system preferences - page 2

Make Your Mac Speak To You With OS X [Feature]

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Make Your Mac Speak To You

It’s the future, already, right? While we may not have flying cars or jetpacks, we do have computers ad mobile devices that we can speak to and that can speak to us.

Here are a few ways to make your Mac speak to you in a variety of ways. Make it read books to you right from the Kindle app, change text documents into audio files for easy transport, and even let you know when your Terminal session is finished. If that isn’t enough, we’ll even show you how to get better voices to do all this with, even in different languages. So settle in and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Make Spotlight Work Again [OS X Tips]

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spotlight

Wondering how Spotlight works, or why it can’t find a file that you were SO SURE you had saved on your hard drive? Turns out that Spotlight is in essence an index of all the metadata from the files on your hard drive. When you type in a search query, the app searches the index, rather than the actual files on your hard drive. This is what makes it very fast in finding the info you are searching for. Unfortunately, that index itself can get out of date or corrupted, or can be deleted by mistake when restoring a hard drive, for example. Luckily, there are two ways to reindex, or rebuild, Spotlight’s database.

See Your Screen More Easily with Built In Accessibility [OS X Tips]

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UniversalAccess

As we all age, chances are our senses will age along with us. As someone with great vision most of my life, I was aghast a couple of months ago when I couldn’t read the writing on a watch battery, no matter how close or far I held it from my eyes. So sad!

Luckily for us, and for thousands of users with visual impairments, OS X has a plethora of ways to interact with the Mac, all built right into the operating system. In this tip, we’ll focus on the vision side of things.

Gatekeeper: First Step Towards App Store-Only Software On The Mac? [OS X Mountain Lion]

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One of the big headline features in Apple’s new Mountain Lion OS is Gatekeeper, designed to keep malware and other nasties away from your computer. So is this another step towards App Store-only software on Macs?

The short answer is yes, it is. But it doesn’t have to be. Gatekeeper gives you the choice: do you want to stick to App Store-only apps, or be able to install anything from anywhere?

Configure The Apple Menu Recent Items Feature [OS X Tips]

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sysprefsicon

The tip today is a simple one that most Mac experts might already know, but I met a newbie today who didn’t have any idea why there are so many items listed in Recent Items a sub-menu on the Apple menu.

“There are just toooo many recent items under documents,” they said, and complained about the Server item being there when they didn’t have any servers.

So I showed them how to fix it, and now I’ll show you too.

Check Out This Awesome Steve Jobs Easter Egg Apple Sneaked Into OS X Lion!

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Screen Shot 2011-07-28 at 11.51.38 AM

Reader Pascal Beausoleil pointed us to a cool (and, we think, new) easter egg in OS X Lion.

If you go to System Preferences > Users you can change your OS X default user icon to a vinyl record… but what are the track titles on that record? If you like Steve Jobs’ keynotes and his unique, shouted catchphrases, you’ll absolutely love this…