A Treasure Trove of Technology Tidbits
I retired my much loved 11” Air and purchased a new MacBook rose gold laptop. One thing driving me crazy with the new trackpad. I hate the new depth sensors and the amount of noise. I was able to resolve both issues easily. Open System Preferences Click “Trackpad” In the “Point & Click” tab, enable […]
When you enable DHCP, you normally get both an IP address and DNS servers from the DHCP server. Sometimes, however, you don’t want those DNS servers because using random DNS servers can open you to DNS poisoning. One way of being more secure is to hardcode to the Google public DNS servers. This works great […]
Today, I was helping someone setup their brand new Apple laptop. One of the recommendations I made was to turn off “Sharing Services”. This resulted in a blank stare, so I thought it would be valuable to describe how to accomplish this task. Note that my recommendation encompasses a large range of features, including, screen […]
Yesterday, I got an email bounce back because I accidentally sent one of my friends and email to their old email address. The reason that happened is that OS X Mail auto-populates(aka auto-complete) the email address as you type. But, this particular friend has two emails: the legacy incorrect one and the shiny new correct […]
Last week, I needed to email someone a document that had my social security number in it. Before the recent 25 million person breach of personally identifiable information (PII) I would have probably just emailed it without a second thought. But, with all the recent security news, I hesitated. How should I get this to […]
This weekend, my mother complained that her Mail app’s Apple notifications were popping up over the movie she was watching. “How do you disable that?” she asked me. So, I went looking in the System Preferences to discover what controls were available to suppress notifications. I found changing these settings was easy, and that you […]
I got a call from one of my friends who was all excited because they had purchased a new Apple MacBook. And, they asked me to recommend an encrypted thumb drive (aka flash drive) that would be compatible with their laptop. Well, I explained there are thumb drives with hardware encryption, but for most of […]
So, recently I wanted to do some client/server testing on my laptop. I am using Oracle’s VirtualBox to allow me to run Windows on my Apple. Anyway, when I attempted to network my Windows 7 VM to my Windows 2008 Server, nothing happened. Specifically, they could each ping the gateway and the Internet, but they […]
I recently upgraded to the latest version of Apple OS X. Mostly, the experience was positive, but one gotcha was that my scroll bars disappeared. I realize that the scrolling functionality remained, you could still use the multi-touch trackpad to control window scrolling. But, I liked the visual clues given by the scroll bars. For […]
Today, I was cleaning up some old USB thumb drives and thought I found some “new pictures” which were not on my laptop. So, I copied the “new pictures” to my local hard drive and reformatted the thumb drive. Looking around, I figured out that these new items were not new at all — they […]