system preferences

This setting makes Mac System Preferences way easier to use

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Arrange your Mac System Preferences alphabetically.
Arrange your Mac's System Preferences alphabetically.
Photo: Jessicah Hast/Unsplash

Are you forever opening up your Mac’s System Preferences app and searching for the section you need? If so, it’s because by default, all those Preference Panes are ordered by category, which — to me at least — makes little sense.

Luckily, changing a single setting in the Mac’s System Preferences app can make this essential tool far easier to use. There’s a much better way to sort them — alphabetically. Let’s check it out.

Huge security flaw leaves macOS High Sierra open to attack

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macOS High Sierra
Apple let a major security flaw slip through the cracks.
Photo: Apple

A serious security flaw in macOS High Sierra has been exposed that allows anyone to gain full access to affected Macs without knowing the computer’s administrative password.

The bug appears to let someone log into the admin account on a Mac by simply typing “root” as the username while leaving the password field blank. Attackers could potentially exploit the bug to access locked Macs and gain access to personal information.

How to auto-hide the menu bar in OS X El Capitan

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Look, ma, no menubar!
Look, ma, no menubar!
Screen: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Sometimes you need to use your entire screen at once, like when you’re working on a serious photo-retouching project or need more screen real estate for an epic GarageBand session and you don’t want to maximize the app you’re using.

If you’ve ever wanted to regain a little bit of space on your Mac’s screen, the time is right to make sure you’re running the latest version of OS X, El Capitan. It will let you hide the menu bar up top to give you more space to work with.

Here’s how to have your menu bar hide itself when you’re not using it.

How To Add A Keyboard Shortcut To A Duplicate Menu Item [OS X Tips]

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defaults Pages

Creating your own Keyboard Shortcuts is a great way to keep your productivity high. To make a shortcut for a menu item that doesn’t already have one, you simply drop into System Preferences > Keyboard, hit the Shortcuts button at the top, and then add your shortcuts (more below). You have to add the full menu path for the shortcut to work, though, and there’s the rub.

Some apps have menu items that are named the same thing. For example, in Pages, there are two submenus named Use Default: one in the Baseline submenu, and one in the Ligature submenu. How can you tell your Mac which menu you want to activate with your new shortcut?

Turn Off That Annoying Volume Popping Sound In Mavericks [OS X Tips]

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system prefs

We’ve all been there, in a meeting or a quiet house and we just want to turn the volume down. The whole point is that we want to make things quieter.

We hit the F11 media “Volume Down” key on the keyboard to just keep quiet and all we hear is the Pop Pop Pop sound as the volume decreases.

Annoying.

Luckily, it’s super easy to fix in OS X Mavericks.

How To Allow Self-Signed Java Run On Your Mac [OS X Tips]

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Java Warning mix

Java is kind of a pain in the butt, if you ask me, but there are many sites that use it.

A friend of mine contacted me this weekend looking for help in getting her Java up and running so she could upload photos to her photography business website. See, she’d upgraded to Java 7 and when she went to use the upload function on her website, she got the security warnings above.

After a bunch of googling and messing about on the internets, we figured it out.

Hide The Menu Bar On Your Secondary Monitor With Mavericks [OS X Tips]

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Get Rid Of Secondary Menu Bar

The external monitor support in Mavericks is much improved, as we noted in yesterday’s tip on getting the Dock to show up on your second monitor.

The menu bar itself will dim when you’re not actively on a specific monitor, as well. In other words, if you’re using monitor A, the menu bar will look opaque, as per usual, while it will dim and go see-through on monitor B. When you switch your active focus by using the cursor on monitor B, though, the menu bar will brighten and not let you see through it, while the menubar on monitor A will go semi-transparent and dim.

There is a way, however, to just hide the menu bar altogether on your secondary monitor, if that’s how you want things to work. The preference is in an unintuitive place, though.

Stop Yelling – Turn Off The Caps Lock Key On Your Mac [OS X Tips]

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Turn Off Caps Lock

Maybe it’s just me, but I always picture someone yelling at me when I get messages and emails in all capital letters. It might just be a mistake on their end, I suppose, since it’s fairly easy to accidentally hit the Caps Lock when you’re aiming for the Shift key on today’s smaller laptop keyboards.

No worries, though, since it’s pretty easy to actually turn the Caps Lock key off on your Mac. Here’s how.

Turn Off Autocorrect On Your Mac For More Authentic Errors [OS X Tips]

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Autocorrect fail
Autocorrect fail
Screenshot: Autocorrectfailness.com

One of the worst things, in my opinion, is how modern autocorrect fixes words that I’ve misspelled into correctly spelled but inappropriate words. What’s worse is the way Mac OS X arrogantly assumes that I must mean the word that makes no sense in context, because it is closest to the typo I just made.

