Mac Lab: An Apple Macintosh OS X, Mac & PC Blog

Many tech support companies reside outside of the US. Some of the calls are answered by English-challenged personnel and in certain cases can lead to a great deal of frustration. Here are some suggestions to avoid ruining your day. 1. Make a so-called contemporaneous record of the call, which by the way is accepted in [...]

In order to place into Word a picture, a piece of clip art or an enlarged section of text, the steps to follow are: (1)    Place your cursor near where you “might” want the item to go. (2)    Go to the Word menu at the top of the screen and  open Insert and select Picture. [...]

To add SSL to your OS X testing server, you need to configure mod_ssl. Open Terminal and type the following commands: * sudo -s * cd /etc/httpd * mkdir ssl * chmod 700 ssl * cd ssl * gzip -c –best /var/log/system.log > random.dat * openssl rand -rand file:random.dat 0 You now need an SSL [...]

Here’s a php code snippet to force the page to https instead of http. You can use a self-signed SSL certificate on your OS X testing server.

If your Mac has an application that is frozen, or you have the dreaded spinning beach ball, you probably have an app that will not quit gracefully. Normally the protected memory feature of OS X allows an application to crash and you can keep working — no restart required. Hit the keystroke combination of Option-Apple-Esc [...]

Number One tip:  stop quitting your most-used applications! I see scores of people use their PCs. Almost everyone will do the following: Open their browser. Quit (close) their browser. Open their email program. Quit their email program. Open Word. Quit Word. Then they repeat this process. Over and over. STOP. Here’s the tip: keep your [...]

I find myself sharing this tip every week. When your Mac has been used for several days/weeks, the consistent opening and closing of applications chip away at your available memory (RAM). Soon you will be out of what is referred to as “contiguous memory”, and the machine will start using the much slower virtual memory [...]