Blog Archives
need a manual for Lion?
Got a new Mac and feeling like you’re on a whole different planet? Providing user manuals with computers isn’t really very Apple somehow 😉 …after all, the OS is supposed to be so intuitive and easy to use we shouldn’t need one…
However, clearly more than a few have been having problems getting used to their new Lion installation as Apple are now prominently displaying two beginners help guides on the ASC support forum.
Have a look at Mac 101 if you’re new to computers in general or haven’t really used one for a while.
If you’re pretty computer savvy but have just switched over from a lifetime of Windows to your first Mac, then Switch 101 will clue you into both some of the major differences and how to accomplish familiar Windows tasks in your new Mac OS X environment.
To keep up to date, troubleshoot, or find answers to specific questions not covered in the above materials, be sure to visit http://www.apple.com/support/lion/. You can also find this page from the menu at the top left of your screen. Click
> About This Mac and then ‘More Info…’:
Over on the right of the next panel, click the ‘Support’ button:
You can access both the online Lion manual (indicated in blue), and also a pdf manual (indicated in purple) for your computer from here.
Enjoy exploring! 🙂
Struggling with the basics? Don’t be shy, let us know in the Comments below! 🙂
featured picture The Close Light by *qaz2008
java not working on Lion
Unlike previous OS X iterations, Java does not come installed by default on Lion OS X. Instead, you need to download it and enable it.
First, check to see whether Java is installed by running this command in Terminal.app
java -version
If you don’t get a version number back, then you need to go here first and download the Java update from Apple: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1515
Once Java is installed, then you need to enable it. In your Applications > Utilities folder, you should find the Java Preferences.app. Double click on that, and in the ‘General’ tab, click the enable checkbox at the top (see screenshot above).
Java working!🙂
how to take a screenshot
We all like to take happy snaps at Christmas 🙂 , but there’s no need to buy expensive software to snap the wonders you or your family produce on your Mac computer screen. Mac OS X has a number of built-in ways to take screenshots. The simplest is to use the universal hotkey combination:
Command-Shift-3
This will immediately take a snapshot of your entire screen and dump it on your desktop as .png file. Try it now and have a look!
If you want to select only a specific region, try this
Command-Shift-4
Move your cursor, and you’ll see it’s turned into a cross-hairs by which you can select any part of the screen you want. You can also press the spacebar after you invoke this command, and the cursor will turn into a camera icon. This lets you accurately select individual windows for the shot, instead of drawing round them.
If you are taking the screenshot to immediately paste it into a post, email or document and you don’t particularly want to keep a saved copy of it, then add the control key to either of the previous commands (e.g., command-control-shift-3). This will dump the screenshot into the clipboard rather than save it as a file. All you do next is go to the window you want to paste it in, and hit Command-V.
Finally, if all these hotkeys are too much to remember for the occasional screenshot, remember you can always access screenshots through the Preview.app menu (see main image above).
Happy snapping folks! 🙂
Here’s the summary of the main commands:
how to unfreeze your iPad
iPads are so easy to use, why bother with the manual? 😉 The chances are though, that at some point you’re either going to find that an app freezes on your screen or your whole tablet becomes unresponsive. Don’t panic, the answer’s simple:
First, be sure that it’s connected to a power source. The most common reason for iPads not working is people don’t realise they’re out of battery! Otherwise try these:
If it’s just a particular App that’s frozen on your screen:
— Hold down the ‘sleep/wake’ button (top right, back edge) for about 5 seconds until the slider appears. Release the ‘sleep/wake’ button. Now hold down the ‘Home’ button (bottom front, centre) until you see your Home screen.
If your whole machine is unresponsive, then do a restart:
— Hold down the ‘sleep/wake’ button for about 5 seconds until the slider appears. Slide it to ‘Off’. Then hold it down again until the Apple logo appears showing that the iPad is restarting.
If that doesn’t work, do a hard reset:
— Hold down the ‘sleep/wake’ button AND the ‘Home’ button simultaneously for about 10 seconds or until the Apple logo appears.
*For more serious problems with your iPad, such as continual restarting or no home screen, have a look here.
featured picture: ice crystals by Typen
upgrading to Lion – the golden rules!
Nearly three months since the initial public release of OS X Lion 10.7 and a couple of updates later (we’re currently at Release 10.7.2) a lot of upgraders are reporting problems to Apple Support Communities. These problems could be avoided or their severity reduced if people upgraded in the right way.
