallels desktop on it. But the problem i have is when I connect a usb device to my macbook it is not being detected in the windows parallel desktop. Also I have no idea how to get right click options in the parallel windows desktop. Can you please help me. Thank you for your help in advance.

When traveling from home base & I am in a "wirless zone", like the Santa Fe airport, where access is free or visiting a residence that has a wireless system, I am always able to access the wireless to receive messages or use the internet, yet I am UNABLE TO SEND emails. I have talked to Apple & our web host, Crystaltech - but to no avail. Apple says that Crystaltech should support that function and Crystaltech has indicated that the only way I can SEND is to go to their internet site and use the mail system. However, my husband's IBM Think Pad allows him to send by changing the outgoing server designation. I am truly computer "dumb" and can only presume that there is something so simple for me to do to accomplish the SEND task, when away from home.

I have an iPhone and appreciate all its features but one: I can't use the calendar capability because I use Google Calendar, not iCal on my Mac. Is there some way that I can either manually or automatically synchronize Google Calendar with iCal?

Just got a new Apple iPhone and bought a movie from the Apple iTunes Store so I can watch it on the phone, but it fails with "computer is not authorized to watch this movie", even though I bought it and originally downloaded it on my Mac. What the heck? How do I authorize my computer?

I'm stumped. With my iPod I simply drag and drop the music I want to take with me from my library onto the iPod on the left side of iTunes, but my Apple iPhone doesn't allow me to do that. How the heck do I put songs on the iPhone without synchronizing my entire (massive) music library?

Okay, this is driving me crazy! I applied an update a few days ago to my Mac OS X system (version 10.4.10), I think it was for a SuperDrive driver on my MacBook Pro, and it came up with an error message indicating it wasn't necessary for my system. No problem, but now I get that error each time I boot my computer!

Hey Dave - I recently got an iMac. And have signed up on the Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM). How can I delete someone on my list?

I don't know what's going on, but every so often I get an email message in Microsoft Entourage that doesn't have any message body, even though the person who sent it insists that they included a message. Is there some overzealous spam filter in the way, or a virus, or what?

Like you, I am highly impressed with the Creative Labs Zen Vision:W [see my review] but it's darn frustrating that Creative only makes its software available for Windows computers, not Mac. I know about the XNJB application that lets me add photos and audio, but it won't let me work with movies. So is there some sort of solution?

Where do I find the @ sign on a spring Icon. It was at the bottom right of the dock. It took me to the Mac OS X website.I deleted it and would like to restore it to the dock..

I just read about Parallels 3.0 being released which is very cool, but rather than run Windows XP in Parallels, as you've written about, I want to run Microsoft Vista on my Mac instead. I have a MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM: is that enough? And if so, how do I install Vista in Parallels?

I'm trying to figure out how to make a copy of a (yes, legal) DVD disk on my Mac and am stumped. I have Roxio Toast 7 Titanium, and I can see that it has a "Copy" mode and works with DVD data, but I can't figure it out!

I have Microsoft Windows XP running on my Apple MacBook, using Parallels for Mac. When I'm on my VM it does not see the CD/DVD drive. I would like to save my data to a cd. any ideas?

Is there a way to put a shortcut to a URL on the OS X desktop. Used to be able to do this in XP, but can't figure out how to do it in OS X.

Microsoft PowerPoint is driving me a bit crazy right now on my Mac because every time I type in a web site URL it turns it into a hyperlink, complete with different formatting and color. Surely there's some way to turn this feature off??

I have been an avid reader for some time but I have a question. The kids all have computers now (we all have macs) and I was wondering if there was a way to check up on them every once in a while. We all have macs running OS X. and I have read the oriely 'control' your mac from afar. but I was wondering if there was a cool way to login screenshot and logout through SSH, I am the only admin so I can get their passwords, I was just wondering about the process.

A pal of mine showed me how she'd set up her MacBook to allow her to just gently tap on the trackpad to send a "click" to the operating system, as if she'd clicked on the mouse button. Very cool. How do I set up my MacBook Pro to let me do the same thing?

My wife and I share the same laptop and I just learned that we can both be logged in at the same time, yet have separate preference files, separate mailboxes in Apple Mail, separate bookmarks in Safari and even keep our files hidden from each other. Sweet! Someone at the Apple Store told us that we needed to use "fast user switching" but I have no idea what that is and how to use it. Is it an application we need to buy?

I saw your earlier article about how to use a Boot Camp partition as the virtual machine in Parallels on my Mac (see Booting off Boot Camp in Parallels) but I don't want to risk having the same Windows install running in two different environments (Boot Camp and Parallels). Instead, is there a way that I can access my Boot Camp partition while I'm in my Parallels virtual machine?

Now that I have Windows XP installed on my Mac via Boot Camp, I'm wondering if there's any way I can use that same partition for a virtual machine in Parallels? I have read your article about how to install WinXP in Parallels (see: How to install Windows XP on your Mac with Parallels Desktop), but I don't really want to have two 8GB Windows installations, so hopefully there's a better way?

I'm trying to install Windows XP on my new Apple MacBook Pro using Apple's Boot Camp utility, and I'm finding a very weird issue: when I start up the WinXP installation within Bootcamp, it goes through various steps then finally gets to a screen where it needs me to press Enter to proceed. Problem is, my keyboard's completely dead at that point and I can't ever proceed! How do I fix this?

