Reader Patti recently submitted a question asking how to find when her iMac was built. This question is often related to figuring out if your Mac is still under warranty. The first step is to find your Mac’s serial number.
In this video I show you how to find the serial number in System Profiler. You can then enter (or, hopefully, paste) the serial number into these web pages. [continue reading…]
Inside: Printing three different ways and annotating your printouts (and PDFs)
I got a little carried away this week.
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Sometimes you’d just love to add some comments to a page you are about to print. Or maybe you want to highlight an important section by highlighting the text or putting an oval or rectangle around it. The Preview application makes this really easy with its Annotation Toolbar.
In this video I show you how easy it is to add these to your printouts:
In the previous video I showed you how to make nice text printouts using Safari Reader. But what if you want more than just the text?
Well, if you are ready to take the leap into Safari Extensions then I’ve found a great one that will let you pick and choose which parts of a web page you want to print. It’s called PrintPlus. You will need to install it but Apple makes it incredibly easy to install Safari Extensions.
Using PrintPlus is a piece of cake. How’s this for simple: [continue reading…]
In the previous video on how to preview a printout and print selected pages, we saw how the Preview application is a handy tool for finding which pages of a printout have the part you want. That method works regardless of which web browser you use.
But Safari users have another tool at their disposal that can help make absolutely gorgeous text printouts. It won’t help if you also want to also print out images or want to capture the page design. If you want to do that, you need to read and watch How to print selected parts of web pages with PrintPlus.
But for printing just the text of a web page, I think using Safari’s “Reader” feature is best. In this video I show you how to use Safari Reader to make beautiful text printouts. It even gives you some control over the size of the type. [continue reading…]
Computers were supposed to let us save lots of paper but they’ve actually made it easier to use much more. Sometimes you just want to read or save a web page on paper. But you don’t need to let a poorly designed web page waste a bunch of paper.
Unfortunately some web pages look terrible when you print them. A graphic header and navigation buttons might look nice on the screen but, if not designed for printing, they often get strewn across pages of paper. And while you might like skimming through other readers’ comments on a popular article, if you print them out you might need to refill your paper tray.
If you want to print just part of a web page, then you’re going to need to figure out which pages that part is going to show up on and how to tell your Mac that you only want to print those pages.
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Inside: *Really* quitting an application, email forwarding etiquette, zooming your display or a window
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It could be advancing age, but more and more I’m feeling the need to zoom in to see things better on my Mac display. It’s not the display’s fault. They’re getting better and better, packing in more and more pixels for gorgeous, crisp photos, artwork, and text. But that often means that, either by design or accident, letters and images on the screen get smaller and smaller.
My eyes grow weary from more and more time in front of the computer and research that shows our backs are better off if we lean way back in our chairs, putting the display even further from my eyes.
Fortunately, the Mac offers a few ways to zoom, either your whole display or just a window. In this video I show you a few of those ways.
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A reader from Montrose, CA said that he gets lots of emails that often have pages of annoying email forwarding history on top. That’s what happens when someone forwards an email and leaves the previous sender’s recipient list on top of the message. The next person does the same thing when they forward it on to their list of friends, and so on, and so on. Not only does this make for an ugly, hard-to-read email, but it exposes all those people’s email addresses to a bunch of strangers.
If that’s not enough to convince you not to do it, then realize that it is considered extremely tacky, and many of us quickly hit “delete” when we see that mess. If you really wanted your recipients to read the email, why not make it easy on them and set a good example at the same time.
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Reader Linda submitted a question a few days ago that reminded me that I’ve noticed many people think that they can quit an application by clicking the little red X button 
in the upper left of a window. When I switched to a Mac a few years ago I thought the same thing since Microsoft Windows has a similar button that does quit the application.
On the Mac, the red X button does not quit the application, it just closes that window. The application is still running, possibly with no open windows. Often this won’t cause you a problem but in Linda’s case it did. She was trying to update her version of Safari and the update installer asked her to quit Safari so it could continue. She thought she had since she’d clicked the red X button and there were no Safari windows open.
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