There’s a wrong way? Oh yes…the Apple way is to encourage you to click on the App Store, click on Lion, pay your money, sit back and watch as everything falls into place without barely a finger lifted from the user. That’s great — when it works, but as noted, a lot of people are finding that all sorts of things are going wrong from software incompatibility to hardware incompatibility and sometimes (like in my own case) just plain user incompatibility (yes, some of us — and it could be you too! — are just not that thrilled with the reduced configurability and usability of Lion compared to Snow Leopard, even when it works as intended). There’s also some reported problems even with Apple’s own products: Time Machine, Time Capsule and Spotlight are all being reported as having problems for some users.
But much of this need not give you a headache, put your computer out of action or require a call to Apple Support if you follow the golden rules to doing any major OS upgrade.
Golden Rule No. 1: Check the compatibility of your key software tools.
Why do I need to do this?
Lion does not support a lot of older technologies such as Rosetta and PowerPC apps. If you make heavy use of these programs in your daily use, you’re going to need to upgrade those too or continue to run Snow Leopard on an external disk.
Golden Rule No. 2: Buy an external disk and clone your current system to it.
Why do I need to do this?
Without a doubt, this is the most important thing you should do before upgrading. What cloning means is that if anything goes wrong with the install, if it doesn’t work, or it isn’t to your taste, you can simply boot back into your old system within minutes (no longer than it takes to restart the computer, in fact). Your clone is your insurance, a fail-safe against the unexpected. Don’t even think about hitting that App store upgrade till you have your clone in the bag.
Or what? Simply put, if you don’t make a clone of your system, you’re going to have to live with any problems until you can work out a way to either solve them (and some issues haven’t even been resolved yet) or revert back to your previous OS the hard way, with the potential of data loss.
Although cloning your system will cost you the price of an external USB or Firewire hard disk, it’s an investment you should not overlook. Even if your upgrade goes well, keep the clone for a month or so till you’re sure everything works fine. Once you’re happy, you can use that disk to clone your Lion OS regularly as an incremental backup (like Time Machine only more configurable and less erratic!).
Golden Rule No.3: Make sure you have a bootable DVD or USB recovery disk.
Why do I need to do this?
Unlike every other proprietary OS upgrade ever, Lion is downloaded from the internet and does not come with an install disk. Does it matter? Well, yes. Sometimes Lion doesn’t install properly for a number of different reasons and sometimes your system just goes belly-up. Now you may have heard that Lion comes with its own recovery partition, but that assumes that the recovery partition installs properly, and it relies on having an internet connection. Re-downloading the installer takes a lot longer than simply copying it the first time and making a bootable Lion recovery disk in case of emergency.
Golden Rule No.4: Do a clean install to your internal disk.
Why do I need to do this?
A clean install basically means two things: you wipe the history of the disk you’re going to use for your new OS, and you don’t import any settings from your previous OS. This should ensure that the OS installs exactly as it was designed, without being infected with any hidden or unknown problems from your previous OS install.
Golden Rule No. 5: Use the clone to add manually the stuff you use everyday, and as-and-when you need it for other stuff.
Why do I need to do this?
Using the auto-upgrade, Time Machine or Disk Migration features have been known to introduce problems such as corrupted files and permissions that Snow Leopard ignored for some reason or other but which Lion won’t tolerate, and/or files and settings which are just plain incompatible with Lion. Trying to find out what is causing your system problems is a gruelling process if you just import everything en masse. On the other hand, if you import things manually over time, it’ll be both a lot easier to figure out which change caused the problem but also — using your clone — to roll your system back if needs be.
Let us know your upgrade stories in the Comments below. Was it just one-click to happiness or a whole world of pain?😉
how to back up your Mac – the best way!
iCloud? Time Machine? Noooo……! We’re talking about the best way to backup your precious data, not the most convenient way…
What’s wrong with using the cloud? The fact that you need an internet connection, a password to be accepted, to act in accordance with the T&C of your cloud provider, the fact that someone – government, corporation, hacker – could interfere with your data, lose it or just add unwanted stuff to it. Also, if you want to backup your whole system then the various free storage offers are not going to be big enough to do the job, and you’re going to end up paying a lot more than if you backup your system properly.
How about Time Machine? Yes, it’s simple and convenient and pretty much automatic, but its not secure. TM has three major problems. First, it doesn’t allow proper archiving so anything you delete from your HDD will eventually get deleted from TM. Second, it doesn’t tell you what it’s doing before it does it, meaning you are at the mercy of its automated decisions. Third, it’s not bootable. If your whole system crashes or your HDD just fails, Time Machine won’t help you. You’ll have to restore the system or replace the HDD before you can use your machine again.
But there is a much better way, and aside from you providing the hardware (a couple of external hard disks), one that’s also free. The most secure system is to run an hourly or daily scheduled cloner on one disk, and a weekly cloner on the other. You can use SuperDuper or, my own favourite, Carbon Copy Cloner.
