My Mac Fixes

We are told that IPv6 -- an updated and advanced system of network addressing -- is the future of the Internet. That may be true, but IPv6 is also an immature and treacherous technology. For maximum reliability, my wife and I have two Internet connections, one cable and one DSL. Both are routed through wireless networks running on Apple's latest generation of AirPort base station. Generally, I use the cable Internet, while my wife uses the DSL, though we switch as needed. For the past few months, my wife has switched to the cable more often than intended. With her DSL, she kept complaining that Web pages were slow to load or stopped partway. I tried a number of possible solutions and managed to make some improvements in network operation, but nothing fixed the original problem. And then she complained it was getting worse. I began to wonder if our old DSL modem was at fault. So, I started researching modems and uncovered some interesting facts. One was that our DSL provider,...

I'm not sure I can tell you exactly why they're so slow, but I think I can tell you how to fix them. Time Machine backups on my Mac Pro with Snow Leopard normally take just a few minutes at most. But recently, I found them taking about 15 minutes each. Reading the status messages in the Time Machine preference pane, I saw that over a million items were being scanned during each backup -- twice. And the actual copying took place at a snail's pace, sometimes a few kilobytes at a time, even though I was hearing a wild disk chattering for most of the backup. Googling around, I discovered that Time Machine relies on a database called .fseventsd to tell it what files need backing up. When it can't read that database, is does the "deep scan" I was seeing reported in the status messages. But it should only have to do that once to get that database back on track. So, something else was obviously getting in the way. I finally found one lone voice saying he had fix...

If you look at customer reviews of recent versions of Microsoft Word, you'll find those reviews divided between users who are tearing their hair out over Word's instability and users who are having no trouble at all. But what's more interesting is how they're divided. Those having trouble are generally those who have used Word for many years. Those having no trouble are the newbies. That's because the problem often isn't in the app itself. Chances are, it's in the fonts on your computer. Word comes with a large number of fonts, and over the years, it has changed where it places them on your drive. During these same years, Apple has licensed a number of Microsoft fonts to include in OS X, placing them in yet another location. The upshot is that a long-time Word user can easily have three or more copies of a font in different versions and in different locations, resulting in conflicts. What's more, Word caches the fonts it finds in your system, and th...

You'd think that Adobe would do this for you automatically, wouldn't you. I mean, can they really think you'd want to leave all keywords and collections behind when updating? But this is Adobe, and user convenience is not their strong point. So here's how to take care of it yourself on the Mac. 1. Install the new version of Bridge. 2. In your home directory -- not the computer's root directory -- go to Library > Application Support > Adobe > Bridge CS5. 3. From that directory, drag the following to the adjacent Bridge CS6 directory: the file Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml and the directory Collections. To instead move copies while leaving the originals in place, hold down Option while dragging. That's it! Your keywords and collections will now be available in CS6. You can use the same method to move keywords and collections between other Bridge versions as well, and you might also find other settings you want to move. I'm told, though, that ...

Check the setup of your Mac or iMac's firewall in the Security preferences panel. If the firewall is on, and if you've checked "Block all incoming connections" under Advanced options, then iTunes music sharing won't work. But if you're still running Microsoft Office 2004, don't turn off that setting before reading this post .

I recently bought an Epson Expression 10000XL scanner to replace a dying Microtek. With the Epson's great reputation, I was expecting high-quality software -- hopefully better than the capable but finicky and fragile software that Microtek provided. I'm afraid I was disappointed. For those of you with Epson scanners, especially on newer Macs with Snow Leopard, here are some of the problems and disappointments I encountered, plus my own solutions for them. -- Epson Scan turned out to be less powerful than the Microtek software, and it has not been kept properly up to date. It hasn't been revised for Intel Macs -- it still needs Apple's Rosetta translator to run -- and it doesn't even know enough to keep its opening windows clear of the OS X Dock! But the real deal breaker was that color management is broken under Snow Leopard, as lamely acknowledged by Epson's own Web site, with no guarantee of a fix. The result is that what you see on screen is very differen...

While adding new MP3 audio files to my Web site recently, I discovered that Safari was refusing to play one of the MP3s already there. The frustrating part was that I could see no difference between this MP3 and any of the others that Safari did play. Searching the Web, I found that this problem was neither uncommon nor particularly new. Safari under Snow Leopard has been having a lot of weird problems playing MP3s. And despite a fair amount of discussion , no one seems to have a solution. So here's mine: Forget MP3. Though it's a common element of HTML5 audio, and though Apple is nominally supporting it, it's really a legacy format. Support may well dwindle further, going forward. My advice is to use MP4 instead. But isn't MP4 a video format? As it turns out, not really. It's a file format that can contain video, audio, stills, and more. You can have audio with your video, or you can have audio without video. Sound familiar? Yes, it's a direct descend...