Tag: how to

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Average Joe's Tips

How To: Securely Delete Your Trash

When you have private content that you do not want people to ever be able to access, Secure Empty Trash is the best way to do it. There are two ways to do it. The first way is to be in Finder, then click on the Finder menu option in the top left, and scroll down to Secure Trash Empty. The next way to do this is by again going to the top left Finder menu option, then selecting preferences. After that go into the Advanced section of the newly opened window, and select the box next to Empty Trash Securely. The way this works compared to just regularly deleting your trash is that it will immediately write over the file other than doing it over time.

Thanks to: OSXdaily for this great tip.

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Average Joe's Tips

How To: Check Your Computers Log In Times

Checking your login times are very helpful in many way. For example, if you feel like someone maybe a friend or family member has been snooping around on your computer, you can check to see if someone logged in and at what time it occurred. Another way this is helpful is if you want to see how often you use your computer. To do this just go and open Console. To open your Console application go into your Application folder, then into your Utilities Folder. After that is open, you will see your activity on your computer and type in “wake” to see logins. On the very left you will be able to see the time to check and see when someone logged in. By looking at the time you will be able to compare and see if you remember logging in at the time or not before blaming someone for snooping around on your computer.

Thanks to : OSXdaily.com for this great tip!

 

Stay connected at my new twitter handle to stay updated 24/7 @TRMGaveragejoes and @realmacgenius What do youthink? Let us know in the comment section.

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Customizing Your Mac’s Trackpad

Tapping the track pad in order to click has become a very popular way for selecting application or texts when using a Macintosh. Its popularity comes from the convinces factor of not having to press down completely on the trackpad every time. However, tap to click tends to be annoying for new users, who may find themselves selecting texts or applications when not desired. Other than tap to click, the trackpad has many other potential capabilities like secondary click, zooming, rotating, and a multitude of gestures. To find these trackpad customizations locate your System Preferences application, then open the Trackpad pane under Hardware. From there you are free to explore. Bellow is a quick overview of my most commonly used trackpad click and hand gestures.

Tap to Click

As described above, tap to click gives the user the connivence of being able to tap their trackpad (instead of pressing down to select) in order to select text or apps.

Secondary Click

This allows the user the ability to secondary click (a.k.a. right click), instead of pressing control + click.

Zoom and Rotate

Found in the Scroll & Zoom section, zoom and rotate is a quick way to zoom into or rotate photos in selected applications like iPhoto.

Swipe Between Apps

In my opinion this is the best gesture ever created. Although it is simple this gesture enables you to four finger swipe between your desktop screens.

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Average Joe's Tips

How To: Save Web Pages/ Reading Lists in Safari

If you are like me then you keep tabs open and use them as a list. But this leads to clutter, confusion, and very slow internet. Thank goodness for Safari, because it allows you to save your web pages very neatly and uncluttered. Saving the web page is very easy, to do this just scroll up to Bookmarks. Then click on Add to Reading List. To view your list go to View and select Show Reading List.Then on the left side of Safari will apear the web pages you have saved. When clicking on one of your Reading List items it will automatically load the web page. Also to delete an item just scroll to the top right of the pane. This has tremendously helped me keep keep my computer uncluttered and I hope it helps you.

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Average Joe's Tips

How To: Restart Finder

 

You might be asking yourself why do I need to quit Finder? Well a reason that you might need to quit Finder is becasue you are trasfering a file or downloading a file and it freezes, so instead of shutting down your computer you can restart Finder. Restarting Finder is easy and there are multiple ways to do it. The first way to restart Finder is to force quit it by clicking  Command + Option + Escape.  The second way to restart Finder is by typing “killall Finder” into your terminal. This kills Finder which will then relaunch. Usually when you quit finder it will relaunch by itself, but not always, so if it dosen’t just type in “open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app.” For those of you who may be new to Macs Finder is essentially Windows Explorer for the Mac. It allows you to manage files, disks, networks, and applications.

Stay connected at my new twitter handle to stay updated 24/7 @TRMGaveragejoes and @realmacgenius

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