Category: tips
Great productivity tip: create a tmp folder.
I’ve been doing this for years, but I’ve never written an article about it. I have an easily accessible folder, available from anywhere, where I throw anything that is temporary. I can easily find what I need, but it doesn’t clutter other places up. Read on… it’s better than it sounds.
How to quickly print a ruler
I was stuck today. I couldn’t find a ruler. Thankfully it’s very easy to print an accurate ruler on a piece of paper that you can use to measure things.
A warning about notifications from websites
If you get a warning like this be very careful about clicking ‘Allow.’ I’ve noticed that lots of websites have been asking to send me notifications. What you may not realise is that these notifications do not come through your web browser. They come through the OSX built-in notifications that appear on the right of…
How to reset your Safari browser
If Safari is running slowly or not doing something it should a reset may fix it. This last week when I typed a word or phrase into the search bar of Safari, it would not do a search. After I reset Safari it started working again. Here is how to reset your Safari Web browser.
Fixing a stuck scroll wheel on an Apple Mouse
One of the most popular posts on macintoshhowto is this 6 year old article on how to clean an Apple mighty mouse. It’s had over 200 comments! Here’s a video so you can see what it looks like. Apple recommend rubbing a piece of paper over the top of the scroll wheel, but I find turning the mouse upside…
How to charge your iPhone from your laptop battery.
Here is how to charge your iPhone from your MacBook Air battery. (It will work for a MacBook Pro as well.) Plug the phone into the MacBook Air USB port. Open the lid and power up the MacBook Air. Close the lid, putting the MacBook Air to sleep and the iPhone will continue to charge!
Safari Surfer Ninja
When you see a Jacki Chan movie, his hands move so fast you can barely see them. With a couple of tricks, you can search the internet so fast you’ll be a Safari Surfer Ninja. Here’s a quick way to open a new tab and start a new google search for any word or phrase on a webpage.
How to remove duplicate lines in a text document or list.
I had a list of email addresses but some of them were duplicates that I wanted to remove. My first port of call was Apple Numbers but it was too complicated. I had to sort them, then write a function to detect duplicates, then filter the results. Good old textwrangler can do it in one go. Here’s how.