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How to review completed Reminders in OS X

In Mountain Lion, Apple split off its reminder options from the provided calendar program and put them into a separate program similar to the Reminders app in iOS. This program lets you keep track of your projects, routines, or what have you, with to-do lists for each. As you make progress, you just mark each reminder as completed, and it drops off of its respective list.

But if, say, you inadvertently mark the wrong reminder as completed, don't worry, you can still get it back.

The Reminders program does have a Completed section that you can click to see … Read more

How to look up Terminal commands for OS X

The OS X Terminal is a very powerful tool for configuring and using a Mac, and can be used to script and program a number of aspects of the computer's operations; however, its text-based interface can be a bit of a cryptic environment to first-timers, especially when it comes to finding out what you can use it for.

There are thousands of Terminal commands available, but when you first launch it you might not have a clue where to look for them. Of course there are basic commands like "ls" for listing directory contents or "cd&… Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about cleaning up a Mac to keep it optimized, external drive permission errors, increasing the number of recent documents stored in the system, and options for triple-booting OS X with Linux and other operating systems. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: How to clean up a Mac to keep it optimized MacFixIt reader Angel asks:

How can I get … Read more

How to adjust network settings in OS X via the command line

If you need to adjust network settings on your Mac, the quickest route is to do so through the OS X system preferences and menu extras. However, you can also make these changes -- adding and removing ports, creating new locations, switching to DHCP from manual configurations, changing MTU sizes, and managing 802.1x profiles, among others -- via the command line.

The utility for doing this is the command "networksetup," which can be used to quickly apply a change to a specific network property. This tool covers every aspect of the Mac's network setup and you … Read more

How to quickly change audio output in OS X

Apple's Mac systems come with a basic audio controller for playing through the system's internal speakers or through the audio ports to headphones or a stereo system. However, if you would like to use a different controller such as a multi-channel USB interface for recording with GarageBand, Logic, or other use, then you can add it to the system and set it up to be used instead of Apple's controllers.

While useful to have, if you configure your system with multiple interfaces then you might run into an issue where the system could revert to its internal … Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about managing contact images in Address Book, the lowdown on the rather negative community reaction surrounding the MacKeeper utility, and errors in gathering Application information in the System Information utility. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Managing the Recent section for contact images in Address Book MacFixIt reader Lars asks:

Is there a way to get rid of the … Read more

How to use the Font panel in OS X

Many programs, such as Microsoft Office, support their own interfaces for various fonts you may have installed on your Mac; however, many other programs like TextEdit and Apple's Pages use Apple's central Font panel to provide font management. This panel can usually be invoked by pressing Command-T in programs that support it, where you will be presented with a column-oriented view of font collections that you can navigate through, select, and set the size for.

While convenient for quickly selecting and setting font sizes, the Font panel also contains a number of additional features that can be applied … Read more

Five things to know as you get started with Vine

As a social network built on keeping things short and sweet, it's no surprise that Twitter released today a secondary app that lets users (Twitter and otherwise) shoot and upload 6-second videos.

Of course, no later than a few hours after its launch, Vine was already being called the "Instagram for video," as users began sharing short clips of kids, stop-motion drawings, food, and, of course, puppies.

Currently, Vine is only available for iOS, but Twitter assures users that its app will be coming to other platforms "soon."

The app is pretty simple … Read more

Customize your username with an alias in OS X

OS X is an account-based system, in which individual users have their own accounts storing their own settings and data. When you set up a user account, the system will ask you for your name and then based on that will create a short username the system will use to identify your user account.

This short username is the true username of the account, but you can use the short name or your full name at the log-in window. Since the system initially generates it for you, it's easy to overlook the fact that you have the chance to … Read more

Caffeinate Mountain Lion to prevent it from sleeping

While setting your Mac to automatically sleep after a period of inactivity has its energy-saving benefits, you may find that the system will go to sleep even when it is churning through data (e.g., applying a lengthy filter routine to groups of images).

This issue happens because Apple has implemented some changes to the latest versions of OS X that result in different requirements for the system to determine if it can go to sleep, and one of these is a new dependence on applications to invoke a "power assertion" to keep the system from going to … Read more