Every so often I get an email attachment and double-click it to open it up on my Mac. It opens up fine, I make edits and save the document, but then when I quit Word I can't find the $#@$# document on my system. What's going on and where are the documents I've edited?

Through some stupid moves on my part, I now have a trashed Mac and an iPod that is full of music. Problem is, every time I hook up the iPod to any other computer, iTunes promptly wants to empty it and reformat it, which would stink because i have tons of music and even some movies on the unit. Help!

Already installed Apple's slick Boot Camp system so you can dual boot your Intel-based Mac into Microsoft Windows in addition to Mac OS X? Perhaps you even used my popular tutorial on How to install Windows XP in Apple Boot Camp to get it all working? Either way, you should be aware that Apple just released an update to Boot Camp that, among other things, will let you install the new Windows Vista in the Boot Camp partition.

Other features of this new 1.2 beta release include:

• Updated drivers, including the trackpad, AppleTime (sync), audio, graphics, modem, and the iSight camera
• Support for the Apple Remote
• Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp
• Improved keyboard support for Korean, Chinese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, and French Canadian
• Improved Windows driver installation experience
• Updated documentation and Boot Camp on-line help in Windows
• Apple Software Update (for Windows XP and Vista)

Hey Dave is there anyway we can have the "Computer" icon show up on the desktop, and the Hardsisks mounted within this folder. Much like Windows? Coz I have too many partitions (3 Harddisks with almost 5-6 partitions on each disks)

I've been using iTunes for a while on my computer and now have a pretty darn large music collection. Rather than have it all work with shuffle mode, I'm interested in learning about playlists, and particularly about smart playlists in iTunes. What can you tell me and what smart playlists do you have?

My Mac has a rather flaky lid catch and I'd love to figure out a way that I can disable the "wake on lid open" capability of the MacBook. I understand that there is some sort of solution, but for the life of me I can't find anything!

Dave, I saw your older article on how to disable guest access to your computer (see how to disable guest access on your Mac for wireless users) but it no longer works as the plutil file appears to be in a different format that won't let you edit it. Help!

Dear Dave, how the heck do I copy the harddrive icon onto the taskbar of my mac?

I have been using CD-RW disks on my Apple MacBook Pro, and while I have figured out how to use a Burn Folder to create the disk in the first place, how do I rewrite the disk with newer content without having to buy something expensive like Roxio Toast??

Here's a weird one for you, Dave: How come ImageCapture on my Mac system won't let me specify a destination directory when I'm uploading photographs? I've tried everything, but nothing seems to help?

I'm a big fan of GraphicConverter and love just about everything about it, except that it drives me crazy how I double-click an image and it always opens up at 100% zoom, even if the image is far, far larger than my screen. Effectively it means I can't easily use GraphicConverter with my archived photographs. Is there some way to change settings so images always open up at "Fit To Window" zoom instead of 100% zoom?

Bought a Sprint PC Card for my Mac PowerBook so I can get onto their high speed EVDO network throughout the United States and found that it's a nice, new Sierra Wireless AirCard 595, which is apparently the fastest card available. Nice. But when I plug it into my PowerBook, nothing at all happens. What's the trick to get this card to work with Mac OS X?

I've been using Google Calendar for a while, but would like to have a backup of my calendar in Apple's iCal program so I can dump a copy of it onto my iPod and other iCal-compatible devices. But how the heck do I get data out of Gcal?

Since you seem to be delving into the world of the Blackberry Pearl with your Mac system, I was hoping you could tell me how to use the Pearl as a wireless (bluetooth) modem with my Mac OS X Powerbook system. Didja figure that one out yet, Dave?

I have multiple printers that I use, depending on my location (it's on my Mac laptop) and sometimes I forget to check printing devices before I queue up a print job. Usually I just leave the job to print when I get back to that location, but isn't there some way to move print jobs from one printer to another in Mac OS X?

On my iMac running Mac OS X i downloaded some widgets for the dashboard but i dont like 4 of them i wondered if you know how to delets them not just disable them?

Dave, I have been trying to upload photos to MySpace, however, I keep receiveing an error message saying that the photos are too large. The program recommended for resizing is for Windows... so how can I resize my photos? Thanks!

I'm completely ignorant of mac systems but I'm learning quickly that macs are cool, and mac os x is excellent, but it seems I have to use Windows for a few things (less so over time as I buy mac versions of my normal applications) but I also like to play games (Nothing busts stress like a quick Quake break). Before I bought the macbook on a whim yesterday, I had also bought Neverwinter Nights 2 to play on my PC. I'd like to play this on my new macbook pro - the specs seem to be more than sufficient, but I don't know the best way to do it. Is it possible to run a hardware hungry PC game in a window using the Parallels Desktop software? Or should I forget all about it and play this game on my PC instead?

I just bought a new Apple iPod Shuffle second generation and before I plug it in, want to know how it's going to sync with my Mac and what I should expect. Is there any software I need to download, for example?

I just finished Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger, and think it is an excellent little resource. I'm recently out of school, a school where we weren't taught anything about Unix, just enough to get by. I started work with the data converter team at Agilent labs, and have been able to glean quite a bit off of them (considering many of them were either directly or indirectly responsible for writing many of them commands in common use today). Thus, I'm often embarrassed to ask them questions about exactly some of the stuff you cover in the book.

