MacTricksAndTips.com

This is only a quick post, but it may be quite useful to many people, especially if you are interested in your own security and privacy. An eHow article a couple of days ago mentions about your Mac sending your location, and Wi-Fi data back to Apple. This is probably OK and there may be a genuine reason for this to happen. However if you want to be a bit more conscious of what is being sent you can turn this off.

A couple of days ago I wrote a post on how to make a PDF file from anything, some one asked the question how do you save multiple images as one PDF. There may be many reasons for adding images into a simple PDF, it is generally useful for email purposes. This post has actually taken me a while to find the best solution. My original solution involved me making an original PDF file and then adding pages into the PDF file and then adding the images. However with a bit (of rather obvious) looking i’ve found a simple way to do it.

The title of this post is a little simple, possibly confusing and may be deceptive, it should really be called “A little tip to help you rotate images of people within the user picture selection window found in applications such as Address Book”, however that title is too long. When you use applications such as Address book and you want to select a picture for a users details you may want to rotate the image to make sure it fits within the slot. This is rather simple and nifty.

I’ve been asked this question many times by my friends. How do you make that file, whether it by a word document, html file, image or anything in between, into a PDF. Thankfully Apple has gone to the trouble of adding a PDF creator within your Mac operating system, so you don’t have to install or download anything. I use this little function all the time, when sending files to people over email, or I just want to store them as a PDF file for myself.

Currently Mail is set up so your Mail messages are at the top of the screen and the contents are at the bottom of the screen. This is fine most of the time, however people with widescreens monitors, or if you want to view a lot of messages at a time you may want to flip the layout into a “three column” layout where your mailboxes are on the far left, the list of emails in the centre and the contents in the third column. This is useful if you have long email messages, and a lot of emails. I prefer it, since I have a widescreen monitor and I want to see a lot of emails. You can’t do this normally within Mail, however there is a quick plugin to solve your problem.

This is going to be a quick, but very useful, tip. In times of increasing power prices having your Mac running constantly (even in Standby) can be a small power drain. The solution to this is to shut it down on an evening. I, however, like my Mac to be up and running in a morning so I can quickly check me emails before the day begins. There is a solution to this problem (hence the post), and best of all it includes settings and functions already present on your Mac, so you are ready to go.

I seem to be repairing quite a few out of warranty Mac’s over the last month. I’m not particularly adept at fixing Mac’s, i’ve never been on a course, however people I talk to never believe how simple sometimes it is to fix a Mac. They always think they have a million parts, requires a soldering iron (never needed to use one yet) or you need a PhD in fixing computers to Mac them work again. This isn’t always the case. Most of the time, with the right guide, a little bit of patience, you can fix your own Mac, even the fiddly bits. Once you have all of the parts you can have your computer working within the hour. This mini guide is a list of things I have compiled to help you get your Mac working again.