Author: Christopher Breen

Reader Henry Ingram has a new problem with an old email account. He writes:

What with all the security breaches going on I’ve been changing passwords. The problem is that I have an old email account that was taken over by AT&T a few years ago but is now run by Yahoo. I’ve had a heck of a time changing the password plus my iPad won’t accept the new one. Is there a way out of this misery?

I’ve been in a similar situation and quite honestly the AT&T/Yahoo relationship in regard to account settings is a nightmare. You go to Yahoo to do something as simple as change your password and you’re passed along to the AT&T site because it controls these kinds of settings. A one-stop shop it is not.

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Reader Shannon Riley believes two iCloud accounts are better than one. He writes:

I’ve set up two iCloud accounts on the iPad Air that my girlfriend and I share—one for her iCloud ID and another for mine. The problem is that I see only my account’s bookmarks in Safari. What do I need to do to have her bookmarks appear as well?

If, on the iPad, you travel to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and take a long look at those two iCloud entries, you’ll find that one has more options listed in fine print beneath it than the other. Specifically, one will list Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Safari, Notes, Keychain, Photos, Documents & Data, and Find My iPad. The other includes just Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Notes.

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In this short video I show you how to create a backup server capable of handling all the Macs on your local network. Cost? Just 20 bucks.

Transcript

We’ve pretty well established that everyone should back up their data, right? Good. Now let’s talk about easily backing up the data not only on your main computer, but those computers connected to your local network. There are a variety of remedies for doing this, but I want to show you one that uses Apple’s Time Machine technology and costs just $20.

You’re going to spend that $20 on OS X Server, which you can purchase from the Mac App Store.

Once downloaded, attach a backup drive to the Mac that’s going to run server.

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Reader Robin Lee wants a bit more convenience from the Finder. She writes:

I’m accustomed to creating quick reminders on my iPhone by using Siri. Obviously Siri isn’t on my Mac but is there an easy way to quickly create a reminder without having to launch the Reminders app?

My colleague Kirk McElhearn covered something like this in Create Reminders When You Aren’t in Reminders, where the key to success was Automator. I too have an Automator solution, but one that requires a single action.

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Reader Andy Gillman is frustrated by iOS’s Calendar app. He writes:

Why does it take so much work to create an event in the Calendar app? I’m tired of tapping the plus button and then entering day, time, details, and so on. There must be a better way!

As a matter of fact there are a couple of better ways. The first is to use Siri. Rather than launch Calendar, tap plus, and then go through the various machinations to create an event as simple as a Friday lunch meeting with your cousin Jo-Jo, just press and hold the Home button and say:

“Schedule lunch with Jo-Jo on Friday at 1 PM.”

Siri will confirm the details and schedule the event when you give it your okay.

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Reader David Gilbert, like many of us, is frustrated by Mac App Store update reminders. He writes:

It seems that every time I start up my Mac I see an alert about application updates waiting for me. Some of them I don’t want. Is there anything I can do about shutting off these alerts?

Yes. Start by launching System Preferences, selecting App Store, and disabling the Automatically Check For Updates option. Do this and the nudging stops. Of course it also means that you may miss out on some important updates. To help avoid that, you might create a weekly calendar alarm or reminder that reminds you to manually check for updates. You do that by opening that same App Store preference and clicking on the Show Updates button.

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Reader Pete Barr asks an age-old question. He writes:

My wife and I recently purchased Apple laptops. We use an AirPort Extreme base station as our router and I’ve configured a Mac mini as a media server. I keep thinking that with the addition of an external hard drive I could put together some kind of backup server for us but I’m not sure how to go about it. What do you suggest?

You have many options (as I’m sure the comments below will suggest) but let me address two. If you have Apple’s latest 802.11ac AirPort Extreme base station, format a USB drive as an Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume, connect it to the base station, and Time Machine on each of your laptops will recognize it as a backup destination.

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Reader Marty Schettler is unimpressed with iPhoto’s speed. He writes:

I am a casual photographer who has amassed about 10,000 pictures in my iPhoto library. iPhoto now runs so slowly that it is essentially unusable (and occasionally tells me that my Library has been corrupted). I’ve heard a few people recommend switching to Aperture, adding iPhoto Library Manager, or jumping to an Adobe or Google product. I just want something where I can organize my photos by date/event and do very light editing. What do you recommend?

Given that the vast majority of us have been filmless for a decade or more, it does seem odd that iPhoto chokes on just 10,000 images. But you’re right, it can and does. Poky performance with largish libraries has been a feature of iPhoto for years and the latest edition is no exception.

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Twitter follower Toby Sax is anxious for me to revisit an old Mac 911 column that lays out the steps for creating mail merged documents in Microsoft Word. In a series of tweets Toby writes:

Thanks for your mail merge and Office 2011 article, which I followed to near success. I have these questions:

• How do you insert an email address from Outlook rather than Apple’s Contacts application?
• How do you maintain a letter format within the resulting email message?
• When I tried this the letters went to Outlook’s Drafts folders and not to its Outbox as you suggested. Why?

