Apple – Steve Morton

Fortnightly Check List for Apple Mac/iPhone Users

1. Go to System Settings

Go to General, then Software Update, check that the Mac OS is up to date.

2. Go to System Settings

Go to General, then Time Machine, check that the most recent backup on all drives is within the last 24 hours.

3. Checking for Updates on other apps.

Word, Excel etc. In Word, click on Help, Check for Updates

Thunderbird. In Thunderbird, click on Thunderbird, then About Thunderbird, it will then check for updates.

Skype. In Skype, click on Skype, then Check for Updates.

4. Go to System Settings

Go to Passwords, Log in with your machine password, check security recommendations for compromised, reused, weak, leaked passwords.

Backing up your computer.

Far too often, I hear about people who have ‘lost’ their computer files. Happily, there are many ways to easily avoid such a disaster these days.

Firstly, how do you organise your files? Having tens or hundreds of them on the desktop is not best practice. Try to follow a ‘clear desk policy’, only keeping files on the desktop that you are currently working on or frequently (i.e. daily) need to access. All other files should be saved and stored in appropriately named folders on your computer hard drive.

Backing up your computer is essential! Hard drives are a commonly used method, but¬ – it’s a big ‘but’– they do fail after a finite time. However, you shouldn’t need to worry about that horror if you have a proper back up strategy in place.

I’ve always followed the ‘3-2-1’ back up rule. This means I have:

Three copies of each file, including the original,
On at least Two different drives,
And One copy stored ‘off-site’.

For example, I might have a document stored on my internal computer hard drive, a copy stored on a separate external hard drive, and the third copy synced to Dropbox.

However, whenever I change the copy on my internal hard drive, the copy in Dropbox (cloud storage) will be updated, and the second copy on an external hard drive will also be updated within an hour automatically via Apple Time Machine or if you are a Windows user there is a similar application such as Backup and Restore.

Therefore, at worst case I will have potentially only lost a few minutes’ work on a document should there be a drive failure or computer failure.

Going back to external hard drives, please do not use them for storing your original files and photographs on them as they tend to fail more frequently than the internal drive on your computer. You should use them only for backing up. The place to store your original files is your computer!

One back-up solution is to use two external drives to back up, with the system alternating between the two drives automatically. The likelihood of both failing at the same time is remote.

Check your back-ups are working from time to time. Make sure that the back-up drive is fully up to date, in the same way you have made sure that your applications and operating system are up to date.

Apple Time Machine

Do you use an Apple Mac? If you do then Time Machine is a great way of backing up your files from your machine to an external drive on a frequent basis.

So some quick tips about Time Machine:

Dedicate at least one external hard drive to Time Machine, don’t be tempted to use it for other files as well. It reduces the capacity. If you need an external drive for other files buy another drive.
Leave the drive connected all the time. If you are using a Macbook (Laptop) then an external drive that connects to your network or your router (Western Digital MyCloud) is a good alternative to one hard-wired to your machine.
Buy a large drive, the bigger the drive the longer Time Machine can keep backups for before it starts deleting old back ups.
If you buy a larger drive at a later date, it is possible to transfer your previous backups to the newdrive, see this article for details. I’ve done this a few times and it’s fairly involved but follow the steps shown and you should retain all your previous backups.

Time Machine keeps:

Hourly backups for the past 24 hours
Daily backups for the past month
Weekly backups for all previous months

The oldest backups are deleted when your drive becomes full.

How useful is Time Machine?

If your Mac has a hard drive failure and you have to replace the internal drive, when you turn the machine back on having installed OSX then the machine will offer the opportunity to restore the machine from the most recent Time Machine back up.
- This back up will restore all your data, settings, passwords, desktop files, photos, music, in summary everything.
- Occasionally you will find you will have to put in product codes to activate software.
The restore process can take a few hours, I ran mine over night the couple of times I’ve had to do this.
You can restore individual files, say you had a file on your desktop some weeks ago. Then you can enter Time Machine and track back and find the file again by literally going back in time. You can then restore that file. If a later version exists then you can opt to replace or keep both versions of the file, which is useful with changing files.
You can split your Time Machine back ups across more than one drive, Time Machine then just uses each drive in turn. This helps to increase the overall security of your back ups in the case of an external drive failure.
Running Time Machine will not slow down your machine, it all happens comfortably in the background and you will hardly notice it happening.

Problems with Time Machine?

Occasionally you might get an error message that says that Time Machine hasn’t been able to verify the latest back up. There seems to be very little you can do about this about from starting the process off again. Time Machine will start a new back up and delete the old one. This is a good reason for using more than one external drive for Time Machine back ups.

