Plan for the Future by Establishing a Legacy Contact

Have you heard the expression “hit by a bus”? It’s a somewhat macabre attempt to inject a little levity into planning for the unthinkable event of dying without warning. No one expects to be hit by a bus, but people do die unexpectedly in all sorts of ways. That’s terrible, of course, but it’s also […]

Should You Use Apple’s New Password Manager in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey?

Should You Use Apple’s New Password Manager in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey?

We continually recommend that every Apple user rely on a password manager like 1Password or LastPass for creating, managing, and entering passwords securely. What we haven’t encouraged as heavily is relying on Apple’s built-in password management features. Although they’re free, they’ve been too basic and hard to use over the years, relying largely on an […]

Print Mailing Labels for Your Holiday Cards with Apple’s Contacts App

If mailing your holiday cards (which you designed in Photos with a plug-in like Motif or Mimeo Photos, right?) is made harder by having to write addresses on envelopes, you can skip the handwriting step this year. Although many people don’t realize this, it’s easy to print mailing labels on standard label stock using the […]

Use Visual Look Up in Photos in iOS 15 to Identify Plants, Pets, and More

Have you ever wanted to identify a plant, flower, or pet breed, or find out what that famous painting is called? Us too. In iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, Apple added a new AI-driven feature called Visual Look Up that provides more information about photos of plants, flowers, pets, books, artworks, and landmarks. When you’re […]

Live Text Digitizes Text in Photos in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey

Live Text Digitizes Text in Photos in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey

The most magical feature of Apple’s latest crop of operating systems—iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey—may be Live Text. You’re probably familiar with the concept of optical character recognition (OCR), which turns all the text on a scanned page into normal text you can select, copy, and edit. Live Text does exactly that […]

How to Take the Annoyance Out of Your Key Passwords and Passcodes

typing password into a computer

We constantly say, “Use a password manager!” for good reason. Password managers make it easy to generate, store, and enter strong passwords. You don’t have to decide whether or not your password is strong or weak, remember it, and type it accurately every time you log in to a website. Seriously, just get 1Password or […]

Two Important Tips for External Storage Devices

external hard drives virtua computers apple consulting

It’s tempting to think that most external storage devices—whether simple hard drives or more complicated network-attached storage (NAS) units—are relatively similar because they all do roughly the same thing. However, a recent problem with older Western Digital My Book Live NAS devices highlighted that there can be large differences. In that case, hackers figured out […]

Learn How to Paste Text So It Matches the Surrounding Text

Sometimes, when copying text from a web page, PDF, or word processing document, macOS will include the formatting from your source, leaving the words in an undesirable font/size/color. In actuality, you probably wanted it to match the styling of the text where you pasted it. Fortunately, most Mac apps have a quick trick to fix [...]