For me, it’s far better to just see the red line of doom; that way< i can right click and choose the right word, or just type it again. I mean, it's typing; it shouldn't be that big a deal to do it twice. If you're like me and want to turn this "feature" off, here's how.

Add Network Locations And Switch Among Them In The Apple Menu [OS X Tips]

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Location Location Location

Network locations are extremely useful if you use your Mac across a variety of networking environments, like a Proxy-laden school building, a super secured enterprise site, or a special set up at home. Each environment could take a ton of extra time setting up the details if you only had one networking setup system.

Luckily, Mac has always had this idea of Locations, a way of setting and saving all the little networking details for each location you use your Mac in. Did you know, however, that you can switch between network locations in the Apple menu? I didn’t, so I figured I’d share what I found out.

Encrypt Your Time Machine Backup Disks For Extra Security [OS X Tips]

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Encrypt Time Machine Backups

Backing up your Mac via Time Machine is highly recommended, and super easy to do, as well. It’s really the only backup system I’ve ever found myself using on a regular basis, because it’s so simple to use and easy to set up. All you need to do is connect any USB drive to your Mac, head to the Time Machine preferences, and select that USB drive as your Time Machine backup. Mac OS X does the rest.

I was thinking, though, that since I back up my Macbook Air onto a 128 GB flash drive, it’s even more possible than ever that someone might get a hold of the drive and then be able to have all my backed up stuff on it. That’s not a huge deal for me, as I don’t keep much on the Macbook Air in terms of private stuff, but if I did, I’d want to keep those files extra secure.

Encryption could be the answer, and Mac OS X Mountain Lion makes it easy.

Put All Of Your Mac Preference Panes Right Into Launchpad Or The Dock

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ku-xlarge

By default, when you turn on a new Mac or open a new user account under OS X, your Mac’s System Preferences icon will be sitting in the dock. It’s pretty easy to right-click on the icon to quickly navigate to whatever Settings panel you need, but how about a prettier option?

Preferences Quick Launch is a small tool that lets you add individual preferences to your Dock or Mac launchpad. Basically, it’s a set of 27 tiny applications, each of which launches a different Systems Panel pane. You can not only pop them individually into your Dock or Launchbar to access commonly used Settings panels, you can even drop the entire folder into the Dock to access the entirety of your System Preferences no matter where you are on your Mac.

Preferences Quick Launch is a free download for OS X 10.8. You can grab it here.

Source: Weebly
Via: Lifehacker

Save TIme And Frustration By Disabling Safari Zoom In Function [OS X Tips]

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Zoom In Safari Mouse or Trackpad

The latest version of Safari for OS X has an iOS-like behavior if you’re using an Apple Trackpad, Magic Mouse, or Magic Trackpad to browse the web. If you double tap on the trackpad or mouse, the view within the Safari window will zoom in, just like a double tap on your iPhone or iPad version of Safari zooms in to help you read the web page on the smaller screen.

If this annoys you, here’s how to disable it.

Easily Access Launchpad With A Keyboard Shortcut [OS X Tips]

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LaunchPad Keyboard Shortcut

Launchpad, the iOS-style apps launcher feature that appeared in OS X Lion, showed up without a keyboard shortcut enabled for it. Later Macs, of course, have the F4 key assigned as a Launchpad, well, launcher. You can use the dock icon, of course, and you can double click the Launchpad icon in the Applications folder, but if you have an older Mac keyboard, here’s how to enable the F4 key (or any other shortcut you want) to access Launchpad easily, with the touch of a keyboard button.

Keep Your OS X Mountain Lion Mac From Sleeping When You Need To [OS X Tips]

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caffeinate

There are bound to be times when you would like your OS X Mountain Lion Mac to not go to sleep. You can set you Mac to Never sleep in the System Preferences, Energy Saver preferences pane, but that’s not always going to work. Even when it’s set to Never, your Mac may still, in fact, go to sleep. The other problem with the Energy Saver preference is that you only have the ability to set the sleep action to hold of foor three hours, or never. What if you wanted to keep it from sleeping for four hours? Or four and a half hours? Or eight hours?

With a neat little Mountain Lion-only Terminal command, you can set it to whatever you like. Here’s the scoop.

Get Rid Of Those Pesky Software Update Notifications [OS X Tips]

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Hide Update Notifications

Doubtless by now, you’ve seen a few notifications on your Mac when there are software updates to be applied. They’re easy to temporarily get rid of, either by clicking ont he Close button, swiping them to the right, or disabling notifications for the rest of the day. This allows you to update your software when you want to, on your own schedule, with a lot less nagging.

