Glenn Fleishman

Freelance technology, science, and typography journalist

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Aug. 7, 2020

Need to disable Activation Lock on an iPhone or iPad? Here are the 3 Apple-connected options to do so

Apple added Activation Lock several years ago to its iPhones as a theft deterrent, partly at the request of users and partly because law enforcement insisted it would reduce the incentive for grab-and-run theft. The idea was that even if an iPhone…

Aug. 5, 2020

Does Safari always request fresh logins to your sites? If it does, there’s a reason

The whole system of web browsing and web servers was designed to be “stateless”: each page load is disconnected from each other. Cookies were invented in the very early days to serve as a kind of breadcrumb (or cookie crumb). When you log in to a…

Jul. 30, 2020

How to delete text in all sorts of ways on your Mac

If you’re a long-time Mac user or a new one, it’s possible you’re only aware of the Delete key, which is technically a “backward delete”: it deletes characters to the left of the current cursor in English and other languages that read left-to-right.…

Jul. 29, 2020

Understanding how iCloud Photos optimizes photo storage and keeps your originals

The old saw about one’s eyes being larger than one’s belly surely applies in an era when we can capture multi-megabyte images and gigabyte videos and have infinite storage online—but still have to contend with the size of flash drives in iPhones and…

Jul. 27, 2020

How to find a monitor that pivots for portrait perfection

Poking at portrait orientation of monitors attached to your Mac definitely scratched an itch for some readers, based on the mailbag. You can read the original column on how to use the Displays preference pane in macOS or a third-party utility that…

Jul. 24, 2020

Turn Your iPhone into a Powerful Webcam with Camo

Some of us have been living in videoconferencing sessions for months, which has presented many challenges. (“Kids, can you stop singing ‘Baby Shark’? I’m in a meeting” “Bill, can you grab the cat?”) One of them is the revelation of just how poor the…

Jul. 24, 2020

Do your iPhone and Mac’s country of origin need to match to work together?

Apple sells particular versions of its hardware in different countries and regions around the world. For iPhones, it has to do with the cellular frequencies in use by carriers. For laptops and other computers, it’s about the built-in or USB-connected…

Jul. 23, 2020

How to automate changing the date and time on HEIC files

When you snap a picture with a smartphone, tablet, or camera, the date and time are encoded in the image’s EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) metadata. It’s embedded so that it can be used later by any software that works with the image. However,…

Jul. 22, 2020

How to add a podcast by URL feed to Apple's Podcasts app and other apps

When you want to subscribe to a podcast, it’s usually as easy as clicking a link—often a link labeled Add to Apple Podcasts or to another popular podcast app, like Castro, Overcast, and Pocket Casts. However, I increasingly find that a benefit of…

Jul. 21, 2020

Monitor won’t rotate? You might be able to use a replacement stand

Monitor won’t rotate? You might be able to use a replacement standOn the heels of a recent column about macOS’s built-in option for rotating a monitor from landscape to portrait display via the Displays preference pane (or third-party software), some…

Jul. 20, 2020

Apple media sharing limits explained and why you should use Plex instead

Apple has implemented multiple kinds of sharing for media—apps, music, audiobooks, movies, and TV shows—but imposes limits across a few directions, ostensibly not to reduce piracy, but limit the reach of any particular purchased item. Some of…

Jul. 17, 2020

Need a portrait screen on your Mac? Rotate your display

I remember visiting a college in 1985 (readers, I’m that ancient), and seeing the height of glamor and magic: a portrait-orientation CRT screen that was part of a typesetting system. Because type was composed in “galleys,” long runs of relatively…

Jul. 15, 2020

Coping with inconsistent facial recognition in Apple Photos

It is extremely handy to tag people you know in photos you take. You can then easily find images of those people across time and at specific events. This feature appears in Photos in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, but may not work correctly across devices…

Jul. 10, 2020

How to check your iCloud your media to see if it remains in place

iCloud Photos offers two options for syncing images and videos across your devices and into your iCloud account’s cloud storage: downloading and retaining originals or “optimizing storage,” which means only thumbnails are retrieved—full-resolution…

Jul. 9, 2020

Apple Opens “Find My” Crowdsourcing to Third-Party Accessories

Apple’s Find My service lets you keep track of your iPhone, iPad, and even Apple-using friends and family. In the future, you might be able to use Find My to track your keys, glasses, and even your cat—that’s unrealistic. Let’s say your dog. By late…

Jul. 9, 2020

Don’t keep your Mac laptop charged to 100 percent all the time. Here’s why

If you leave your MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air plugged in all the time—no matter the vintage—the battery suffers wear for being charged to full. Over time, the maximum charged capacity diminishes and you lose many minutes—even hours—of usable…

Jul. 8, 2020

What to do when a Time Machine copy to an external drive is enormously larger than expected

Time Machine uses a clever technique to make snapshots of your Mac backups. Instead of just creating copies of files that have changed since the previous backup—incremental archiving—Time Machine in macOS creates effectively a copy of each backed up…

Jul. 3, 2020

Apple Photos: What can you do if you crop out details and later want them back?

A photo often doesn’t contain exactly what you want. Cropping a picture can be a solution. But what do you do if you crop out a critical detail and later want it back? One Macworld reader cropped herself out of a picture with her newborn baby! Momma,…

Jun. 30, 2020

How to solve ImageCaptureCore error -9937 when importing photos and videos from your phone to your Mac

The higher compression in new media formats Apple added in iOS 11 can nearly double the amount of photos and video you can store when you take pictures and shoot movies on your iPhone or iPad. However, using HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format)…

Jun. 26, 2020

What the HEIC? Apple’s Highly Compressed Image Format Still Confuses

To store more photos and videos on a mobile device, you can either buy more storage or increase image compression. Apple has enabled both paths. It expanded maximum storage so that a 256 GB iPhone isn’t ludicrously expensive. But that gets you only…