Technology 101

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

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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.

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Quick tips: Having your Mac save printer settings.

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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.

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

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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?

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

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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.

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Safari isn’t saving my password – or, Keychain Access Adventures

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Update 10/3/13 I’ve been getting a higher and higher number of people asking about Safari flat out refusing to save passwords on certain sites where it used to.

A bit of research made me realize what I should have known: Safari 6 and up will respect a website requesting that certain fields not be autocompleted (such as PayPal and Yahoo). There’s not much you can do about it within Safari, although you could use a third party password manager such as 1Password or a free extension (that link will download it) that would make Safari ignore the autocomplete request.

Update: I’m getting a surprising number of people from around the planet hitting this article, searching for things like ‘Safari isn’t saving password’, ‘Mac keychain’ and ‘why oh why am I always being asked for my keychain password someone help me please’. Anyway, if the article doesn’t answer the question, don’t hesitate to drop a question in the comments.

Your Mac, much like, say, a sheepdog, is supposed to make your life easier by fulfilling your commands. And much like a sheepdog, when you give it a clear, distinct command, and it lopes off into the sunset ignoring it completely, it’s apt to raise your blood pressure.

Just to take an example: lets say you’re doing your daily check in on your webmail, and lets say you’re using yahoo mail. You cheerfully plug in your username and password, and when Safari asks you ‘Hey, would you like to save this password for later?’ you say ‘yes.’

The next day, you happily surf back to Yahoo webmail, innocently expecting that there will be no more password typing for you (after all, typing 123456 can get a bit old).

As an unusually perspicacious individual (evidenced by you reading this blog), you’ve probably already guessed the punchline: not only has your Mac NOT remembered the password, but it pretty much refuses to do it even after you go through the entire denial, rage, and piteous begging stages of troubleshooting.

What is up?

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Maintaining Your Mac: a Boring Guide

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Recently, I had to buy a new car. Well, a car, as it’s only new if the first ten years of something’s life don’t count. In which case, huzzah! I’m still in my twenties.

Outside of that though, it wasn’t a new car, it wasn’t all that expensive, and boy, was it in great shape. In such great shape, in fact, that my trusty old VW Golf – which had been making horrible sounds that universally caused new passengers about five minutes of alarm and asking ‘No, really, are you sure it’s okay?’ – seemed to rise up, Jacob Marley like, from the metal grave to which it had been consigned to shame me for its ill treatment. It was nearly the same age, after all, and the only reason for the discrepancy (outside of the fact that I drive an absolutely insane amount, I suppose) is that I was much more of the school that as long as I could squeeze the last remaining, clanking, staggering miles out of the vehicle, well then, why take it in for repair?

We don’t really need to go into why that’s dumb. It is. Very. When you own a car, you factor in more than just the cost of purchasing it, but of gas, insurance, tires, and if you’re not a moron, maintenance. Thank you Captain Obvious, yes I know.

But it made me think about similar Total Cost of Ownership considerations for a computer. The obvious ones are there, of course – computer, internet connection, printer, and so on. Then the not-so-obvious but even more critical backups. What about maintenance? Smart people ask me about what they can do for their computers all the time.

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Set your Google privacy settings

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Note: This is a quick and dirty guide. We’ll be improving it a smidge over the up-coming days, to make it easier to understand!   First, log into your google account. You should be able to do that from just about any page with the word ‘google’ in it, including plain old google.com. If you … Read more

Why is my Mac slow?

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What is the number one technological hurdle of computing? What problem plagues people more than anything else, despite massive leaps in hardware and software in the past twenty years?

“My computer is just so sloooooow.”

Ironic, really. Think about it – the one thing that vendors incessantly bombard us with is how fast their new product is. That alone is a clue, I suppose, that something is amiss – if someone is constantly yelling at you that the reason it’s better is because it’s faster, obviously being slow was a problem in the first place. And the more people are yelling about it, the bigger a problem it probably is.

The catch, though, the great reveal to this particular magic trick, is that the reason our computers never seem any faster is because they aren’t actually slow in the first place.

Nope, I’m not about to pull some zen mystical “it is what you want it to be,” although if you can pull that off, more power to you – go do that and stop reading this. For those of us who can’t do that (raises hand) we’ll be better suited by applying a staple of troubleshooting: if a problem hasn’t been solved by trying the same thing 500 times, perhaps we should try something else.

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Copying DVD’s to your computer – or iPhone, or iPad, or whatever

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I get a lot of questions about how to get videos onto your iPhone or iPod or iPad or iMac or what i-have-you. There’s actually a really easy way to do this, and it has an added bonus of letting you get your current DVD library stored on your Mac. Outside of potentially saving space in your house, it has the benefit of having all your movies instantly available, and if you connect to a large display or a TV, well, that’s pretty darn convenient. Movies, much like music, are one of those things where a strong argument can be made for letting your computing devices take over. Saves you space, and makes it a great deal easier to find what you want.

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