How To

The Spotlight feature in OS X is a convenient tool for locating your files, contacts, e-mails, and other information by searching through an index of file content and metadata in addition to file names. While this feature's primary use is for locating user data and resources you may use, such as Applications and system preferences, it can also be used to find practically any file on the system.

Spotlight's index of your hard drive includes information on practically every file on the drive, but since it is geared toward relevant search results, by default Spotlight does not include … Read more

Having multiple windows cluttering your screen can be inconvenient. While the Mission Control feature in OS X can be used to preview windows and switch between them, and isolate windows to specific desktops, even with this you may find your work space a bit cluttered with browser windows, Word and Pages documents, various utilities, and Finder windows.

Unfortunately, switching between multiple windows by clicking with the mouse can result in them overlapping in ways that are frustrating to deal with. While keeping things simple by continually closing windows is one approach, you can also use some OS X features to … Read more

At some point, you've probably considered hooking your computer up to your TV. Maybe you even purchased a video cable, only to realize that being hunched over your computer and tethered to the TV is far from the awesome setup you had in mind.

Hooking up your computer to your TV can be as simple or as complex as you want. A basic setup lets you stream the occasional Web video, while a more advanced rig lets you access movie and music files from computers across your home network.

But the most brag-worthy home theater PCs (HTPCs) include all … Read more

This might be a tip only the Anal-Retentive Chef could love, but I kind of like it. If you'd like to add a bit of order and structure to your Mac OS X Dock, there is a way to add spacers, which let you separate the various icons into distinct groups.

To do so, open Terminal and then copy and paste this command:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{tile-data={}; tile-type="spacer-tile";}'

Followed by:

killall Dock

The command places an invisible space on the right side of your Dock. You can drag to reposition this spacer … Read more

Here's the scenario: you have selected a large number of files on your Mac to move to a new folder, and when you go to drag this highlighted group of files to the new folder, you realize you forgot to create the new folder in the first place. Your painstakingly selected files ready are ready to go but they don't have a destination. You could create a new folder on your desktop or another folder for these files, but one misplaced click when you return to the folder with your carefully selected files could deselect them all.

To … Read more

In the OS X Security system preferences you can set the system to require a password when the system wakes from sleep or after the screensaver has been active for a period of time. However, you may run into a few cases in which entering your account password then does not work.

One cause can be if you have recently changed the name of your user account. For authentication, OS X will use either the short or long username, along with any aliases that you have associated with your account. However, if you have changed the long username for your … Read more

Sometimes you may wish to get the full path of an item in the Finder, and while there are several ways to access file paths, not all will allow you to extract them as text to paste into documents you may be composing.

For example, if you select a file in the Finder and press Command-C to copy it, the behavior when pasting it will be different, depending on the program being used. In some cases the program will only paste the file name, but in others it may try to embed the file's contents or its icon where … Read more

Mozilla just released Firefox 20 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux), which introduced a few new features, including a brand-new download manager. The new download manager works similarly to the old one, but with a couple of new twists.

The first change you'll notice is a new Download button next to the Home button. This gives you quick access to the last three downloads. The Download button will actually display the time remaining during a download, then change to an arrow when the download completes.

You can click on "Show All Downloads" or use the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+… Read more

The risk that an Internet-connected computer is infected with malware will never be reducible to zero. It's just the nature of software that errors happen. Where there are software-design errors, there are people who will exploit those errors to their advantage.

The best PC users can hope for is to minimize the chances of an infection and to mitigate the damage a piece of malware can inflict -- whether it intends to steal a user's sensitive data or to commandeer the machine as part of a cyber attack on servers thousands of miles away.

Last week, Internet users … Read more