If you want to read up on and understand the various backup options and what they entail, you can’t do better than to read this superb post by Apple Discussions member ds store.
how to uninstall MacKeeper – updated
Lees dan dit artikel in het Nederlands 
Lire cet article en français 
Last updated: June 16, 2018
If you’re unfamiliar with the reputation of MacKeeper but have come here because you downloaded it – or it downloaded itself after you were inadvertantly redirected to some unwanted website – and are now wondering whether you made a mistake, let me present you with a few facts.
MacKeeper is one of the most infamous pieces of software on the macOS platform. This post itself was first published in September 2011, and has since received over 2 million hits from people wishing to uninstall MacKeeper from their computers.
When I ran MacKeeper’s free trial version on a brand new clean install of macOS, it told me that my system was in ‘serious’ condition and that I needed to buy MacKeeper in order to solve all my problems.
It seems, then, that MacKeeper thinks macOS, freshly installed, is a poor piece of software engineering, but the feeling is mutual. macOS doesn’t like MacKeeper much either. macOS provides the following warning about MacKeeper:
MESSAGE FROM CONSOLE
12/05/2015 17:48:00.946 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Helper) This service is defined to be constantly running and is inherently inefficient.
If you have installed MacKeeper and wish to remove it, read on.
Preparation:
i. If you have used MacKeeper’s encryption feature, be sure to unencrypt before you uninstall MacKeeper. You should also check whether any of your personal files are stored in /Documents/MacKeeper Backups.
Backups & other disks
ii. If you have any disks connected to your mac, including Time Machine, eject them before you start the uninstall procedure.
Trash
iii. If you have anything in the Trash, empty it now before you start.
You are now ready to uninstall MacKeeper.
The Easy Way
As I’ve been involved in helping people uninstall MacKeeper for over 5 years, I eventually got round to the task of automating the process so that folks who were not that technically proficient with computers could take advantage of the information on this page.
If that sounds like you, then the easiest way to uninstall MacKeeper is to use my app DetectX. This is a shareware that can be used for free 😀. You do not need to sign up to anything, subscribe to anything or give anyone your email address. Just download the app, run it, remove MacKeeper and be on your way.
After several years of testing and refining my app’s removal procedure, I now recommend using it even for proficient users as it is simply faster, more reliable and less prone to error than doing it any other way. The only people who should really consider the manual option are those that are running versions of macOS that are too old to run DetectX.
Please note also that the list of filepaths below is somewhat out of date. Follow the instructions, but consult my post here for the most recent update to the list of MacKeeper filepaths.
The Manual Way
If you need to remove MacKeeper manually then follow these instrutions carefully. They’ve been refined over the years by many people who contributed in the hundreds of comments that follow this post and have been proven to work without exception. However, bear in mind that the onus is on you to follow the instructions to the letter. For that reason, go slow, read carefully and don’t do anything if you’re not sure what you’re doing. If you have any doubts, post a question in the comments.
Here we go!
1. If MacKeeper is running, quit it. From the sidebar in any Finder window, choose your hard disk icon and go to your Library folder. Look in the Application Support folder for the folder inside it called ‘MacKeeper’:
/Library/Application Support/MacKeeper
Drag this folder to the Trash.
2. Still in Library, look for and trash any of these you find in the same way:
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.AntiVirus
/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.plugin.AntiTheft.daemon
3. If you are using OS X Lion 10.7 or later, use the ‘Go’ menu in Finder’s menubar and hold down the ‘option’ key. Choose ‘Library’ from the menu (yes, this is a different Library folder from the one you were just in). If you are using Snow Leopard or Leopard, just click on the little ‘Home‘ icon in the Finder sidebar and navigate to the Library. Then trash any and all of these that you find:
~/Library/Caches/com.zeobit.MacKeeper
~/Library/Caches/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper
~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper
~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.plugin.Backup.agent
~/Library/Preferences/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper.plist
Be careful not to delete the wrong files: only those that have got the words ‘zeobit’, ‘MacKeeper’, ‘911’ or ‘911bundle’ should be trashed.
Update May 2015:
Due to recent changes in MacKeeper, the following files should also be searched for and removed:
~/Library/Application Support/MacKeeper Helper
~/Library/Caches/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper
~/Library/Caches/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Helper
~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Helper.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Helper.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.plist
~/Documents/MacKeeper Backups
~/Library/Logs/MacKeeper.log
~/Library/Logs/MacKeeper.log.signed
/private/tmp/com.mackeeper.MacKeeper.Installer.config
/Library/Preferences/.3FAD0F65-FC6E-4889-B975-B96CBF807B78
The last item above will require removal in Terminal or turning on of invisible files in the GUI (various 3rd party apps can do this, including my own DetectX and FastTasks 2).