Okay, now for the question: at work, they have the terminal set up such that the command line works like vi. That is, if I want to search my command history, I simply change mode via escape, type /pattern_to_be_searched, it finds the command, and then I can use other vi commands to change the command a little bit, and then execute it via the shell. How do I set this up in OS X?

I am an experienced Mac user but really haven't learned some basic stuff. I need to know about desktop icon management in Mac OS X. I am using OS X.3 on my desktop and OS X.4 on my laptop. How can I keep my harddrive icon in one spot I designate? Every time I shut down and start up again, the icon is in a different place. I like it in the upper right hand corner (I'm old-fashioned, I know). I'm sure there has to be a way, but I haven't found it yet.

I know that there are lots of places where I can get illegal movies, but I'm wondering if there's a place where I can find legal downloads and if so, where, and how do I copy them to my computer so I can watch them on plane flights or while bored at meetings.

I keep trying to download pictures into my RAZR V3 from my Apple Mac but all my pictures are too large. How do I reduce the size and/or quality of the picture so that the phone will accept it?

I'm just curious, is there any list of the most popular shareware for the Mac and Windows platform, and if so, are Windows people more likely to download games or Mac people?

I've been using Microsoft's Entourage program for a while and like it, but just noticed recently that my friend's Entourage looks totally different: instead of having these six huge buttons on the top left of my main view window. How the heck did they do that?

I'm trying to get Microsoft Entourage on my Mac to work with an SSL-based mail server, but every time I try to use it, I get errors about "unverified root certificate" or uninstalled root certificates. I've dug around on my SSL server and can't figure out what the heck Entourage wants. Help!

I live for music and have a ton of different musicians and bands that I want to keep track of. I know I can go to somewhere like Google News + Technorati and create dozens of searches, but, man, it's the 21st century, surely there's an easier way?

Can you please help me? I was told by a friend that if you hit 'F12' on your Mac you will get widgets pop-up. I have pressed 'F12' but nothing is happening. Are the widgets already loaded into your computer, or do you need to download them or something else? I haven't been using Macs for long, so i'd really appreciate your help :)

Just bought a new MacBook and love it, especially the ability to run Windows through the Parallels system, but there's one thing that's driving me totally crazy: every once in a while it randomly shuts down with no warning. It's $#@$#@$@# frustrating! What's going on?

A pal of mine uses a program called Roboform on her PC to keep her site passwords all synchronized between her different Web browsers and as a Mac user I figure there's got to be at least as good a solution, if not better on my new Macintosh. So how do you manage your passwords?

Last month I was visiting a friend's office and was given the password to access their wireless wifi network. I want to use it again, but they've changed the access point (base station) name and now I don't have the password. I can ask, but surely there's some cool Mac way to recover the old password?

This is driving me wacky! I have a ton of music in iTunes and also have a couple of audio books. All well and good, but when I'm in shuffle mode, everything in the iTunes music library is fair game, which means that every so often my party groove is suddenly interrupted with the fifth track of Harry Potter or something equally wacked. Is there some way to stop this?

I have two computers in my office and unfortunately installed both copies of Microsoft Word using the same serial number. I never thought it'd be a problem, but am constantly finding that when I leave Entourage running on one of them, I can't run Microsoft Word on the other. How the heck can I get Office to ask me for a different serial number so I can fix it?

I'm a huge fan of Apple's iTunes music player and am pretty darn excited to see the new iTunes 7 release that includes movies, games, and so much more. Most interestingly, it now has some new views of the library that are darn reminiscent of a jukebox. But I don't have artwork for any of my albums!

I've been using iCal for quite a while, but finally need to share my calendar with some others on my team but I don't have a ".mac" account, so... so I think I'm going to switch to Google Calendar and live in the Web 2.0 world. My question: how do I export my iCal calendar events and import them all into Google Calendar?

I know that I can go to a Web site to do currency conversions, but that's not always convenient or possible since I'm often in the air traveling back from overseas business trips when I'm filling out the forms that need this data. I could just write the conversion rates later and use Calculator to figure it all out but surely there's a better way on the Mac?

I've been running with Parallels for a while on my new Mac Intel system, and am really happy with it. But I really wish I could cut and paste between the Windows apps and the Mac apps, wish it would sync to the correct time, and so on. Is there some sort of Parallels equivalent to the old VMware "helper apps" that you'd install within the guest operating system? I'm running Windows XP.

I've become paranoid about security on my Mac laptop and just bumped into a story about some hackers who claim that they can break into a Mac laptop via the wifi connection. Yikes! How do I disable the hole so that no-one can use this exploit to get into my computer??

I want to import my yahoo address book to the Mac Address application on my laptop. I am running OSX 10.3.9. In Mac Address book "help" it says: "If you have problems importing a contact into Address Book, make sure it is a vCard or is in LDAP Interchange Format (LDIF). These are the only two formats Address Book recognizes."

I realize that to export my Yahoo address book it must be in the format of ".cvs"

Obviously these formats do not match so I ask you if you know of a work around solution to this?

Can you offer up a better explanation of the new Time Machine capability that Apple has unveiled for its upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 operating system? I've read that it's some sort of automatically backup system, but don't see how that can work without massive reengineering of the entire Mac OS?

