Mac 101
Dear Aunt TUAW: ZDnet switcher has some wires crossed
Auntie knows that some of her correspondents don't get around to sending in their questions promptly -- in some cases, not at all. This week, she's handed over the perfumed stationery to nephew TJ, who has a bit of a bee in his bonnet over Ken Hess's ...
Mac 101: The history of the Command key "pretzel"
You've probably tapped it at least a few times today without ever knowing exactly what it is or what it's called; I'm talking about the strange, swirly square emblazoned on the Command key (that's Unicode U+2318, for the font fanatics). So just what ...
Mac 101: Finding your Mac's UUID
Most Apple owners are familiar with the UDID, aka serial number, for their iOS device, but did you know that your Mac has a similar hardware UUID too? In this post, I will show you where to find it, so you can use it in beta testing. If you ever ...
TUAW TV Live: Doctors Without Borders Edition
This week on TUAW TV Live, I am still covering for Steve Sande while he is on a boat, but this week I have found a friend to help me disrupt the class. Today I will be joined by the other doctor from the cast of regulars Dr. Allgood. We will be ...
Mac 101: How to retire a Mac with an iCloud account
When you want to retire, sell or give away a Mac, you should never just pass it on to someone else as-is. There are many apps that only allow you to use your serial numbers a limited time, most notably from Adobe and Microsoft. You should ...
Mac 101: Beef up your spam filters in Mail (video)
Nobody likes spam, but if you use Apple's Mail on Mountain Lion, at least you have some tools to deal with it. Plenty of Mac users rely on Mail to read, manage and process their emails... and spam messages. If you use email, you have spam -- ...
Mac 101: Checking your Mac's warranty status
More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Every newly purchased Mac comes with a one-year limited warranty and 90 days of complimentary telephone technical support from Apple. Of course, by purchasing AppleCare with your new Mac, you ...
Mac 101: How to back up your Google Reader account
Google is sunsetting its Reader service in July and you may be on the hunt for a new RSS service and client to use. Before you fire up that new client, you should take a few minutes to back up your current Google Reader feeds as you may need to ...
Mac 101: Schedule event details in the event title with Calendar
More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Let's say you've just got off the phone with a friend. You've arranged to meet later for coffee, but you don't want to forget, so you go to Calendar on your Mac to schedule the event. You ...
Mac 101: Use Automator to extract text from PDFs
More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice (and expert) Mac users. Have you every tried to copy and paste text from a PDF into a word processor document like Pages or Microsoft Word? Most of the time the text loses all its formatting from the PDF, ...
Mac 101: Temporarily disabling Notification Center
One gripe I hear a lot from OS X Mountain Lion users is that they sometimes get notifications bothering them at the most inopportune times. I know that when I'm working on TUAW TV Live, the last thing I want is something else to distract my ...
Mac 101: dealing with iCloud email spam
Dealing with an email inbox filled with spam can be a tedious process. Some spam emails, like those saying you have an inheritance overseas, are easy to spot, while others are cleverly crafted to appear legitimate. If you use an iCloud email ...
Mac 101: Use Finder's item arrangement to sort your files
One of the really neat things about OS X is that it's easy to sort your files in Finder. If you're downloading a lot of files, there are several ways to corral them by using the item arrangement (the button that looks like it has a lot of tiny ...
Mac 101: Mountain Lion's Magic Trackpad triple-finger tap dictionary lookup
Let's say you're reading TUAW and you see that I've used the word "peripatetic" in a post. While some of you would know the meaning of the word, others might be doing a bit of head-scratching and fire up the Dictionary app on your Mac. If you ...
Mac 101: Preview's magnifying loupe
One thing I love about OS X is that no matter how long I use it, I'm often surprised by something that I didn't expect to find. That was the situation last week when i was using Apple's Preview app in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to resize an image, ...
Mac 101: Deduplicating your birthdays in the Facebook era
More Mac 101, our ongoing series of tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Adding Facebook integration to the OS X Contacts application was not without controversy; many of us feared an onslaught of @facebook.com email addresses polluting our ...
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TUAW (or The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is a website devoted to tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple.