Having trouble dragging selection handles in Preview because Live Text wants you to select text in the image instead? Here’s how to turn off Live Text if necessary.
After spending several days helping some elderly friends with their Macs, Adam Engst came away with a new appreciation for how difficult some aspects of Mac use are for older people. Some Apple efforts are a step in the right direction but may not be available to today’s users. And there’s plenty of room to improve.
If you’re still running macOS 11 Big Sur, it’s worth updating to the quietly released version 11.6.7, which fixes a problem that prevented email apps from opening attachments. It may also help clear Time Machine blockages, but it could also introduce problems by removing Rosetta from M1 Macs.
In its ongoing effort to protect users’ privacy, Apple has built a series of related technologies into macOS 12 Monterey, iOS 15, and iPadOS 15. Unfortunately, they can cause network connectivity issues, such that you might want to disable one or more. Here is how we think they work.
After initially demanding that legacy G Suite users upgrade to the paid Google Workspace keep their custom email addresses, Google has relented and is now offering individuals and families a free option, but you only have until 27 June 2022 to claim it.
iCloud Drive folder sharing has been around since macOS 10.15 Catalina, which makes it all the less acceptable that someone with whom the folder is shared can delete a file permanently and with only one possible—and unmentioned by Apple—option for recovery.
Computer hardware engineers are clever, but even they can’t bypass the physical limitations of battery chemistry. Or can they? Apple has implemented some clever workarounds to maximize battery life and lifespan.
Apple’s networkQuality command-line tool in Monterey provides a new metric—“responsiveness”—that measures latency in a more realistic manner to better reflect your real-world experience with interactive Internet services like videoconference and gaming.
It’s a good news/bad news week. On the plus side, Apple finally fixed the bug that prevented Mail from following links to named anchors, making our table of contents links clickable again. Sadly, however, we mourn a steadfast friend of TidBITS who was responsible for ensuring that all TidBITS staffers could cover the just-released iPad.
Blue light emitted from screens has been linked to a number of health issues. Here are a couple of ways you can reduce or block it on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
We’ve resubscribed several hundred TidBITS readers who were inexplicably unsubscribed several months ago, and on a completely different topic, Adam shares a tip on how to run Monterey on a Mac that doesn’t support it.
After much sleuthing, Adam Engst uncovers why some TidBITS readers experience a situation where an article in a TidBITS issue would be formatted as a column of text a single character wide. The culprit? An ancient email retrieval protocol as implemented by Yahoo Mail.
Many Mac user groups have dissolved or are a shadow of their former selves. Not so the Naples MacFriends User Group, which has embraced the Internet and attracted hundreds of members from around the world. Adam Engst shares more on that, plus recommends Howard Oakley’s work at the Eclectic Light Company blog and provides an update on iCloud delivery problems for TidBITS subscribers.
Apple may have discontinued the Time Capsule, but many Mac users still need a network-based Time Machine backup. This article reviews what options exist and weighs their pros and cons.
Annoyed by constantly picking up his wife’s MacBook Pro instead of his MacBook Air, Adam Engst decided to decorate the laptops with inexpensive full-color vinyl skins. It worked like a charm, and the skins also make the laptops more secure to carry and offer protection against scuffs and scratches.