I like Spotlight well enough that I find myself using it a few times a week to help dig files out of my huge archives, but it always bugs me that it sees and indexes all my mail messages too. If I wanted to have all my email searched, I'd do so in the program itself. How do I disable this feature of Spotlight?

I've gone ahead and installed Apple's Boot Camp product and Windows XP and I'm totally delighted with the results. Finally, I can pop into Windows as needed without having to drag along a PC on my sales calls. But how the heck do I get back to Mac OS X? It's now automatically booting into Windows each time.

Just read your tutorial on installing and configuring Boot Camp (see Installing Boot Camp and Windows XP on your Intel Mac) and it's great. I notice that at the end you comment about your PC partition showing up on the Mac side when you reboot. That's cool, but how do you find files on that disk?

I read through your splendid tutorial on installing Windows XP with Apple's Boot Camp product (see boot camp help) but that's not for me. I don't want to have to reboot each time I want to try something out with a Windows app on my Mac. I've read about something called the Parallels Desktop and am hoping you can explain how to install it and how to use it so I can run Windows in parallel with Mac OS X? Thanks.

I've been running Mac OS X Tiger for quite a while now and have only recently begun to explore the capabilities of the Spotlight feature in the OS. It's pretty cool, but sometimes I find that its index of my drive is out of date and I need to have it reindexed. How do I get Spotlight to index or reindex my drive?

I'm thrilled to learn that I can now dual-boot my new Intel-based Mac so that I can live in the warm fuzzy world of Mac OS X or flip over to the business world of Windows XP. I have a shiny new copy of WinXP from my IT people, an Intel-based Mac Mini, and lots of enthusiasm, but that's about it. How the heck do I actually install Windows XP on my Mac so I can work in either operating system?

Every now and then I log in to terminal (in OS X) to mess around and stuff but I logged in this time and I got this message to start...

Last login: Fri Apr 21 19:15:30 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
You have mail.
$

Its all good except for the "you have mail" I dont know what mail this is whether it is linked to OS X's mail program (I dont think it is) or whether it is a standard thing. It's not a huge issue, but I wouldnt mind knowing what it's about.

I don't get it. When i put songs on my ipod nano it lists two album titles (the same titles) for that artist. I can't seem to fix it... thanks

I read your note a few days ago about how to use GraphicConverter to create thumbnail icons for my image folders (see Why don't my pictures have image thumbnail icons?) and I'm using the technique you wrote about, but my icons are fuzzy and have a little turned-down corner and look terrible when I make the icons in my folder larger! What am I doing wrong?

I'm jealous: my buddy has a Mac and when he downloads pictures from his camera onto his computer, they all end up with nifty little preview icons that make it easy to pick out which pictures to view. When I download pictures onto my Mac, however, I get these stupid generic "JPEG" icons instead. What's wrong and how do I fix it?

I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4.5 and it has set me back to being online for only 10 minutes with Earthlink, and then cuts me off. I forgot how I stayed on line! It was simple, but I can't remember. Help!

Hi Dave, I'm really into world of warcraft and i was wondering how i get some of their wallpapers on my G5 also why can't i watch movies from thier website, i have downloaded the sample version of Divx? thanks

I've been trying to copy some files off an FTP archive, but every time I go to do the transfer, it says "Entering Extended Passive Mode" and never gets any further. My conclusion: this passive mode thing is a bust. How can I transfer the files without using passive mode? I'm using ftp from within a Terminal on my Mac, by the way.

I have a pretty new Mac G5 desktop system and just read all the news about Boot Camp. Wow! I would be so psyched if I could actually dual boot Windows XP and Mac OS X on this computer. Can I? And if so, how?

Alright, Dave. I'm darn frustrated. My husband and I both have Macs and he also has an iPod -- that I bought him! -- but when I plug his iPod into my Mac, I can see the music in iTunes and can even listen to it, but I can't copy it into my own iTunes library. What's wrong, and how do I fix it?

I have a Dual 2Gig G5 running the latest version of Mac OS X. I'm having difficulty getting all of the "buttons" on a certain webpage from showing up in Safari. They show up fine when I log in to my account. They used to show up fine when logged in on my wife's account, but now they no longer appear. What could cause something like this to be blocked on one account, but not the other.

Hi Dave, I am running Mac OS X 10.3.9 and recently encountered a strange occurrence. Instead of the usual tag under my main hard drive(74.4 GB, 24.75 GB used) it shows (74.4 GB). After I used "Get Info" it says i have read-only access. Every time i want to move a file to it, it asks for my admin password. I am normally an admin user, and this has never happened before. Is this a major thing? And how can i change it back to what it was before?

Dave, I'm a bit puzzled. How do i find what DNS servers my emac is using at any given time?

I think that the Apple iTunes Music Store is very cool and it's nice to be able to buy episodes of TV shows, but they don't have the shows I like to watch, like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Sopranos and Sex in the City. I have a TiVO unit so I can record them, but how do I get the shows from my TiVO to my iPod? I'm using a Mac, if it matters.

I have two Macs. One is running Mac OS X Panther, the other Mac OS X Tiger. They both have Safari and Explorer. I have kids that want to spent alot of time on myspace.com. I have heard that you can use Unix to redirect URLs by changing the host file. If you could help me I would apreciate it.

