Troubleshooting

If you are going to sell, return, or give away a Mac, you almost certainly want to factory reset the computer first. Performing a factory reset on a Mac will erase all data on the Mac, and return it to a clean slate as if the computer were brand new, without any data or personal … Read More

Apple Watch users may occasionally see a black screen with a squiggly line that looks like a charging cable and lightning bolt, and when this screen is active you will find Apple Watch is not usable. You may run into this screen after an Apple Watch has not been in use for a while, and … Read More

Using Microsoft Edge as the default browser on MacOS has been a mostly positive experience, for speed, utility, access to GPT-4, and other neat features. But it’s also not without some degree of confusion, like wondering what on earth the number badge icon on the Edge icon in the Mac Dock means. One key component … Read More

Some iPhone users may find that the onscreen keyboard occasionally gets stuck on screen and covers buttons or other elements on the the screen, preventing interaction with the iPhone and preventing the dismissal of the iPhone keyboard. This can happen for a variety of reasons, whether in Messages, Whatsapp, Instagram, FaceBook, Mail, and basically any … Read More

File types and file formats can be a bit of a mystery, especially when you stumble into a file that you don’t necessarily recognize. One such case that you may come across is a file that has a .pxm file extension, and if you haven’t heard of a PXM file before you understandably might be … Read More

Some Apple Watch users have experienced a situation where their Apple Watch seems to respond to phantom touches, which some users have come to call ghost touches. These false touches can happen in a variety of different situations, from the Apple Watch simply being on your wrist and doing nothing out of the ordinary, to … Read More

Uninstalling and removing apps is a necessary task on any computer, and the Mac is no exception. One of the benefits of MacOS is that it makes uninstalling applications pretty easy, and there are several ways to go about participating in the removal of apps from your Mac computer. One of the handiest ways to … Read More

When you connect an iPhone or iPad to a Mac or Windows PC, you will see a request on the device to “Trust this computer?” with an option to ‘Trust’ or “Don’t Trust’. This is a security feature that is part of iOS and iPadOS to ensure that you approve of a device connection to … Read More

If you’re at the command line and perhaps interacting with Homebrew, Git, or similar, you may run into an error message that says something like the following “warning: unable to access /Users/Name/.config/git/attributes” : Permission denied”. This error message sounds more alarming than it is in most cases, but regardless, you likely want to fix the … Read More

If you have an Apple Watch, or you just bought an Apple Watch, you may occasionally run into a situation where the Apple Watch displays a squiggly line charging cable on the screen, sometimes with a little lightning bolt icon as well. Some people have even referred to this screen as the ‘green snake screen’ … Read More

Some Mac users have discovered a process named “NewsToday2” running on their Mac, typically found after they’ve noticed a slowdown on their machine, or if they’re browsing through active processes running in MacOS. We’re going to dive into the NewsToday2 process in MacOS, discuss what it is, and show you how to stop it from … Read More

If you use your iPhone as an alarm clock, as many iPhone owners do, you may have discovered that if the iPhone alarm is sounding and ringing continuously on it’s own, eventually the iPhone alarm turns itself off automatically. While this may be confusing if you’re used to old analog alarm clocks that will ring … Read More

A process named fileproviderd may be discovered by some Mac users, usually seen in Activity Monitor when someone has discovered that their Mac feels like it’s running slower than usual. There, fileproviverd may be using high amounts of CPU, and by using heavy system resources, the Mac slows down.

Universal Control is one of the most useful features available for Mac users who have multiple Macs and iPads that they’d like to control with a single mouse and keyboard, it works really well and offers a great experience once it’s setup and working. But, like so many other recent changes to the Mac that … Read More

Some Mac users are discovering that USB-C hubs and external monitors are no longer working with their Mac after updating to macOS Sonoma 14.4. This issue can apparently impact anything connected to the USB Hub as well, leaving the USB hub devices undetected by the Mac, including keyboards, mice, external displays, SD card readers, cameras, … Read More

WeatherWidget is a process you may encounter on a Mac when looking through Activity Monitor or a system stats app, a task that many advanced Mac users find themselves doing if they notice their Mac performance is slowing down. The reason, of course, is that Activity Monitor (or similar) will show you what processes are … Read More

iPad may display a warning message on the screen if it gets too hot, becoming unusable until the iPad cools down again. This happens if the iPad is overheating, and there are various reasons this can happen. The specific message on screen is “Temperature – iPad needs to cool down before you can use it.” … Read More

Rarely, a Mac can experience a memory leak which causes MacOS to run out of memory. When this happens, it’s fairly obvious because not only does the Mac become unresponsive, but you see an error message on the screen that says “Your system has run out of application memory. To avoid problems with your computer, … Read More