Author: Ted Landau

Recently, upon visiting my Slanted Viewpoint blog, I was shocked to see an advertisement at the top of the page. I had never selected, modified, or added anything to my blog’s settings that might have caused ads to start appearing. What the heck was going on?

Making matters worse, the ad covered over article text, requiring readers to dismiss the ad before they could proceed. Plus, the ad was for cosmetic products, which is completely unrelated to anything I had ever written or would ever write about. I was now angry as well as shocked.

Many Mavericks users report that their MacBooks take an irritatingly long time to reconnect to their local Wi-Fi network after waking from sleep. While this symptom had been occasionally reported prior to Mavericks, there has been a resurgence of complaints following the release of OS X 10.9. Something new seems to be at fault.

I am one of the users who have this symptom. In my case (13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display), the length of the delay varies. Sometimes it’s just a few seconds longer than I would otherwise expect. At other times, it can take a few minutes before I’m back online.

When I initially check the Wi-Fi menu while waiting for a reconnect, no network names appear. After a while, my previously connected network—as well as any other nearby networks—eventually do show up. A successful reconnect typically occurs shortly thereafter.

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Initially, after updating to OS X 10.9.2, all seemed fine with my 2009 Mac Pro. Then I launched Skype. The application could no longer detect the camera built into my 24-inch Cinema Display. I quickly confirmed that this failure was not specific to Skype. It extended to all programs that accessed the camera—notably Apple’s FaceTime and Photo Booth. For example, shortly after launching Photo Booth, a message appeared that said “There is no connected camera.”

The most recent versions of Adobe Reader install a new security feature. When in place, any attempt to open a PDF file within Safari is initially blocked. In order to get the PDF to open, you have to negotiate two warning messages.

Call me reckless, but I am not especially concerned about the security risk here. I would much rather avoid the hassle of having to deal with the warnings each and every time I attempt to load a PDF. So, I set about to disable the feature. Figuring out how to do so turned out to be more work than I had anticipated.