Computers and hardware

To help identify your user account from others who use your system, OS X assigns your account a small picture that appears in various places in the system, including the log-in window as well as in applications like Mail.

When you initially set up your account in OS X, the system will have you set up your account picture, but often people skip by this step and continue with the setup process to start using their computers quicker, leaving their accounts with the image that OS X randomly chooses for it. However, if you would like to change your account … Read more

As part of OS X, Apple provides a number of styled screensaver options for displaying photographs and images you have stored in your iTunes or Aperture libraries when you are not at your computer. These options are fun to use; however, they are quite limited in the settings they offer, as there are practically no options to customize them.

At most, you can set the screensaver to shuffle the slide order and choose a source for the photos, but you cannot change the duration of the transitions or perhaps, more importantly for some people, the time in which the screensaver … Read more

Beyond the basic arrow key navigation and space bar to start and stop song playback, there are a few other keyboard shortcuts in iTunes 11 that can be used to help you navigate its features.

Since the release of iTunes 11, a few convenient keyboard shortcuts have been revealed that offer quick ways to manage playback, navigate the windows, or otherwise deal with some of iTunes' common functions. As with most programs, various shortcuts can be found in the application's menus. However, along with these there are some hidden options that may prove convenient.

Clear play queue When playing … Read more

All Mac systems should by default have at least one administrator account for installing programs and otherwise changing the system configuration and settings. However, there may be times, when after an OS upgrade or other major system configuration change, that the administrator privileges of an account might get stripped, leaving you with no way to change a number of system settings.

This occurs quite rarely, but if it does happen, one quick but well-known and convenient trick for recovering administrative status on a system is to activate Apple's OS X setup assistant again. This assistant is generally only used … Read more

The dreaded Reply All button rang up another victim last week when a Los Angeles Police Department commander asked his officers in an e-mail to arrest someone for the illegal sale of underage bunnies so the department wouldn't receive a "black eye" in the media.

As Ana Garcia reports for NBC Southern California, the commander didn't realize his reply to an LAPD officer was also sent to the TV news producer who requested information on the lack of animal-cruelty arrests months after the department claimed to be cracking down on the practice.

Unlike many Reply All … Read more

It's exciting when your favorite musicians release new material. In the past, you may have found out about new releases on the radio or from an ad in a magazine or Web site. With iTunes (Mac and Windows), however, keeping up with the latest releases by your favorite artists is as easy as check marking two boxes. Here's how:

Step 1: In iTunes, go to the Store Menu, then select View My Apple ID.

Step 2: After you log in to your iTunes account, scroll to the Settings section at the bottom of the page.

Step 3: Under … Read more

While there are a number of media players and audio programs that can be used to play music through your Mac, iTunes being a library and content manager as well as a player that comes preinstalled on Mac systems makes it the most popular option out there. The program offers simple controls for sorting through music, generating playlists, and playing your music, but in addition there are some settings that can be used to greatly improve sound quality during playback.

The first of these is the Sound Enhancer setting in the iTunes preferences, which is activated by going to the … Read more

Last week Apple released the much anticipated, and delayed, update to iTunes. iTunes 11 has a new look and feel, as well as some new features such as "Up Next." Along with the new look and feel comes new methods of interacting and accomplishing once familiar tasks in iTunes. One of those tasks, managing downloads, isn't as obvious as it used to be.

When iTunes 11 was first released I had a few apps with updates available, so I started the downloads. In the previous version(s) of iTunes you could manage active downloads in the sidebar, … Read more

One of the new features of Windows 8 is metered wireless connections. In the past, you could run Windows programs to monitor your data usage, but they didn't do anything to actually reduce data usage. With mobile hot spot and broadband card usage on the rise and unlimited data plans nearing extinction, every kilobyte of bandwidth saved is a penny earned. Enabling metering in Windows 8 will limit your PC or tablet's data usage by preventing nonessential data transfers.

According to Microsoft's FAQ on metered connections, the effects of enabling a metered connection are: