Computers and hardware

Regardless of whether you purchase it new, refurbished, or used, your Mac is likely a sizable investment that you might wish to keep running for as long as possible, not only because of the cost factor but also because of the time and effort it would take to migrate your data and workflow to a new system (even though Apple has made the latter quite easy if you have proper backups).

There are many ways your Mac can get damaged, become outdated, or otherwise experience greater wear and tear from use that can shorten its lifespan. In most cases these … Read more

Commercial MP3s and other digital music files provide a wealth of information about the songs in addition to the audio-playback itself. This metadata makes it easy to display the track name, artist, album, and other facts about the songs in your playback device or program.

When you use an application such as the free Audacity audio-editing utility to convert music from LPs, cassettes, or another analog source, the only metadata accompanying the tracks is whatever information you provide when you create the digital file. There's the rub.

In July 2011 I described how to use Audacity to convert LPs and audio cassettes to digital. … Read more

Editors' note: This post is part of an ongoing series. For the other parts, check out the related stories.

Wi-Fi and Internet are two very different things.

With the popularity of wireless networking, the term Wi-Fi is often synonymous with access to the Internet. In fact, our seasoned editor Scott Stein compared how fast the new iPhone 5's 4G LTE Internet speed was with his "home Wi-Fi," which is a skewed comparison at best. To be fair, most of us use "Wi-Fi" as a shortcut to mean our home broadband Internet connection, and Scott just … Read more

Legal forms, letters, and other documents are progressively migrating to digital media; however, the need for applying a signature to them is often still a requirement. While you can print these forms out, sign them and then fax, scan, or e-mail them after signing, another option is to apply a digitally saved version of your signature.

While one approach to doing this is to scan a document containing your signature and then crop it out and paste it in-line with your form, this requires that you keep the image of your signature readily available, and unless you have used transparencies, … Read more

Some of the applications in Microsoft's Office 2013 suite launch with a start screen by default. On the left side of the start screen is a list of recent documents and on the right side, a list of templates. It's a useful feature, but if you prefer, you can bypass the start screen and go right to the edit screens of those Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Here's how:

From within the main edit screen, go to File > Options or use the keyboard shortcut, ALT+F, T. Under the General Options tab, go to Startup options … Read more

Launching iTunes, the App Store app, or the Mac App Store just to find an app, copy its direct link, and then send it to someone is a process we all accept. Sure, it doesn't take up too much time, but if you're sharing apps on a regular basis, the entire process adds up. But there's a quicker, easier way to share an App Store link with your fellow iOS and Mac users.

During the Super Bowl, the AppStore.com URL shortener made its official debut when the "Star Trek: Into Darkness" commercial used AppStore.com/StarTrekApp … Read more

Apple's Preview program in OS X is a very convenient tool for quickly editing image and PDF files. It supports a number of options for annotating images and adjusting colors, cropping, and otherwise editing them, it can also be used to quickly convert an image to another format.

Preview supports reading most common image format types, and likewise allows you to export them to these same types, so even if Preview is not set to be your default program for handling images, you can still use it to quickly make an image conversion.

To do this, right-click the image … Read more

Judging by the genres represented in my iTunes library, I listen to a wide variety of music, from alternative, blues, and country to R&B, reggae, and rock, with a bit of electronica/dance, hip-hop/rap, and jazz in between. I don't always adjust iTunes's equalizer, but when I do, I find it helps. For the last year or so, however, I've switched from using iTunes to Spotify for the majority of my listening pleasure. I love Spotify's seemingly limitless library and its ability to load in a fraction of the time it takes iTunes, … Read more

In Windows 8, Microsoft quietly removed a useful networking feature: ad-hoc networks.

In Windows 7 (and previous OSes), the tool could turn your PC into a Wi-Fi hot spot, allowing it to share its Ethernet or other Internet connection with other devices by broadcasting its own network.

So, if you paid for Internet access at a cafe, or you're at work, and want to share your PC's Internet with your phone or tablet, this feature would let you do that.

It is very possible to do this in Windows 8, but the built-in method requires fiddling with the … Read more