I love Apple, and have done since I bought my first Quadra Mac years ago, and I really love wandering around the Apple Store in my neighborhood too, but I gotta say that whenever I need to get help from someone at their Genius Bar it drives me completely crazy. I waste HOURS waiting for my turn. Is there some secret to getting prompt service?

I just got a new Motorola SLVR cellphone from Cingular and it's very cool, but somehow I can't figure out how to use the iPod area of it. How do I hook it up to my Mac and download some songs onto it, and, for that matter, how many songs can it hold anyway?

How do i change my password on my Mac OS X system, Dave? I looked when I was logging in and didn't see any sort of button or configuration option!

Any idea on how to transform Sony Micro MV videos into a version compatible with Mac OSX 10.3.9 so that they can be edited with iMovie?

How can I copy a DVD from my G4 powerbook (I have pocketmac pro) to my I-mate Jam phone which uses windows Pocket PC? I'm familiar with Mac the Ripper but I don't know how I can convert the files to ones that my phone can read, I'm really confused regarding what mp4 setting to use (most available softwares are for ipod conversion eg. MovieToGo)

I'm darn concerned! Every time I start up my Apple Safari browser, I find that the program has remembered every search I've done, whether from the Google search box or when I'm actually on the Google home page. What the heck? How can I disable this "feature" and regain my privacy?

A virus on the Mac. Gadzooks, what's next? Spyware? Ug. Meanwhile, can you tell us a bit more about this code, how it works and how we can avoid being infected?

Dave, I'm baffled. I have been running Microsoft Entourage for a while, and have grown to like the little bings and bongs of its audio notifications. But all of a sudden Entourage doesn't make any sounds at all. It's mute. What's happened?

I have a bunch of WMA format audio files on my Mac and really want to put them on my RCA Lyra MP3 player but it only supports MP3 format. Somehow, I need to convert the audio from WMA to MP3. How?

For some reason the sound notifications in Entourage have switched themselves off. I was having problems with Pocketmac Pro which I have decided to give up on....the developers in an effort to get it working had me reboot my Powerbook holding down the C key and repairing from the install disk. It didn't help and the sounds in Entourage have not worked since?

I have a Mac OS X iBook G4 ver. 10.3.9. Recently, I don't know what came over me, but I wanted to change my "name" on my computer. So, what I did was open Finder, click on my name (beside the house icon) and clicked File-Get Info. I then simply changed my name in the box that showed up under "Name & Extension". I did not realize what havoc this would cause on my computer (I did not get any "Are you sure?" warning message or anything). Even though I had changed my name, I had NOT created another account. All my old files were then put under my old name, and I eventually found these files. However, all of my programs reset themselves. I lost my emails, all my personal settings, everything. It was as if I was opening the programs up again for the first time. This was still the case even after I had switched my name back to the original name.

Question: What did I do? Why was it so easily done? How can I get my original settings back without having to reset them all manually?

I typed out my Social Security number while chatting on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I immediately knew after I did it that it was a mistake since IM is not secure. My question is, can you show me how to wipe out any trace of my Social Security number from any cookies, logs, or scripts (or anywhere else on my computer and my chat-mate's computer where it may be stored) so that someone cannot get their hands on it? Basically, I'm trying not to be a victim of identity theft. Thanks!

I won a Creative Labs Zen Micro MP3 player and am darn disappointed to find out that it appears to only be compatible with Windows XP, since I'm a Mac guy. It appears to be a problem with the "Plays For Sure" system, but I dunno. Anyway, is there any way I can use this device with my Mac?

Please help me! someone has shut me out from my own apple Mac laptop! They have taken the admin privilages and set-up a guest account for me! I use MacOS 9.

Help! For some reason when I try to use "ssh" to connect to my server from my Mac, it fails and is saying that I might be a victim of a "DNS Spoof"? What's going on, and how do I fix the problem?

I recently backed up my files on USB flash drive for my iMac computer. I had to get system updated. My tech support reformatted drive and put system 10.2.2 on my computer . I went to load my files back onto computer and all files as listed now as UNIX files.

The original programs were loaded back on computer: Appleworks 6 and Quicken 2000, but the applications don't recognize their own files now. I was told that I had to add an extention to each file so it could be recognized by each program . This is 5 years of files and I am not feeling good about this whole mess. Is there any hope to get these files attached back to their programs/ applications?

Dave, I just heard that Apple released some new computers and is touting that its latest release of some of the cool Apple software is built around "Universal Applications" technology, or something like that. I've been a long-time Mac user: what the heck are they talking about?

Dave, we have a server security problem in Mac OSX, it is being remotely accessed by a former sys admin who has been stealing our business and the webfiles that go with them. Could you work with me to help lock down this machine?

He set the machine up, it is one of several we run. As a result, he knows the root level password. I am finding when we try to change the MySQL root password, which is the same, the websites which rely on MySQL can no longer "see" their data tables. We also must shut out this fellow's access through terminal, or change the server's root name and pass.

Help!

i need just a little help here im not sure just what happened. i accidently closed my ichat instead of safari so i brought it back up like any other time. but when i brought it back up this time, it asked me for to do a new user config. i shutdown and restarted my mac and my background reverted to default, all my book marks were lost (both in safari and firefox), my icon for ichat changed to the one on my user logon. my iphoto library (where i had my backgound image) shows the outline of the picture but thats all. also, all my stuff on my desktop disappeared. im not sure if this is all that has changed yet.

