Tips

If your kid is using an iPhone, iPod, or iPad to blast music at unsafe levels, you should consider setting a limit on their maximum volume. I mean, they'll hate you for it -- but they'll also hate having tinnitus in their 20s, right?

In the above video, I'll walk you through the steps of lowering the maximum volume limit on any iOS device, as well as locking that setting in place using a password of your choosing.

If the video doesn't appear above, try going directly to the video on CNET TV or pay a … Read more

If you are a Safari user then you might be familiar with the program's Bookmarks bar, where you can save links to individual Web pages, or group them as collections in folders.

You can also use it to save any other location you can link to through Safari's address bar, including files and folders on the system.

To do this, simply drag a file to the address bar, and you should see a bookmark to it as you would any other file. You can also load some files such as images directly into Safari by dropping them on … Read more

While deleting files in OS X simply involves moving them to the trash and emptying it, this routine does not remove the data of these items, but instead only clears the directory entry for them. The content of the items is kept on disk with the system having no way to access it; as a result, there is potential for the content to be scanned and recovered by data recovery tools.

To prevent this from happening, you can use secure-erase features in OS X, one of which is to securely delete the files in the Finder by choosing this option … Read more

OS X supports the option to read NTFS-formatted drives, but has not supported writing to these drives. Therefore, the use of a third-party driver such as Paragon NTFS or Tuxera NTFS has been required for those seeking full NTFS support; however, OS X does support writing to NTFS, but this feature is just not enabled by default.

To enable this feature, you have to do so on a per-volume basis, by editing the system's hidden fstab file to adjust the way the drive is automatically handled when attached and mounted.

First ensure that your NTFS drive has a simple … Read more

Apple's autosave and resume features are convenient for maintaining your workflow, even when you do not save documents. So in a program like Pages, for example, you could work on a document and simply quit the program or restart your computer, and the next time the program opens, your documents will be reopened with the changes to them preserved.

While convenient, especially in the event of a crash, hang, or power outage, this feature does have one potential drawback: it could reveal some personal or otherwise private information at inopportune times.

You can avoid this by quitting programs with … Read more

Apple's Spotlight search technology is a quick way to find files, applications, contacts, and numerous other items on your system, but there are times when you might like to keep some things from being indexed and included in search results.

For example, if you have a collection of outdated program versions in a folder called "past versions," you might wish to keep Spotlight from showing them all, and only have it locate the most recent one that you use. This might also be true for temporary files you have on your system, such as those in the … Read more

If you regularly script tasks in the Terminal, you might find at times that handling windows can be a burden. While an unused Terminal window can quickly be closed by pressing Command-W or clicking the red button at the top of the window, if you run numerous scripts then you may be left with a number of windows to close.

One way you can better manage these windows is to change the default Terminal behavior for when a terminal shell exits. By default, the Terminal will keep the window open and display the text "[process completed]," leaving you … Read more

When you use your new Mac for the first time, the fresh OS installation and new configuration will have the responsiveness and speed that's intended by Apple. For the most part, this should continue throughout the life of the system. However, as with any system, there are times when you may experience slowdowns.

These can happen either from running low on resources like RAM or hard drive space, from software incompatibilities, or even from errors with your system.

While you can tackle these problems if they arise, there are several things you can do to keep your system running … Read more

A picture being worth a thousand words makes screenshots often the most convenient method for conveying instructions to people. While Apple has a number of screenshot options built into OS X, these often result in intermediary files that can clutter up your computer if you frequently use them.

For example, if you press the classic Shift-Command-3 shortcut to take a screenshot, the image file will be saved to your desktop, where you can open it, crop, and otherwise edit it before sending it to your recipient. With this method, though, you are left with the file on your desktop that … Read more