In my case I use a locally connected USB external drive as one Time Machine drive and a network connected MyCloud drive as the other one.

On rebooting the external drive will not always be picked up. Let me explain.

The external Time Machine drive icon is normally shown on your desktop on your Mac and it will look like this:

A normal non-Time Machine drive will look like this:

On start up or rebooting if your Time Machine drive looks likes the ‘Yellow/Orange’ drive above it might be functioning ok as your Time Machine back up drive, but just to be certain there are a few simple things you can try to ensure it turns to ‘Green’

Starting with the simple test. Hover your cursor over the Finder icon on the dock (normally at the left) press the ‘Alt’ key on the keyboard then ‘Right Click’ the mouse and then left click on ‘Relaunch’ Finder will relaunch and then check to see if your drive icon has changed to ‘Green’

If it hasn’t then go to the next step.

2. Go in to System Preferences, Time Machine. Click on Add or Remove Back Up Disk and then click on your external drive again, then ‘Use Disk’

You can then close System Preferences. If the Time Machine Icon hasn’t turned ‘Green’ try relaunching Finder again using the Alt, Right Click, Relaunch routine again. It should then turn ‘Green’ and all should be working as it should.

As reboots of Macs is normally fairly infrequent, you will not be doing this that often.

Every so often you can check in Time Machine System Preferences, this is will show the latest and oldest back up dates, how much drive space you have.

If you disconnect your Time Machine drive from your computer, Time Machine will politely remind you that you haven’t backed up for n weeks with an on-screen message after about 10 days. Hence why it is always best to keep the drive connected when ever possible.

Finally.

This has been a lightning tour of what Time Machine can offer, but it really is a useful feature built-in to OSX that you should be using. External drives are not expensive these days. So get one and get using Time Machine… And remove the drive to a safe place if you are going away for any length of time.

Turn your iPad in to a second display for your Mac or Windows machine

I’m used to using my large 27 inch iMac at home, I rarely use applications full screen though, you start to suffer from moving your head from left to right, like you are watching a tennis match on Centre Court!! So I tend to divide the screen between two apps at a time. Mail and Skype, or Safari and Twitter etc.

Quite often I will drag a tab out of Safari and sit it next to the other Safari window, so I have the two side by side. I can see both that way. I can place the mouse cursor in one Safari window, whilst the flashing on-screen cursor is in the other and happily copy links from one window with the mouse and paste them in the other with a key stroke without having to change the active window, it just works brilliantly for that simple function.

I’m writing this post whilst away from home on my Macbook Pro, the same resolution screen as I have at home, but smaller screen size. Resizing windows to fit two side by side isn’t so practical on a 13 inch screen, but with a simple app I have gained a second display using my iPad.

My iPad isn’t particularly new, it’s the 3rd generation one, but with the Duet App loaded it functions as a second display when connected via the USB cable to the Macbook Pro.

The app lets you configure the screen resolution to use on the iPad separately to your main display, which side of your main display the iPad is stood on and a few other features.

Even on my old iPad there is no detectable lag or delay in the cursor movement, the second display acts just like it is the main display. If you press the home key on the iPad to come out of the app, any windows or apps you had placed on the iPad screen are moved back on to the main screen without having to close them or reopen them.

It apparently works with Windows machines as well, although I’ve not been able to test it with one as I don’t have any Windows machines these days.

So if you have a spare iPad you aren’t sure what to do with it… turn it in to a second display for your laptop or even your Mac or PC at home.

Mac OS X – Preview

Preview on Mac OS X is a very underrated application. It has been included on every version of Mac OS X I’ve ever used, which in my case goes back to ‘Tiger’ version 10.4

Now at first sight it might not seem to be able to do a lot. You use it for viewing photo and graphic files, it also handles PDF files too, no need to install Adobe Reader… (thank goodness!!) It will also let you ‘preview’ Word, Excel and a number of other document formats.

OK so it does those… but did you also know you can do a lot more too…

For images you can:

Rotate images in 90 degree increments
Flip images horizontally or vertically (Mirrored ones)
Adjust the size of an image (so you can reduce the size of image before emailing it or uploading it to say Facebook)
Adjust the colour and other parameters of an image.
Crop images
You can annotate images with squares, ovals, lines, lines with arrows etc. Useful for adding labels and notes
Add Text to images in different fonts, styles, colours etc.
You can take screen shots of images/documents which is a quick and dirty way of creating images suitable for a website when you don’t want them to be huge in resolution!
You can take a PDF and digitally sign the document and save it with your signature. You do your signature on a piece of paper then hold it up to the camera.

I use Preview many times a day, it is a built in application that I couldn’t do without.