10 Things You Can Do On Your Mac When Bored

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some things you can do with your Mac if you're bored. 

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Now there are a lot of blog posts and videos out there that give you ideas of things to do on your computer when you're bored. I'm going to focus specifically on the Mac and I'm going to try to avoid things that cost money. I'm also going to avoid simply going to the web browser to browse the web with one small exception.

So first there is one game that comes with your Mac. It's chess. If you launch Chess you get this 3D chessboard and you can play chess against the computer. You can use this to learn chess. It's not going to let you make an improper move. I can't do that. So you can only make correct moves. In addition, the computer is going to move really quickly so you can play a game pretty fast without waiting for the other player and you have various things that you could do to learn more, like Show a Hint or Take Back a Move. You could also go into Preferences here and set the difficulty level. So set it to 1 move ahead if you are just learning.

Another thing you can do is you can edit your photos. So maybe you've never actually looked at your photos and gone to Edit before and then tried all the different lighting and color options to do various different things with your photos. You can take some time to learn how to use these tools to make your photos look better. In addition to that you can always select some photos and then create a Shared Album so that you can show your friends some of your best photos from your last trip or the ones that you've taken in the last year. You could also go to System Preferences and then to Desktop & Screen Saver and under Desktop you could actually select one of your photos as a desktop background. So you can look through all of your photos, maybe edit one and find a good one to use as a desktop background to customize your Mac.

Now your Mac comes with a Books App. One of the things that makes the Apple Book Store different than others like Amazon is they actually have free books here. So you can search for books and see some of them are free. You can also go to Browse Sections here and then look specifically for free books. Some of these are going to be public domain books. Classic novels and things like that. Others will be the first maybe in a series where the author is offering the first book for free. There's going to be all sorts of different things in here including a lot of non-fiction books that you can learn from. In fact if you search for a topic that you want to learn about, like astronomy, you're going to find a bunch of books that are actually free. So you can start learning about a subject. Maybe these aren't the type of books you're into. Did you know also you can also find graphic novels in the Apple Book Store? Just go to Sections here and you'll find Comics & Graphic Novels. So, yes, this is an example of something you may need to pay for as, of course, many of the most popular graphic novels cost money. But there are also going to be some free ones here as well. The great thing about reading these on a computer screen is it is easy to zoom in to read small text or to admire the artwork.

If you don't know how to program you can get started on your Mac with a free app that Apple provides. In the App Store search for Swift Playgrounds. This is an app that Apple has that will teach you the Swift language using games and graphics and all sorts of fun stuff. So it has all sorts of playgrounds here that you can go into and when you start to use them it will walk you through the steps you need to build something or learn a part of coding.

How about drawing something? You can use your computer to draw art. You can get a graphics app from the App Store. There are even some free ones like Seashore that you could use. For instance, here's something that I drew using Seashore. You can try drawing whatever you want. Nah, I didn't draw this!

Now yes you can probably guess that I was going to suggest going to the Podcast App and listening to a podcast. But, instead of a podcast did you know there are also lots of lectures that you can get as podcasts. Apple used to have an app dedicated to downloading lectures. But now you can do that in the Podcast App. So search for lectures and you're going to come up with all sorts of different things from different universities. So you can basically take a class as a podcast. Some of these are even video.

Now, of course, no list like this is complete without at least mentioning the idea that you could spend the time cleaning up your Mac. You can clean up your files. Go through them. Organize them. You can Archive old files or delete ones that you no longer need. You can go and look at your apps. Figure out what you have installed that you no longer need and maybe rearrange things and organize Launchpad if you like. You can go into Notes. You can go into Reminders. You can see what sort of old lists and things you have you no longer need, or maybe can label a little bit better, or export as pdf and Save and get out of those apps. You can go into Contacts and then organize your contacts here. Maybe get rid of some of these. Maybe fill in information missing from others. If you're one of those people that has a full inbox in Mail you might want to go through that as well. Clean that out and get organized in there.

Another free app from Apple you can find in the App Store is GarageBand if you don't already have it. You can go and get it in the App Store and create an empty document there. You can record your voice through the microphone or an instrument that's plugged into your Mac. You can go to the special drummer section and create a beat. Go to Software Instruments and then choose one of the many instruments that come with GarageBand. You can even bring up a little keyboard here and use this to play or use the keys on your Mac's keyboard to play like that. Record. Add some loops here. There's all these different loops you can add and just play around and create some music.

As you can probably guess I'm also going to mention the News App because you can use it to read news articles. You can customize what you read. You can search for a specific news sources and see what they have there. In addition to just regular news reports there is a lot of deep information in here like magazine articles and such. So you can search on something you're interested in, maybe a science article, and then read something in depth and learn a little something.

Now so far I've avoided telling you to just go onto the web and do something there. But this last one I want to mention does actually require you to go in Safari to Trailers.Apple.com. On Apple TV there's actually an app for you to do this and you can actually get an app for the iPhone and iPad as well. But on the Mac you have to go to the website. Now what's cool about this is you can view movie trailers of current movies, old movies, upcoming movies and you can do it without any ads. I hate going to a site to view a movie trailer, which is essentially an ad for a movie, and then being shown another ad before that. Apple has always had this site here that allows you to view these movie trailers without all that nonsense. So if you're into movies and want to see what is coming up soon you can go to Trailers.Apple.com and then there are a ton of movie trailers you can watch in high definition on your Mac.

So I'd love to hear from you of what things you like to do on your Mac to learn new things, to be entertained, or to make yourself maybe a little bit productive when you're bored. Thanks for watching.