Technology 101 – Page 2 – Out of a Jam Solutions

How to test your internet speed – without getting infected by malware

July 8, 2015 by Michael Miller

You’re paying for it, and by golly, you want it! You want that internet speed. But mostly, you probably want to know why it’s so slow right now that you’re about ready to go mental. Well, as you no doubt know, you could be using speediest.net to find out just how fast your connection to … Read more

How to Make Sure my Time Machine Backup is Working

March 14, 2024July 1, 2015 by Will Troshynski

Time Machine is a great and wonderful tool, but only if it’s functioning properly. You know this, because you’ve already set up your Time Machine backup. In a twist of fate, however, you may see (as you go about your daily computer-related business) a notification that you haven’t had a backup in 22 days… Which, considering that Time Machine is supposed to create a backup every hour for the past 24 hours, is concerning. How can you tell if your backup is, in fact, working? Where can you see the latest backup? How can you make sure all of the information you want to save is there?

Not to worry: there are many tools available to check and double check your backup is running properly— and if it’s not, to reconfigure the backup service to be back on its feet.

iCloud Storage Full: Or, my phone keeps annoying me and I want to smash it

March 16, 2014 by Michael Miller

The latter part of the subject could be a lot of things. The first part, too, I suppose, but fewer enough to where we can cover them here!

If you’re an iPhone user, chances are you are, whether unwittingly or not an iCloud user as well. Apple reps at the Apple Store are pretty aggressive about turning it on (Apple ad: used car salesmen everywhere: would you like to push iCloud services instead?) and iOS itself is pretty insistent you get some iCloud on.

It’s not that iCloud is bad – by and large, it’s great, and well worth having for one reason or another. The times when you wouldn’t want iCloud are worthy of an article entirely on their own, but for the moment, lets get over my absurdly long intro and get to the meat: what do you do when you start being incessantly told your iCloud storage is full?

The possible reasons are many, the common reasons are but two.

How to Scan in Mac OS X

July 1, 2013 by Michael Miller

A little while ago, I had the following conversation over dinner:

Michael, speaking with the same enthusiasm with which he is chewing his dinner (which is a lot, considering it is delicious):

“So I’m trying to decide. Should I write about how to scan on the mac, or something different?”

Everybody at dinner:

“BoooorrriiiiZzzzzz.”

So it’s possible, I suppose, that ‘how to scan on the Mac’ isn’t the most riveting of subjects. But I actually get that question a lot, and here’s why.

Could not find PPoE server, or: I’m travelling and my Mac went insane

June 3, 2013 by Michael Miller

From time to time, I get an emailf rom clients on the road about a specific problem. I’ll paraphrase:

When I left my house, my perfectly well-behaved Mac went completely mental and pops up gibbeirsh sounding messages what seems like ever two seconds. These messages are always saying the same thing, something about ‘A PPPoE server cannot be found TECH BLAH BLAH BLAH’

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How to use iPhone HDR, or: advice I am not qualified to give

July 21, 2012July 20, 2012 by Michael Miller

With apologies to Richard Murphy.

Extra special note: I am not a photographer. I do not take good photos. But I like taking photos, and as such that places me squarely in the demographic of most other iOS users out there. I wrote this after showing these examples to a number of clients who had this question – to very positive reaction, so I figured I’d save myself the time and just write it up. If the advice here gives you, a professional photographer of fame and talent,an ulcer, I sincerely apologize. Please make sure to write something angry about it and link to this blog, so that I can finally become famous via outrage, the current path to fame du jour. Thank you!

HDR, I’ve found, is a mystery to many people who have an iPhone. The most common emotion seems to be that it makes your built in camera take worse photos slower, which hardly seems like a winning proposition.

Quick tips: Having your Mac save printer settings.

June 25, 2012 by Michael Miller

Q: How do I have my printer remember my last settings?

Has this happened to you? You pull up your beautifully crafted document, go to the ‘File’ menu and choose ‘Print’. In the helpful little dialogue box that comes up, you realize that, no, you don’t want to print all 80 pages in glorious full color, and in fact, while you might not consider yourself a tree hugger per se, you wouldn’t consider yourself a tree-sucker-puncher either, so you would like to print two-sided. You click around on some menus, fiddle with some buttons and voila! The document prints the way you would like it to. Feeling well pleased with yourself, and rightfully so, you wander away from your trusty Macintosh to save the world/defeat an army/bring about world peace/go to the bathroom.

Should I get a Retina Macbook Pro?

July 4, 2012June 21, 2012 by Michael Miller

Yes, they make a Mac now that implants in your eyeball.

Reducing Word and PDF file size: automated. Kind of.

December 5, 2014June 2, 2012 by Michael Miller

I HAVE A GIANT WORD/PDF DOCUMENT HELP ME WHAT DO I DO.

Panic not. First, I must congratulate you that you’ve noticed. Unless your document is so monstrous that you noticed its size because your computer started yelling at you, I’m glad you are being a conscientious citizen and not emailing 15mb files left and right, willy nilly. This is bad etiquette, poor form, not done.

On the other hand, you might want to get that file to someone, so what’s a good etiquette, fine form displaying individual to do?

My Printer Stopped Working: or, how to make me unable to pay my bills

April 19, 2012 by Michael Miller

First, a disclaimer: I hate printers. I mean, I really do. It’s a voodoo industry, full of cheap-yet-secretly-expensive devices, that seem intent only on never working exactly as they should. They are consistent in their inconsistency, and reliably rubbish. Inkjet printers have ink that costs enough to make you think they need harvest unicorn blood, and laser printers are the size of a unicorn stall. Or weird little gears and gizmos go out of whack, like some sort of fiendish goblin contraption, and it literally costs more than a computer to get the part replaced.

All that being said, there are a few, tried and true, reliable things that fix 95% of the problems people call me about when it comes to printers. Theres lots of OTHER things that go wrong, but this little procedure is what I always try first, and it generally does the trick.