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
Options for securing external storage in OS X
The default approach for storing files on drives other than your boot drive is to get an external storage device and then copy your files to it; however, by doing so you leave open the possibility of someone getting your drive and accessing your data. To secure the files you place on such drives, there are several approaches you can take, including encrypting files or the drive itself, and using special setups to require two or even more physical drives be attached before you can access the data on them. Continue reading