Mac Zen - expert Apple tech support

10/21/2019

I know some of you use NordVPN. It may be worth changing your login password, and be mindful of whether you have used that email/password combination elsewhere.

NordVPN, a virtual private network provider that promises to “protect your privacy online,” has confirmed it was hacked. The admission comes following rumors that the company had been breached. It first emerged that NordVPN had an expired internal private keys exposed, potentially allow…

08/27/2019

Because stats are fun, and YouTube is source-a-plenty…

There's definitely no shortage of interesting YouTube stats out there. We've collated the most up-to-date, most interesting facts we could find.

08/08/2019

“Hey Siri Call Ayten Rubby-Knee” or not…Teach Siri to pronounce names correctly.

This step by step guide with images covers how to get Siri to say names right (both others' and yours) on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

08/08/2019

Aside from being an exceptional online backup platform, Backblaze publishes these reports based on the thousands of hard drives they turn over every year.

If you’ve ever heard me gripe about Seagate—and why I only use Western Digital drives (they own the HGST brand referenced in the report)—this is why. Seagate has had the worst track record for failures over the years.

Since LaCie was bought by Seagate, I’ve also avoid LaCie drives. Even before that LaCie exclusively used Seagate internally.

Choose your backup drives carefully.

This review looks at the Q2 2019 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers.

07/27/2019

I would prefer that Macworld didn’t have to rely on ads, buts sadly such is the world of publishing these days.

Great tips. My favourite is command + ~ (tilde) that allows you to cycle through windows within an app.

Want to take screenshots or find files faster? There’s a shortcut for that—and many other things.

07/27/2019

I think the important part to remember about this that the data is anonymous, and not—as Apple asserts—linked to any Apple ID. The recordings are quality assurance clips long after the Siri request had been processed for the user, but I can understand why some people might be concerned about it.

Apple, like Amazon and Google, has staff that sometimes hear private data when trying to improve its voice assistant.

07/24/2019

This is cool. Now you don’t need to restore from an iCloud or iTunes backup when you’re setting up a new device.

With iOS 12.4 or later, there’s a new iPhone set up option. You can now perform a local iPhone data migration when setting up your new iPhone. As part of Quick Start, you can now Transfer Your Data directly, without requiring the use iCloud or an iTunes backup. The iPhone defaults to using local W...

07/24/2019

To all you non-Mac VLC users out there. This looks important.

Because of its free and open-source nature, VLC is one of, if not the most popular cross-platform media player in the world. Unfortunately, a newfound and potentially very serious security flaw discovered in VLC means you might want to uninstall it until the folks at the VideoLAN Project can patch t...

12/30/2018

If you're thinking of succumbing to Apple's insistence towards installing Mojave, now's a good time. I walkways like to hold off until at least the new year, before doing it on my own machines.

Make sure you read Apple's support page for how to upgrade to the latest macOS. There's lots of things in there that many done't do.

Learn how to download and install macOS Mojave, the latest version of the Mac operating system.

12/18/2018

Lots have people have been running into issues with Safari this last week, check your updates—you may have a fix waiting to be installed.

Apple this week released iTunes 12.8.1 for OS X Yosemite up to macOS High Sierra. The minor update resolves an issue that prevented iTunes from...

12/10/2018

I’ve talked about how we’re a transitional generation for the digital dimension. To our kids there will be very few boundaries. For them, the digital layer is very much a tangible dimension. This article is a good read for those ready to face the fact that we are already deeply integrated into our technology, and that it is on the way into us. Do we extend into it, or does it extend into us?

As our online existences become less distinct from ‘real life’, experts raise concern about the growing power of big tech

12/10/2018

A good reminder of why it’s worth doing an audit on your notifications