I am having the reverse of the typical winmail dat problem. I have a mac with microsoft office installed. I am sending an excel template to windows users. The template was dropped/dragged (from my old windows computer) to my excel for mac. When the file is sent to any windows user they receive a winmail dat file. When I send it to myself it works fine. I want to be able to alter the file before sending so the very busy and not highly technical recipients can receive my emails. Hope you find this interesting and even better, find a solution.

I've been running Mac OS X for a few months now and every so often it pops up to tell me that I need to install an update to some program or other. That's nice, but sometimes it indicates that there are updates to install for programs I never use. How do I tell Software Update to ignore certain programs?

So sorry to ask what is I am sure a pretty dumb question, but I have downloaded widgets for my Mac OS X Tiger which don't really work in the part of world that I am (India). e.g. i can't send smses from the sms sender as no carrier here is supported. Now I want to know how to get rid of them, and the 'manage widgets' widget seems to be missing.

Hello, I'm using a Linksys WRT54GS Router to connect my G4 Mac PowerBook w/ OSX 10.4.2 to the Web, and it's working great. However, I created a closed WPA network internally with Airport and now I can't seem to change the security setting without losing that WPA signal. This WPA network is all the router/Powerbook recognizes, and I can't lower the setting for friends with WiFi laptops. I know my SSID and lil' password but not the WPA. So where or how can I change the security setting with Airport? Or is it permanent?

I don't know how, but my boot target drive recently changed which I fixed under system preferences. However, everytime I boot my machine now Safari opens. How do I stop this?

Hi Dave. I'm at a conference and have just been told by a fellow attendee that there's an IRC channel for us attendees to chat in while we're here. But I'm on a Mac and have absolutely no clue what IRC is and whether it works with my various instant message clients, so I don't know how to join the discussion. Help!?

How do I get MP3 format files out of my iTunes player on my Macintosh? I want to know because I have a new Sony PSP unit and really want to copy some songs from my computer onto my PSP unit. Thanks!

How do I change the program associated with specific file types and the icons associated with specific file types? For example, I want to change all my PDF icons...

My partner's 12inch Apple iBook no longer sleeps when she puts the lid down. I've never had to fix this kind of problem and hope you can help, hence the email!

I'm new to Mac, last Apple I owned was a IIe in the 80's. This question is related to your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger book, page 41 "Changing the Command Prompt. In this section you give the following command for changing the prompt:

      PS1= "? "

I typed this, but got the following response from the terminal window:

      -bash: ? : command not found

What am I doing wrong?

Upon attempting a Software Update, I was told I didn't have enough memory and was to remove unnecessary items from my Start Up Disk, I seem to have my HD in my Start Up Disk (is that normal?).

I simply restarted my machine to find that there was a flashing square box with a globe in the centre. After about a couple of minuets of this flashing an old OS 9 emblem (two faces) in a folder flashing up along with a question mark.

It now does this all the time. Could you tell what is going on here.

I love dashboard widgets! I access them by moving my cursor to the bottom left corner of my screen. Since I use my laptop for school, it would benefit me to have a third desktop layer besides the ones presented by the regular desktop and the widgets layer. Is there a way to have a third "desktop" that I can access the same way I access the widget layer?

I wrote all of my web site's code using SimpleText in MacOS 9. Recently I made the step up to OS X and I've transferred all of my data from my old G-4 to the new system. When I open the html pages in TextEdit on OS X I am unable to go in and edit the code. Instead I get a screen that reads the the html and presents a page like one would see on the web. Is it possible to edit the html that was written in SimpleText and still keep it as a text file?

I have been working on a PowerPoint (Mac OS X 2004) quiz for quite some time and have inserted sound files which work fine. However i have been working on a new slide and it seems all my sound files (not movie) only play for about a second. This is throughout the whole presentation. I must have clicked on a setting but i have no idea how and how it would effect the whole presentation.

I've been running Mac OS X Tiger for a while now, and when I encounter Web sites that have RSS feeds available, I've noticed that a blue "RSS" graphic appears in the address bar, but I haven't figured out how to actually subscribe to RSS feeds and use Safari as an RSS / syndication reader.

I am currently living with my Dad, have about 1700 songs in iTunes and don't want to lose them when I move to my Mother's house! How could I somehow transfer the songs to my computer at my Mom's house? Is there a way where I could burn the data to a CD or something? If you could please let me know, it'd be very appreciated.

I'm running iTunes v 4.9 on my Mac (running Mac OS X 10.2.8). I screwed up somehow and deleted my old music library trying to fix a diiferent problem. I learned my lesson on that. I have on older v 1.5 iPod with all my music on it. Can I transfer those songs into my library?

I've fallen in love with Dashboard on my new Mac OS X Tiger system, but I hate having to type f12 to get them to show up. Is it possible to have my dashboard widgets show up on my regular desktop?

Mail is set as the default email program on our Mac, so when we happen to click on an email link in anything (say, our browser), the Mail app automatically opens up and creates an email message. We don't want that, we'd like to be able to designate our chosen email apps (I use Thunderbird, she uses Entourage). How do you change this?

