Ask Dave Taylor

I’ve been a Mac user since about 1985, starting with a little 512K Mac that was portable, self-contained, and not much more than a toy. But I loved it, and I have owned a never-ending parade of Macintosh since then, upgrading about every twelve months or so. Man, that’s a lot of hardware!
All along, however, [...]

I just got a fancy new cellphone from Verizon, a Motorola RAZR V3c, and was darn frustrated to find that it wouldn’t work out of the box with Mac OS X, either via USB cable or bluetooth. Apparently, it’s just too new for the OS to know about. Blech. Meanwhile, though, I spent hours [...]

While interoperability between Mac and Windows systems has come a long way in the last decade, and it’s rare to have Mac users wishing they were using a Windows system so things wouldn’t be messed up on transfer, there are occasional hiccups and glitches that can prove frustrating problems, particularly with email applications. A reader [...]

You’ve had it happen to you, I’m sure: the insistent warning message from the Software Update utility indicating that there’s a new version of an Apple program available for download, a program that you don’t use, and probably didn’t even know you had installed on your computer! You could just accept the update, but [...]

Much fanfare surrounded the release of Dashboard, a new feature in Mac OS X Tiger’s operating system, since picked up and mimicked by Yahoo, Microsoft, and many other companies. But while Dashboard is fun and lightweight, it’s not necessarily the easiest environment to work with, as a recent query from a reader in India attests. [...]

Hello, I’m using a Linksys WRT54GS Router to connect my G4 Mac PowerBook w/ OS X 10.4.2 to the Web, and it’s working great. However, I created a closed WPA network internally with Airport and now I can’t seem to change the security setting without losing that WPA signal. This WPA network is all the [...]

I don’t know how, but my boot target drive recently changed which I fixed under system preferences. However, everytime I boot my machine now Safari opens. How do I stop this?
It’s strange that your boot drive randomly changed, without question, but I’m suspecting that you started up at one point and the standard hard disk [...]

Hi, Dave. I’m at a conference and have just been told by a fellow attendee that there’s an IRC channel for us attendees to chat in while we’re here. But I’m on a Mac and have absolutely no clue what IRC is and whether it works with my various instant message clients, so I don’t [...]

How do I change the program associated with specific file types and the icons associated with specific file types? For example, I want to change all my PDF icons…
There are two parts to this question, so let’s tackle the harder one first. To actually change the icon associated with a specific file type, you [...]

My partner’s 12inch Apple iBook no longer sleeps when she puts the lid down. I’ve never had to fix this kind of problem and hope you can help, hence the email!
You’re not the first person to encounter this sort of problem with a laptop, but have faith, there are a number of standard paths you [...]

I’m new to Mac, last Apple I owned was a IIe in the 80’s. This question is related to your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger book, page 41 “Changing the Command Prompt. In this section you give the following command for changing the prompt:
      PS1= “? “
I [...]

Upon attempting a Software Update, I was told I didn’t have enough memory and was to remove unnecessary items from my Start Up Disk, I seem to have my HD in my Start Up Disk (is that normal?).
I simply restarted my machine to find that there was a flashing square box with a globe [...]

I love dashboard widgets! I access them by moving my cursor to the bottom left corner of my screen. Since I use my laptop for school, it would benefit me to have a third desktop layer besides the ones presented by the regular desktop and the widgets layer. Is there a way [...]

I wrote all of my web site’s code using SimpleText in MacOS 9. Recently I made the step up to OS X and I’ve transferred all of my data from my old G-4 to the new system. When I open the html pages in TextEdit on OS X I am unable [...]

I’ve been running Mac OS X Tiger for a while now, and when I encounter Web sites that have RSS feeds available, I’ve noticed that a blue “RSS” graphic appears in the address bar, but I haven’t figured out how to actually subscribe to RSS feeds and use Safari as an RSS / syndication reader.
While [...]

I am currently living with my Dad, have about 1700 songs in iTunes and don’t want to lose them when I move to my Mother’s house! How could I somehow transfer the songs to my computer at my Mom’s house? Is there a way where I could burn the data to a CD [...]

I’m running iTunes v 4.9 on my Mac (running OS X 10.2.8). I screwed up somehow and deleted my old music library trying to fix a different problem. I learned my lesson on that. I have on older v 1.5 iPod with all my music on it. Can I transfer those songs into my library?

I’ve fallen in love with Dashboard on my new Mac OS X Tiger system, but I hate having to type f12 to get them to show up. Is it possible to have my dashboard widgets show up on my regular desktop?

Mail is set as the default email program on our Mac, so when we happen to click on an email link in anything (say, our browser), the Mail app automatically opens up and creates an email message. We don’t want that, we’d like to be able to designate our chosen email apps (I use Thunderbird, [...]

I am new to the Mac world and I have started with Tiger. When I use the textedit program to type HTML code and save it as an HTML document all I see is the code when I open the file in any of the browsers that I use. Unlike Notepad in Window, why can’t [...]