Thanks for allowing me the chance to revisit this topic, particularly as it lets me answer some outstanding questions that followed it. For the sake of convenience I’ll pull portions of that column (in italics) into this one and answer as I go.

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Twitter follower Jason Verly is interested in learning my technique for auto-filtering email. When I mentioned that doing this requires Outlook he didn’t shy away.

The two key components are Outlook and Stairways Software’s $36 Keyboard Maestro. The latter is an outstanding macro program that I use to fire off a series of Outlook commands.

I use this technique to handle the scads of PR releases I receive each day. In general terms, it allows me to add a sender to Outlook’s contacts and then assign a specific category to that contact. When future messages from that sender arrive, they are moved to a specific folder via a rule I’ve created within Outlook.

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In a recent article you said that you couldn’t play movies stored on a flash drive on your iPad. Is there any way at all to use other kinds of files on a flash drive with an iPad?

In a very limited way, yes. It’s like this.

You can attach some flash drives to Apple’s $29 iPad Camera Connection Kit. (If you have an iPad with a Lightning connector you’ll additionally need Apple’s $29 Lightning to USB Camera Adapter.) Let me underscore some. Some flash drives require more power than the iPad can provide and won’t work. For example, I had luck with a low-capacity (64MB) flash drive but a 4GB drive was deemed incompatible by the iPad.

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You, as generous parent, have given your child an iPod touch. Problem is, they spend all their time on the thing texting their friends when they could so more important things like their homework. You could, of course, just pull the thing out of their hands, but if you connect to the Internet via an AirPort Base Station try this instead.

First, grab hold of their device and go to Settings > General > About. Scroll down and look for the Wi-Fi Address entry. This is the hardware address (or MAC address) that’s unique to that device. Write it down.

Now launch AirPort Utility, select the AirPort Base Station that’s connected to your broadband modem (in the video I misspoke and said “router,” but that’s incorrect as the Base Station is the router in this case). Click Edit. Click on the Network tab and then enable the Enable Access Control option. Now click the Timed Access Control button. In the sheet that appears click on the Plus button to add a wireless client. Give your kid’s iPod a name and then enter its MAC address in this field. Now configure the pop-up menus for those days and times wireless access is allowed—so maybe for an hour or two after they come home from school during the week and a few hours on the weekend.

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Pay a visit to Victorinox’s website, and you’ll find that the manufacturer of the legendary Swiss Army Knife offers models with as few as seven implements, as as many as 80. Neither is right for everyone.

Similarly, Mac utilities can range from do-a-couple-handy-things apps to do-everything-under-the-sun software. Software Ambience Corp’s $5 Unclutter (Mac App Store link) falls into the former group. It provides just three tools: a clipboard history, a place to stash files, and a simple notes area—all accessible from your Mac’s menu bar.

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Reader Clint Grosse, like many people, faces the “laptop or iPad” decision. He writes:

I want to purchase either a 13-inch MacBook or iPad soon. I would only use either when traveling and would primarily need it to check email every day or two, write a document occasionally (I don’t know how that might be done using an iPad, since Word doesn’t appear to be an option) and, sometimes, be able to go to an online auction site. Also, I might want to occasionally listen to a CD and watch a DVD. And flash/thumb drives? Without USB ports, they’re not an option for iPads are they?

As you’d expect, you can do everything you desire with a laptop (okay, you’ll also need an external CD/DVD player if you want anything other than the old non-retina 13-inch MacBook Pro that Apple still sells, as Apple’s other laptops no longer include such media players). Let’s now run down your list in regard to the iPad.

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Reader Andy Ingram is befuddled by an iOS limitation. He writes:

I have multiple AirPlay-compatible speakers around my home but it seems that I can stream music from my iPhone to just one of them. Yet on my Mac I can stream to multiple AirPlay speakers. Isn’t there some way to do this on iOS?

Not without some help from a third-party as Apple specifically limits AirPlay output to just the single destination.

If you’d like to stream music that’s on your iOS device, take a look at Thomas Schwitzer’s $3 Multiroom Music/Radio Player app. The “on your iOS device” is in italics for good reason. This app will not send music you’re streaming via your device—Pandora, iTunes Radio, or a music subscription service such as Spotify or Beats Music—to multiple AirPlay devices. It must be music you have on the device itself. For that $3 you have the ability to stream to two destinations. You can add up to six destinations with an in-app purchase of $2 per destination (so, $8 to add four additional speakers).

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Reader Ingrid Hansmann wishes to go back in time. She writes:

I visited a web page about a year ago that had some information that I wanted. I’ve since returned and the page has changed. Is there any way I can see the old version?

There is. Google caches many webpages and there’s a chance that an old version of the page you’re looking for is available in cached form. Just use this formula:

Enter http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache: and then paste in the full address of the page you want to visit. For example, if I wanted the cache from http://www.example.com/fuzzybears I’d enter this into my browser’s address field:

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