Glenn Fleishman

Freelance technology, science, and typography journalist

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Jan. 14, 2021

Mac screen sharing won’t work? Disable it! Then turn it back on

It’s a sad thing that after so many years of offering screen sharing as a native feature in OS X and then macOS, the remote-access service remains unreliable. I have two Macs in my house on the same network—one a laptop, one a desktop—and it’s often…

Jan. 13, 2021

Macworld

macOS Big Sur’s battery optimization: You can’t do much to tweak laptop settings

In macOS 10.15 Catalina, Apple brought the first part of the existing iOS/iPadOS battery-charging optimization algorithm to Mac laptops with Thunderbolt 3 capability. Instead of always charging your laptop battery to 100 percent and then topping it…

Jan. 8, 2021

Macworld

How to scan documents in Notes and third-party apps on the iPhone and iPad

Relatively few people buy stand-alone scanners these days unless they work with printed documents, photos, or photographic negatives, and most financial, medical, and legal documents show up in digital form—but not all. That’s particularly true if…

Jan. 7, 2021

Tidbits

Apple Unveils Stringent Disclosure and Opt-in Privacy Requirements for Apps

In late 2020, Apple rolled out its new privacy guidelines for apps, which require explicit and detailed disclosure by apps of their collection and use of personal data. In the near future, it will also require that apps get opt-in permission to track…

Jan. 7, 2021

Macworld

How to figure out if a MacBook power adapter or battery has gone bad

You plug in your adapter to your laptop, and the battery doesn’t charge reliably. Sometimes, your Mac dings to let you know it’s plugged in to power; other times, you have to plug and unplug, or even restart your computer. What’s up? Battery charging…

Jan. 4, 2021

Macworld

How to enable the iTunes Store in the macOS Music app

Apple pushes its Music subscription service heavily, to the extent of killing off iTunes in macOS with the release of macOS 10.15 Catalina in 2019, and replacing it with several apps, including one simply called Music. But if you subscribe to Apple…

Dec. 31, 2020

Macworld

How to make use of typographic refinement in Pages and other macOS software

Well-drawn type has been integral to the Mac since the very start. Steve Jobs, who famously adored a calligraphy course in college, insisted that the Mac use “real” fonts, something made possible by the company’s early partnership with Adobe Systems.…

Dec. 29, 2020

Macworld

How to get an accounting of your Apple Cash transactions

Apple Cash is an extremely convenient way for people in the iPhone/iPad ecosystem to send and receive money, and it’s where Apple plops its daily cash rebates if you use the Apple credit card. However, running through transactions in the Wallet app…

Dec. 26, 2020

Medium

Don’t Coffin Me, It’s Crackers

Listening to the wonderful No Such Thing as a Fish podcast this morning, made by the researchers (“elves”) of UK panel show QI, they brought up a problem with a joke included with Christmas crackers. Crackers are a British tradition — nothing to do…

Dec. 23, 2020

Macworld

How to restore a previous version of your Pages, Keynote, and other documents in macOS

One of the most powerful additions to one’s computing arsenal that arrived in the early 2000s was automatic saving, particularly incremental saves that happened quietly and continuously. This means you don’t lose your work in progress between saves.…

Dec. 22, 2020

Macworld

Lost text in a browser form submission? Avoid it with an extension or a clipboard add-on

We live on the web. Web apps mean we enter extensive amounts of text into form fields or pages that look like forms all the time. The best tools, like Google Docs, automatically save as we type, preventing the loss while connected to the internet of…

Dec. 18, 2020

Macworld

If you’re using AFP to share a Mac drive, It’s time to change

Apple began phasing in the use of its SSD-friendly APFS file system with High Sierra for SSD-only Macs, and then upgraded Fusion Drive-based Macs in Mojave. In Big Sur, Time Machine volumes can finally be formatted with APFS, too. But in this…

Dec. 17, 2020

Macworld

How to change the icon of a storage device in macOS

Apple hides some of its best features through obscurity, not intentionally. For many years—at least 15, by my research—you have been able to select and change the icon for any file, folder, volume, or drive. But it’s a multi-step process that…

Dec. 16, 2020

Medium

Yes! We Have Some Bananas

The public domain gained an entire year of material in 2019 and more is slated to come. “Whose woods these are, I think I” — whoa! Until January 1, 2019, I couldn’t quote any more of this famous poem’s introduction, because of the dogged defense of…

Dec. 16, 2020

Macworld

What’s the latest version of macOS you can run on your Mac?

People accuse electronics manufacturers of built-in obsolescence: that hardware is designed to stop working or not be useful after a relatively short period of time. Apple has generally avoided that with Macs, letting many of its models receive OS X…

Dec. 15, 2020

Macworld

macOS Big Sur supports Time Machine on APFS-formatted drives, but there are a few catches

Apple started shifting Macs from its old HFS+ filesystem to its more sophisticated APFS format with macOS 10.13 High Sierra. In that release, all SSD-based Macs were upgraded to APFS. Fusion Drives followed with macOS 10.14 Mojave. But it took a full…

Dec. 14, 2020

Macworld

How to unify your Apple IDs in macOS for Media & Purchases

It’s easy to wind up with multiple Apple IDs that you accrue over time, including for long-time Mac users who originally had a cloud-based account and an iTunes Music Store account, both of which migrated into separate Apple IDs. This can be…

Dec. 11, 2020

Macworld

How to change your name on your Mac's user account

People wind up with a new name, often one that better reflects who they are or have become, for all sorts of reasons. macOS can keep up with the name you use, so you aren’t staring at your past identity indefinitely. It’s not obvious, but you don’t…

Dec. 9, 2020

Macworld

How to check a Mac’s OS upgrade history in System Profiler

While macOS upgrades should always proceed in a sequential fashion, sometimes things go awry. Typically, the Software Update preference pane shows all updates available for your current release of macOS, and when installed, they disappear from the…

Dec. 7, 2020

Macworld

How to work around a Save as PDF restriction in macOS Big Sur’s Preview app

Users who rely on the Preview app in macOS for viewing PDFs report that a minor change is causing major headaches. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. IDG PDF files can be protected in various ways, and when using the Print function in macOS and choose…