I am new to the Mac world and I have started with Tiger. When I use the textedit program to type HTML code and save it as an HTML document all I see is the code when I open the file in any of the browsers that I use. Unlike Notepad in Window, why can't I see the results of my code in a web page? I am completely lost and have combed the Internet. The simple Text Editor program in the older versions of the Mac OSs' seemed to work just like Notepad in Windows. Please let me know what I am doing wrong.

I bought a used PowerBook G4. The original owners have moved to Canada and I do not have their phone number. The problem is that I do not know the administrator's password. I am unable to make changes on the computer or add software without a password. How do I get a new password when I don't even know the existing one?

Dave, how do I get rid of all these stupid America Online pop-ups that plague me when I use my AOL account? I checked my AOL preferences and don't see anything that lets me turn them off!

I have recently bought a new computer and want to move my Itunes from my old one, onto my new one without having to download all the songs again. Some say it can be done, other say it can't - what do you say???

Dave, I've been reading and hearing about Google's mythical PageRank for quite a while, but what bugs me is that I haven't figured out how to ascertain my PageRank on a Mac. I know that Google has their Google Toolbar for Windows, but I don't want to have Windows just for that purpose! Sheesh. What's a guy to do?

Dave, I've read lots of news about how iTunes now supports podcasts directly, but even now that I've downloaded the latest version of iTunes, I can't see how to browse podcasts and subscribe. Help?

Is there some arcane magic required to get signatures to automatically appear on an account?

Some of my accounts work fine; some simply refuse to auto insert the signature when I open a new message, even if I completely delete and recreate the signature.

Annoyingly, it's my main business account which it doesn't like :-(

I have a powerbook g4 titanium , 60 GB HD, 512 MB ram, 1Ghz processor. I use the program DVD Backup to put dvd's on my desktop as TS folders. It has served me well on business trips, bored meetings, etc. I recently upgraded to Tiger and now I can not watch the created VIDEO_TS folders on the DVD player. What is the deal?

Dave, I'm completely clueless when it comes to programming, so I have a question that hopefully has an easy answer. Can I get the contacts in Palm's software into the Mac OS X Address Book without too much difficulty?

Dave, I'd really like to learn more about how to work with the Unix operating system that's buried in my Macintosh, now that I have Mac OS X Tiger on my G5. What do you recommend as a resource? And how easy is it to learn Unix anyway?

Hi Dave, I run Pro Tools Digidesign 002 6.7. Have recently booted RAM from 512mgb to 1gig. The issue is CPU, as mid session I will get error message that I am running out of CPU. The problem is this; there are many duplicate files and folders which are playing havoc with the CPU. How do I find all these files and folders and remove them from the system?

I presume there is a download or product that finds these files and deletes them forever. I am very new to computers and after more than 30yrs as a musician I would like my system to run like my tiny old Sony walkman did for many years.

Boot up, catch the song idea and develop quickly and without any bother. I have a Mac G4 8oomhz, play many instuments straight into the system ( I don't use Midi) in my enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge have found that I don't need too much (STuff) to create and deliver my music. A couple of nice reverbs etc. I use disk utility to help, but this is not the complete or practical way to start/stop/start/f f f f-forgetit, lose the moment.

Can you help with ideas on removing all files etc that aren't needed? I am half way through my new album and am loosing the plot rapidly...just need to focus on the music...

Dave, I'm following your setup for installing Ubuntu, Yellowdog, and OSX on a G4. I purchased a new secondary hard drive and have successfully installed OSX, Ubuntu Linux and Yellowdog Linux 4.0.1.

I've installed the three OS's and have reached the step where Yellowdog now takes precedence over ubuntu and Ubuntu is no longer visible to the boot sequence. Please tell me exactly how to get YaBoot to recognize both OS's.

Dave, what's on your PowerBook? What cool apps do you have that I should know about? What Dashboard widgets? Etc. etc etc.

Dave, I'm now running the slick new Mac OS X Tiger operating system from Apple, and amy trying to get up to speed with the RSS reader built into the new version of Safari. Very nice, but... it doesn't seem to know that my Weblogs have RSS feeds! How do I tweak my blog so Safari can see the feed and offer a one-button subscription for Tiger users?

Dave, as far as I know, I get a new IP address every time I connect to the Internet with my Apple PowerBook. How do I figure out what address I've been assigned?

Dave, do tell, when are we unwashed masses going to be able to enjoy the goodness that will be Mac OS X 10.4, aka "Tiger"?

Dave, I'm thrilled, I just got a new Mac Mini to dip my toe into the world of Macintosh (I'm a long-time Windows user) and I'm wondering what applications you recommend I add to the unit to make it maximally useful?

Dave, there are a couple of people who send me email, and, consistently, their attachments don't show up as neat "foo.doc" or "report.xls" but as the generic attachment winmail.dat. They don't know why and I don't know why. Worse, as a Mac user, I can't figure out what to do with them. What's causing these "winmail.dat" files and how do I decode 'em?

Dave, I have a problem which I know that many other users have, certainly of Macs, and maybe of other machines as well: Sometimes when I look at an email which has been sent to me which is clearly *supposed* to be rendered in html in my reader, all I actually see is a bunch of html code gobbledygook.

As you can imagine, the email is completely unreadable.