But what if you want to not be bugged at all about a specific software update? With the first solution above, the notification comes back in a little while. If you turn notifications off for the day, they’re back at nagging you tomorrow. If there’s a particular bit of software you’d like to not update, or just are tired of being bugged, here’s how to keep it from re-occuring.

Make Better Use Of Your Time With Reading Lists In Mountain Lion And Safari 6 [OS X Tips]

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Reading Lists

Safari 6, the web browser that comes with OS X Mountain Lion, added a ton of new features when it launched a while back, and Reading List is one of the cool ones. Reading List will let you save articles without having to bookmark them, thus avoiding all the hassles of organizing and/or synchronizing bookmarks. It’s a similar system to something like Instapaper or Pocket (formerly) Read It Later, but baked right in to your Safari browser.

See What Your Friends Are Tweeting In Your Contacts App [OS X Tips]

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View Tweets

Here’s a hidden little piece of OS X Mountain Lion: you can view your friends’ tweets from within the Contacts app, provided you’ve added your Twitter account to OS X, and then updated your Contacts with the social networking service. Now that Twitter is directly integrated within OS X, you can connect to the service with many different apps, like the Notification Center and Contacts.

Here’s how.

Make Your Mountain Lion Mac Announce The Time And Act Like A Town Crier [OS X Tips]

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The Fred voice sounds like that Radiohead song.
The Fred voice sounds like that Radiohead song.

Do you find yourself getting lost in activities on your computer, forgetting to check the time, missing appointments, even? If you get lost in a video game or Facebook surfing session often, you might consider having your Mac announce the time out loud, like a town crier in the days of old.

All it takes is a quick trip into the System Preferences. That, and the ability to have the sound up on your Mac while you’re working at it. Otherwise, if a Mac speaks the time in a speaker-off situation, does it really exist? Wait. Scratch that.

Decide For Yourself Which Apps Can Access Mountain Lion Contacts [OS X Tips]

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Contacts Privacy Mountain Lion

OS X Mountain Lion added some new security features to an already fairly secure operating system (not perfect, we know!). One of these features is an alert you get when you use an app that wants to access your Contact information from the Contacts app on your Mac. When you see this, you’re able to allow or deny that app access to your contacts – this is there to help make things a bit more transparent, and hopefully more secure.

Once you’ve given that access, however, that app gets tracked as one that can always access your Contacts info. If you want to change that access, today’s tip will help.

Enable Accessibility Options Anywhere In Mountain Lion [OS X Tips]

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Accessibility Options

Built into every Mac are a host of accessibility options. People with visual disabilities may need to zoom into the screen, making everything on it bigger in order to see enough to use the Mac. Individuals who experience blindness can use VoiceOver, which has the Mac speak everything on screen, including menus and dialog buttons. Other people with visual impairments may need to invert the Display colors and adjust the contrast to help them with eye fatigue as well as seeing the items on screen.

Revert Mission Control To Exposé-style In Mountain Lion [OS X Tips]

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Put it back the way you found it!
Put it back the way you found it!

In Mac OS X Lion, Expose merged with Spaces and became Mission Control. When you tapped the default F4 key on your laptop (or F9 or use a three fingered swipe up on your trackpad) to launch Mission Control, you’d get the image on the top left in the screenshot above: all the windows of un-hidden open apps at once.

OS X Lion changed things up by grouping all the windows from each app together in Mission Control, like the image in the lower left corner of the above screenshot. This new style, continued in Mountain Lion is intended to be an easier way to find the specific window you’re using. If that doesn’t work for you, you’re not out of luck, provided you’re running the latest big cat OS.

3 Ways to Turn Off The Screen of Your MacBook Without Closing The Lid [OS X Tips]

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macbookprowithcinemadisplay

If you use your MacBook with external displays, you might want to use it with the display off but the lid open at some point. If so, today’s tip should help you accomplish this goal, with not one, not two, but three different ways to do so.

You can do this with the laptop lid shut, but with ever more powerful MacBooks out there, avoiding the heat that might build up in there is probably worth leaving the screen up, right? Leaving the screen up with the display off will let heat leave the Mac through the keyboard, and will allow the graphics processor give all of it’s power to the external screen, which is helpful if you’re working on graphics-intensive applications.

Change Those Pesky Regional Settings When You Travel Internationally This Summer [OS X Tips]

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Regional Settings

If there’s one thing you can be certain of, it’s that date formats, measurement units and currency will generally be different when you travel to a different country. If you’re living in a new country, or working there, chances are this will be even more important to change on your computer, so as to make your written communication that much more comprehensible to your friends and co-workers in your new country. Mac OS X makes it easy stay in sync with the region you are visiting with just a few preference adjustments.