Your keyboard and mouse are the gateway to your computer, so if these stop working then you will find yourself somewhat hard-pressed to properly control your system. While for the most part an unresponsive input device is indicative of an issue with the device itself, there are times when a conflict with your Mac may be the reason for the problem. Either way, there are several steps you can take to overcome input problems and regain control of your Mac. Continue reading
MacIssues site problems and status
To all readers, MacIssues has had some problems in the past few weeks that have been rather difficult to address. These have included incredibly slow loading times, and errors about inability to establish database connections that have cropped up when people load the pages. Today the site went completely down, and I had to do a full reset and restore. I am looking into what has caused the problems, including potential malicious activity. As things stand, a few of the more recent articles are missing, and some visual tweaks need to be done, but overall the site and its content should be running properly now. Posting should also continue on a regular basis. Thank you for everyone who has attempted to reach me regarding this.
Certificate expiration breaks older OS X installers
Replacement developer certificates Apple issued to fix security issues have caused signed packages created using the older replaced certificates to no longer be verifiable. This results in OS X assuming corruption in these files, and will not process them by default. One unfortunate side-effect of this is that older installers you may have collected for past versions of OS X will likely have been signed using older certificates, and may no longer install. Continue reading
How to change video playback speed in QuickTime X
When Apple replaced its aging QuickTime Player 7 with the newer QuickTime X, it touted the change as a ground-up rebuild to supplant the band-aided framework that had kept QuickTime 7 going for so many years. QuickTime may now be better poised to handle future media types and implementations, but since its announcement QuickTime X has not really done much, and has left many without obvious approaches for some of the basic controls that have been conveniences over the years. Continue reading
Fix VIP mailboxes not showing all messages in Mail
The VIP mailbox in Apple’s Mail program should show messages from contacts that you flag as VIP; however, there are instances where messages from your designated VIPs will not show up, leaving this feature somewhat unreliable. This may happen after upgrading or updating OS X to anew version, and if its happening then the fix should be relatively straightforward. Continue reading
Hot corners annoying you? Make them explicitly requested.
One of OS X’s notable features is its Hot Corners service, where by moving your mouse to a designated corner of your screen you can activate one of several designated tasks, including sleeping your system, preventing sleep, triggering Expose views, and more. These options undoubtedly have their benefits; however, there is also the problem where the default approach for assigning hot corners makes them too easy to trigger. Continue reading
Overcome the OS X Dock getting stuck on a second monitor
If you have multiple monitors and are using OS X Yosemite or later, you will have Apple’s latest multi-screen implementations available for use, where unlike classic extended desktop setups, each screen can be treated as a separate space, or “virtual desktop”, upon which you are doing work and organizing your windows. Continue reading
How to get file information from the command line in OS X
When you are browsing your files in the OS X Finder, you will have a number of options for telling you what the file is. For starters, most files have an icon that represents the program that will open it, and then you can click the file and press Command-i to get information on it. When managing file in the OS X Terminal, if you are relatively new to the Terminal you may think the only identification for a file is its name (ie, a “.txt” suffix for a text file); however, there are several tools you can use to see quite a bit of information about a file. Continue reading
Tips and tricks for increasing the use of the OS X Console
One of the top troubleshooting tools you will use in OS X is the Console app, with which you can view a centralized list of logged system activity, be it from the system console or from application-specific log files. With the details output in the resources available in the Console, you can often track relevant activity for when crashes and other faults occur, and then address them accordingly. Continue reading
How to run “headless” virtual machines in OS X
If you run multiple operating systems on your Mac in virtual machines, then you likely use either Virtual Box, VMWare Fusion, or Parallels Desktop. For the most part, when you set up a VM on your Mac with any of these solutions, it will run as a window that shows you the graphical view of the virtualized OS. However, if you use your VMs for servers instead of running desktop applications, then you can use a small trick to run them in the background, and thereby save both a little processing power and some desktop clutter. Continue reading