When booting your Mac you should only need to supply your username and password once in order to log in. However, there may be times upon cold-booting your Mac where you enter your password at the login prompt, but after the system shows a gray boot screen as expected, it displays your login window again. This problem does not affect the functionality of your Mac, and is only a minor hiccup in how FileVault disk encryption is set up on your system. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: March 2015
How to prevent letters fading on your Mac’s keyboard
Your Mac’s keyboard is built to be fairly durable; however, there are instances where the letters on it may wear. For external Apple keyboards this can result in a blank white key, and for backlit keyboards you may find the sharp-edged letters are now a splotch of translucent white. This can have you considering a replacement, which can be expensive for MacBook systems. If you are noticing fading keys on your Mac, then there is an easy way to prevent the problem from spreading, and even fix a key that is already faded. Continue reading
Use Preview’s Loupe to Emphasize Areas of PDFs and Images
If you use Apple’s Preview program regularly to view images and PDF documents on your Mac, then you might find yourself opening some documents where you might need to zoom in on some details. There are several ways to do this in Preview using its standard Zoom function, but in addition you can use the Loupe to keep your document mainly at one zoom level, and only increase the zoom of the area under the loupe. Continue reading
Unable to boot to a secondary hard drive? This may help
One long-standing and useful feature in OS X is its ability to boot from practically any mountable partition, including external drives. This allows for quick ways to test an installation, isolate different uses of your Mac to separate boot drives, troubleshoot aspects of your Mac’s hardware and internal storage, and create bootable backups of your Mac’s hard drive. While useful, there are times when your Mac will not boot to such partitions, even if they are perfectly healthy. If so, then here is what to do about it. Continue reading
How to overcome Safari hijacked by a JavaScript warning
Whether it is from clicking on spam or otherwise being caught in a malicious trap, every now and then such oversights when browsing the Web can have you inadvertently load phishing or spam pages that attempt to pull ransomware attacks on you. When this happens, you will see a warning window claims your browser has been locked and you will have to pay a fee or give them information to release it. Continue reading
Remote Apple Events may break with Security Update 2015-002
Remote Apple Events allows you to use AppleScript routines to control another Mac; however, if you have installed the latest security updates for OS X, then you might find your scripts and any programs that use Remote Apple Events may not work, and give you an error. This may be especially true for communication between systems running OS X 10.8 and 10.9 Server, and OS X 10.10. Continue reading
Anti-Reflective coatings separating on MacBook displays
The anti-reflective display coating on some MacBook systems may separate from the glass panel over time, leaving a notable permanent discoloration on the display. When this occurs, the discoloration may spread quite easily as the separation expands. Given that Apple has used anti-reflective coatings on many MacBook systems (both retina and non-retina), this problem may be a potential issue for many people. Continue reading
Three approaches for quickly accessing shared folders in OS X
Do you access shared folders often on your Mac? While the use of AirDrop, Messages, e-Mail, and online drive options are great for personal and workgroup sharing, often in corporate environments you might have central shared folders to store data. You might also have a theater system, file server, or other central storage set up on your home network that you might wish to access regularly. Continue reading
How to significantly decrease your iOS device’s brightness
If you have an iPad or iPhone, chances are that you periodically use it in a location or two that have very low light, where even the brightness level at its lowest settings may still cause the device to glare and be somewhat intrusive. Specific instances of this might be if you want to read in bed but have a partner who is sleeping, or are otherwise in an environment where others are enjoying the dark. In these instances, you can make use of a hidden feature in your iOS device to make its brightness even dimmer. Continue reading
Safari bug saves Web page URLs in Private mode
Private Browsing mode should prevent most Web browsers from saving loaded content in any way. Any such information such as that in your browser’s cache, its history, or cookie information should be stored temporarily for the current session, and then discarded when you close your browser window. However, in Safari your pages might be logged by a small but overlooked aspect of how Safari handles Web pages. Continue reading