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If you extensively use your Mac, you might regularly end up with many windows and tabs open on your screen at once, and organizing your workflow around these windows can sometimes be a chore. To help in this process, Apple has included its Expose and Spaces features in OS X, and in Lion has implemented a combination of these two options called Mission Control, but these graphical approaches have limitations.

If you have too many windows open, sometimes you might need to preview them before closing them, and while you can use Mission Control and similar tools to browse through … Read more

When you move files from one location to another in the OS X Finder, if their names are the same as existing files or folders, the system will ask you whether you wish to keep both files, replace the existing file, or cancel the move operation. If you replace the file, then the one you are moving should be the only one left in the new location; however, a bug in the Finder in OS X might result in both files being deleted.

Earlier today, Mac OS X Hints posted steps that show the Finder deleting both the original and … Read more

Often when troubleshooting odd application or system behavior in OS X you will access the preferences folder in your user account to remove or manually edit settings for a program. While in most cases you will find the preferences file for an application directly in the Preferences folder, sometimes they will be in subfolders within the Preferences folder itself.

Usually this sequestering of preferences files is done by developers such as Microsoft or Adobe for their various applications or application suites; however, in addition to those from developers you will see a folder called ByHost that contains a number of … Read more

Google+ finally allows nicknames, Priceline is killing Shatner, and a solar radiation storm crashes communication systems.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Creating files and folders in OS X can generally be done without requiring additional steps, but sometimes you may run into situations where the system either claims access is denied or that you first must authenticate to make modifications to the current folder.

This behavior happens because your account does not have proper write access to the folder in which you are working, which may be purposeful in some cases. By default, the permissions in OS X are set to allow you access to your account's resources, but will restrict you from modifying or even reading other resources, including … Read more

LAS VEGAS--As helpful as the original Cobra Tag was for a forgetful guy like me, it had one fatal flaw: I kept forgetting to recharge the darn thing!

The new Cobra Tag G5, set to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, now only needs charging twice per year. Cobra is claiming more than six months of monitoring between recharges of the new Tag G5 thanks to its implementation of Bluetooth 4.0 technology. However, in order to achieve this astronomic battery life, the phone the Tag G5 is paired with will also need to support Bluetooth … Read more

The Finder in OS X has four views: Icon, List, Cover Flow, and Column, which can be activated on any Finder window to display its contents in different ways.

Each has its perks and uses, though many may often use column view because it shows multiple levels of a directory tree in the same window and can therefore help in organizing and navigating files.

While this feature makes navigating and moving files around a bit easier, often when you scroll up or down in column view the column size will not change. This sometimes results in long file names being … Read more

Now that the Yuletide fog has cleared, details are emerging about the extent of an Anonymous hack on security think tank Strategic Forecasting that was first reported Christmas Day and appears to have affected some 50,000 individuals.

Austin, Texas-based Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, disclosed over the weekend that its Web site, which remains down, was hacked and information about its corporate subscribers--who include the likes of the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and Miami Police Department--was disclosed. AntiSec, an Anonymous-affiliated hacktivist group, quickly claimed responsibility and promised "mayhem" with plans to release even more documents.… Read more

The system console lists much of the output of running programs as they perform various tasks, which includes errors and warnings that are not otherwise shown to you. For instance, if you can't start up Web sharing on your system but don't see any error messages, then you can check in the Console utility to see if any console messages are generated there when you try to enable Web sharing.

Even if you do not know what the error messages mean, you can copy them and ask people about them to get more insight into how to troubleshoot … Read more