4. Go to Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access.app and double click on it. Notice the padlock in the window is up there on the left, rather than down the bottom. Click on it and enter your admin password. Now go through all the items in the ‘Keychains‘ list (such as Login, System, Root) with ‘All items’ selected in the ‘Category’ list. Anything you find related to ‘MacKeeper’ or ‘zeobit’, click on it, then choose Edit > Delete from the menu.
(Thanks to Al for also mentioning this point in the Comments below! 🙂 ).
5. Open the Activity Monitor utility (Applications>Utilities>Activity Monitor.app). In 10.10 Yosemite or later, select the View menu and choose ‘All Processes’. For earlier versions of macOS, select ‘All Processes from the drop down menu just over on the right of the dialogue box. Next, scroll down the list of items shown and see if any processes called ‘MacKeeper’, ‘zeobit’ or ‘911 bundle’ are still running. Older versions of MacKeeper may have a ‘WINE’ process running, so also look for ‘wine’. Anything you find, click on it and hit the ‘Quit Process’ or ‘X’ button (Yosemite) in the top left corner.
6. Go to your Applications folder from a Finder window and select MacKeeper. Then, hold down ‘command’ and press ‘delete’ once. If you assigned MacKeeper to be pinned in the Dock, be sure to also drag the icon off the Dock and release it anywhere over the desktop. It will, satisfyingly, disappear in the ‘poof’ of a cloud. 😀
7. When you’re done filling up your trash can with all this junk, click on the Finder> Empty Trash.
8. Go to
> System Preferences > Users & Groups (or ‘Accounts’ for Snow Leopard) | Login Items
If you see anything to do with MacKeeper in the list of items there, highlight it, then click the little minus ‘-‘ button near the bottom of the list.
9. Restart your Mac. Everything should be back to normal, but check the Activity Monitor one last time to be sure.
Supplementary: If you have a problem with MacKeeper pop-ups while using your browser, try clearing out the caches, like this:
In Safari menubar, choose ‘Safari > Reset Safari’. Make sure all the options are checked.
This will not only clear out your caches, but everything else stored by the browser. Don’t worry, it won’t affect your bookmarks, but it will reset your ‘top sites’ and history.
In Firefox menubar, choose ‘Tools > Clear Recent History…’ and choose ‘Everything’. Again, it’ll clear everything out but won’t delete your bookmarks.
Obviously, if you use any other browsers like Opera or something you’ll have to find the same options for those too.
Related Posts
Terminal tricks for defeating adware
block MacKeeper and other browser ads
protect your mac from malware viruses and other threats
FastTasks 2 – get Applehelpwriter’s free utility app from Sqwarq.com
NOTES
1. If you have any problems carrying out the steps, try starting your Mac up in Safe mode, and then running the procedure.
2. You can safely ignore any MacKeeper files that are in the BOM or Receipts folders.
3. If you have only downloaded the MacKeeper package but not ran the installer, you only need to send the .pkg file in your Downloads folder to the Trash. That’s it!
4. If you are seeing ads on this site, we recommend that you use an adblocker!
Acknowledgements
This post has been refined and improved over time thanks to suggestions and replies made in the Comments and on Apple Support Communities. Thanks especially to Al, Lyndon and Jack.
get Kindle Cloud Reader for iOS/OS X
Well, you probably already have Kindle for iPad, but Amazon’s latest way to offer up your electronic texts, the Kindle Cloud Reader, could be the way of the future as far as non-App store developers are concerned.
Kindle Cloud Reader avoids the app store (and Apple’s 30% cut and other stringent conditions) by serving up your Kindle database through your web-browser. It’s basically a password protected web-site that also allows you to allocate offline storage space on your iPad or Mac OS (it’s not yet available for iPhone).
Amazon’s move follows in the footsteps of the Financial Times move in June this year to sidestep iTunes.
Cupertino, I think we have a problem…
assign apps to a desktop in Mission Control
Mission Control allows you to assign an app to particular desktop, so you can keep your work organised in different screens, and move between tasks with a swipe of the trackpad.
The easiest way to assign an app to a desktop is to first run the app so it appears in the Dock. Then, if you’re not already in the desired desktop, change to the desktop that you want the app to always appear in.
Next, place the cursor over the icon, and right-click (or two-finger tap if you have this gesture set for the trackpad).
Navigate through options and assign the app to ‘This Desktop’. That’s it!
applehelpwriter.com 