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?

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?

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'm trying to upload some photos to a social media site and it's complaining that they're too big. They are, as they come off my camera huge, but I have no idea how to shrink them down and was rather hoping the site would do just that, reducing image size, but nope, it just complains. On my iMac, how do I shrink down images so that they can be uploaded and shared?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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 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?

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?

Tech expert Dave Taylor shows you how to find cool wallpaper images with Google Image Search, then with a couple of additional mouseclicks set that image as your desktop wallpaper on your Mac OS X system. Fast, easy, fun. Video is also a demonstration of how to use Telestream's Screenflow to produce attractive video captures with call-outs and more.

TIP: Pick the highest HD resolution, then watch this in full-screen mode.

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!

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?

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?