Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

You can set a text message to appear on your Mac's lock screen. Use this to put contact information or instructions for someone who may find your lost MacBook. Change the message often to fit your situation.

Your Mac comes with 46 apps pre-installed. Gary attempts to describe each one in just over 3 minutes. Watch to discover things you may not have known were already on your Mac. You can find all of these with Spotlight searches, Launchpad or looking in Applications or Applications/Utilities.

While most keyboard shortcuts can be found by looking through the menu items, you can discover more obscure shortcuts by using the Help menu documentation, which often includes a page of keyboard shortcuts for the app you are using.

You probably know you can select a file in the Finder and use Command+i to view information about that file. If you select multiple files and use Command+i you get one info window for each file. But if you use Command+Control+i you get a single info window that shows you combined information for all of the files selected, such as the combined size.

The Help menu can be used in all applications to find other menu commands. The search function in the Help menu will return any menu command that contains the keyword, which will help you locate commands buried deep in submenus.

The Help menu in Mac apps can be used to access app documentation. Some Apple apps come with extensive documentation that users do not realize even exists. You can search the documentation, or read through it by topic to discover features.

The Merge function in Sierra's Finder will allow you to merge two folders, keeping the latest versions of each file. The trick is to arrange the folders so they have the same name and use a temporary folder to place them both into.

In Sierra if you look at your hard drive storage you may see an item labeled Purgeable Space. The files here would include downloaded media and documents in iCloud Drive that Sierra knows it can safely remove if space is needed. There is no need to try to manually manage Purgeable space as macOS will clear them and re-download them as needed.

If you need to share a single image quickly and easily, without using iCloud, Dropbox or some other service you have set up, you can use Imgur.com. You can upload an image without signing up and then use that to share you images in emails and message boards where images may not normally be supported.

Do you like some of the desktop background images that Apple includes with Sierra? Ever want to get to the image file itself to use in a project? You can do so by simply going to System Preferences, Desktop & Screen Saver, selecting the image you want from the Apple/Desktop Pictures list as your Desktop. Once you see it in the preview rectangle at the top, drag it from that preview rectangle to the Finder to export it.

A key skill every Mac user should master is how to select multiple items. In icon-based situations like the Finder or Keynote, you can drag a rectangle around items. In icon and list-based situations you can select multiple items using the Command and Shift keys.

If you have ever wondered how data gets from a website to your Mac, you can use Traceroute to see the full path data takes through the Internet. You may be surprised by how many hops it takes to load a webpage. Viewing a few trace routes will help give you an appreciation for how complex the Internet we take for granted can be.

Rulers in Pages can also be using in Page Layout mode, where you can have both horizontal and vertical rulers. You can use these rulers to create guidelines for easy alignment of objects. You can also have the origin point of rulers centered on the page instead of to the left and top.

Learn how to show rulers in your Pages documents so you can control the margins and paragraph indents. You can also use rulers to add tab stops.

Demonstrating iPhone panos at a spot along the coast just south of Abel Tasman park in New Zealand. The noise you hear are cicadas, I think. You can see the images I took here: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/iFsVs" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://imgur.com/a/iFsVs</a>

In Applications/Utilities there is an app called Activity Monitor that allows you to track all of the apps and other processes running on your Mac. You can see which ones are using the most CPU, memory, energy, disk access, and so on. While this is useful for software engineers, it isn't really that helpful for typical Mac users.

When you drag file and folder icons on the Desktop, or in any Finder window where you are using icon view, they will snap to a grid if you have Snap To Grid turned on in View Options (Finder, View, Show View Options). But if you don’t use the grid normally, you can use it for just one drag by holding down the Command key and dragging. When you release the icons selected will snap to the nearest grid spot.

If you having trouble figuring out which emoji characters to use in Messages, you can use the handy search function to look for them by keyword. It can be tricky, however, as you often have to try multiple keywords to find what you are looking for. You can also move the cursor over the text to see the exact description of the character before you decide to use it.

While e-books in iBooks are not supposed to be a substitute for audiobooks, it is possible to get iBooks to speak text to you. If you select enough text, you can make this an occasional alternative to reading with your eyes.

I'll be posting lots of Apple-tech travel videos in the next two week or so. If you have any questions about how I'm using technology on this trip, let me know and I'll try to answer it. Basically, I'll be using my iPhone 7 plus and an old MacBook Air as I travel throughout the south island of New Zealand.