Many places you need to enter a password give you the option of saving it “to your keychain,” freeing you from the need to remember or enter passwords over and over. What happens to your passwords, though? What if you need to remember one, or delete one? You can find all the answers in the Keychain Access application buried with the other Utilities.
Managing Saved Passwords
December 3rd, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
Dude, Where’s My Mouse?
November 30th, 2007 — Free Friday
Monitor size is increasing, and so is the amount of stuff displayed on the monitor at any given time. With all that cluttered space, I often lose track of my mouse pointer and end up flailing the mouse around wildly until I happen to catch sight of the little arrow flying through my peripheral vision. Frustrating, but easily solvable with a handy little application from 2Point5Fish.com called Mouse Locator.
My iPhoto Edits Disappear
November 28th, 2007 — Write-in Wednesday
Q: I edited my photos in iPhoto, but when I try to use them later I keep getting the original, unedited photo. What happened?
Finding Photos Outside of iPhoto
November 26th, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
Between Halloween, Thanksgiving, a plethora of December holidays and New Years, ’tis the season for photo management. But if you use iPhoto, can you use your photos outside of iPhoto? Before iPhoto ‘08 (version 7.0), you could easily navigate to your iPhoto Library in the finder or an Open File dialog, find the photo you want and open it, upload it to a website, or use it the same ways you did before iPhoto ‘08. Now, if you navigate to the iPhoto Library, instead of a directory full of photos organized by date, you’re confronted with a single icon.
Luckily, there are some simple strategies for getting to your photos if you want to get to them through the file system.
The Countdown Begins
November 24th, 2007 — Free Friday
Happy (day after) Thanksgiving! Thanks have been given, the turkey’s been eaten, and the day that heralds the official start of the “Holiday Season” has come and gone. Many thanks to all of the Unseemly Raptor readers for your interest, comments, emails, and questions. I love hearing from all of you.
Kick off the holiday season by counting down to Christmas with Kevin Craft’s Christmas Countdown Widget. Starting at the end of November, decorations are added to the tree until you reach December 25th as your dashboard grows ever more festive.
My Browser Forgets My Address
November 21st, 2007 — Write-in Wednesday
Q: I love the fact that when I fill out forms on the internet, my Mac just pops in the information. However, since I moved, most of the time it fills in my old address, phone, etc. which I have to erase. Every once in awhile, it fills in my new info. How do I get rid of the old data?
Address Book As Birthday Calendar
November 19th, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
Address Book is great for keeping track of contact information, but it has several other helpful tricks up its sleeve. For example, with a few quick changes tweaks, you can use it to automatically create a calendar for keeping track of birthdays in iCal. Once this calendar has been created, anytime you add a contact’s birthday to your address book it will automatically show up in iCal on their birthday each year.
Backups In A Time Machine World
November 16th, 2007 — Free Friday
With the introduction of Leopard, Apple has given users an easy to use, no need to think about it way to do backups with Time Machine. It’s slick, and I think people will actually use it. However, with that said, there’s not really any reason for Time Machine to become the only piece of your backup repertoire.
If you haven’t upgraded yet, you’ll probably want to make a backup of your important data before switching to Leopard (it’s always a good idea to back data up before making major changes to your computer), and even if you already have Time Machine crunching away at your files, it’s still a good idea to have periodic backups for your backups. The external drive that Time Machine uses is just as fallible as the one in the computer you’re using it to back up, so you’d hate to have that drive go belly up and still be without your backup. Having another backup that’s not stored in Time Machine and connected to your computer all the time also ensures that nothing that could wipe out your system will take down both your computer and all of your backups.
Let’s face it: stuff happens. The more ways you back up your most important information, the better! But, if you’ve already spent money on Time Machine and external drives, you’re probably asking, “Ok, how much more will this cost me?” You want another way to back up data, but it should be cheap, reliable, and easy to use. Enter, SuperDuper from Shirt-Pocket Software. It’s more than just a cute name!
Relocating the iTunes Music Library
November 14th, 2007 — Write-in Wednesday
Q: I love iTunes, but I have a lot of music and it’s taking over my disk space. Can I keep my music on an external drive without re-importing it to iTunes every time I listen to it?
A: Yes, you can. Disk space can be particularly vexing for laptop users, so it’s always nice to find that something that takes up a lot of space, like an extensive music collection, can be moved off-board.
Special Characters
November 12th, 2007 — Miscellaneous Monday
You can place many special characters in text documents by holding down the Option key and pressing various other keys, but this doesn’t help much if you don’t happen to recall that pressing Option-R will get you the ® symbol. There is actually a large array of characters that you can get by pressing different combinations of keystrokes, but Apple’s Character Palette is a much easier way to get to them.