I have searched and searched for a way to clean this sort of email up so it's readable, but to no avail. I have been told that the problem is that the email sender does not have some sort of code set correctly, and that some mail programs will overlook this (which I guess explains why they keep sending this garbage, maybe not enough people complain), but that some, such as my Mac's, will not. Help!

Hello Dave, I work on Mac OS X and I have been trying to add a favicon.ico to my website's address bar, only to find that it only shows when I open it with Netscape or Firefox, all the other browsers like Safari and Explorer don't seem to recognize it.... Can you help?? It is driving me mad...

Dave, I was talking with my ISP and he suggested that I use an "ssh tunnnel" when I use my email program, Microsoft Entourage, on any public wireless networks to avoid exposing my account and password to anyone who might be sniffing the wi-fi network. Problem is, I have no idea what they're talking about, but I'm definitely paranoid about security and the idea of point-to-point encryption sounds wonderful. Can you tell me how to set this up?

Dave, how can I flatten a directory structure? I've got a directory "foo", with many more sub-directories and files within. I want to take all the files from all levels beneath foo and put them in foo itself.

I've tried this: find . *.mp3 -print0 | xargs -0 mv . but I get an error on the mv command that I can't figure out. Help!

Dave, I have just installed a new DVD burner in my computer (a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-105 internal drive) and am trying to figure out what kind of blank disks I should be using. There are apparently five different blank DVD formats. Do I want DVD-R? DVD-RW? or ??

Also, if I just want to burn lots of data onto a DVD disk, can I use my Roxio Toast Titanium to do so, or do I need to use a special DVD-friendly app like iDVD?

Hi Dave! I'm running a 500 MHz Titanium Powerbook with 512MB of memory, Mac OSX 10.3.7. I recently had to do a clean install on my powerbook and my shell is defaulting to the tcsh instead of the bash. First question... Why did it do that? Second question... How do I fix it?

I have a Snow iMac G3 800MHz, with both OS9.2.2 and OS10.1.5 on it, and for jollies, I put 10.3 on my external firewire hard drive, and just boot off the external drive. I wanted to see how well that works, and it works wonderfully. (it is up to 10.3.7 right now)

Anyway, this is my question: I've been itching to buy an external firewire DVD drive, to play movies or anything else a DVD drive can be used for. I've tried to figure out if this is possible, and whether I would run into problems concerning encoding or decoding movies, software vs hardware decoding, which external DVD drives have the decoding ability built in, and... I'm not sure what else to think.

So I was wondering what your thoughts are and how to tell if external DVD drives have hardware decoding built into them, or if I could just buy any ol' external DVD drive as long as I had the proper software.

Once installed, Ubuntu Linux and Yellow Dog Linux both add something called yaboot which then controls the boot-up sequence. This boot control application that lets you pick which operating system you want to have run gives you about 15 seconds to pick between Linux and Mac OS X then defaults to launching Ubuntu. Not what I wanted at all.

I'm experimenting with installing Ubuntu Linux on my Macintosh, and it's working great except now the default operating system upon boot is Linux, not Mac OS X. How do I fix that??

I haven't yet read through your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther, but I realize now that I probably need to! Here's what happened: I typed this command "ping www.yahoo.com -f -1 1492" into terminal from a website saying it might help me determine my ideal MTU settings. I believe they mislabeled the instructions and this command should have been for Windows... not Mac.

Did I screw anything up? Here's what I typed and the results I received:

Last login: Sun Oct 17 22:06:55 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
Wiamea:~ mike$ ping www.yahoo.com -f -1 1492
usage: ping [-Rdfnqrv] [-c count] [-i wait] [-l preload]
       [-p pattern] [-s packetsize] host
Wiamea:~ mike$

I've started to go through your shell script book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts but there is still something I'm unclear on. I'm showing my ignorance here, but how exactly do you save a shell script so you can use it later?"

"In Mac OS X, have you ever done "Get Info" on a shell script, made it open with Terminal, and had it forcibly execute every time you open the Terminal app and then exit? Any idea how to fix this? I've changed the path to the script and now it complains that the script is not there but still forceably exits after failing to execute the original script."

I have a Mac running OS 10.3.5, and I am trying to use TextEdit to write HTML code in your example. However, it will not let me save the file with an .html extension, as you specify needs to happen for the browsers to properly read it. And I tried it anyway using both .rtf and .txt extensions (the only options it will allow), and Explorer says "it doesn't know how to handle the type of file you've selected." Of course, I didn't expect it to work, because your book said it wouldn't. What can I do? And will I continue encountering problems as I go through your book since I'm working on a Mac, and the book is written from the perspective of PC users? Thanks

Help! I read about some sort of major security hole where people can exploit the Safari help system and drop junk onto my computer? What's that all about? How can I avoid it being a danger on my computer?

As I'm now working through your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Jaguar, I can't get the commands "alias" and "grep" to work. Has been there a change in the command definition from Jaguar to Panther?

"I've really learned a lot from reading your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther, but I'm still unsure what's involved in tweaking my WiFi configuration from the command line. Help?

Security Update 2003-11-04 addresses a potential vulnerability with the Terminal application in Mac OS X v10.3 and Mac OS X Server v10.3 that could allow unauthorized access to a system.

"I figured that this would be right up your alley. If I want to move any document that contains "agreen" to another folder, what commands would I use on the command line?"