Apple Tips, Help & Tech Blog
Practical Apple tips, troubleshooting advice and the occasional bit of technology nonsense from Dan LaRocque and Robert Van De Weghe at Up Your Media.
If you’re looking for something specific, use the directory below to jump straight to one of our current articles. The newest posts are also shown below.
Browse Our Apple & Tech Articles
Back Up Your Hard Drive With Time Machine
Get Some Peace Without Missing What Matters
How To Clear Your Browser Caches and Cookies
How to Deactivate Your Facebook Account, and Whatever Happened to Pirate?
How to Record Your Mac Screen
Memory (RAM) vs Storage Capacity
Passwords, Passkeys and Security for Your Mac
Understanding System Settings on Your Mac
Up Your Media’s Custom iPhone Ringtones
Use iPhone Reader View to Get Straight To The Content
Using Multiple Photos Libraries On Your Mac
What’s Inside Your Mac? The Main Parts Explained
Your Mac Says Your Startup Disk Is Almost Full. Now What?
Latest Posts
Up Your Media’s Custom iPhone Ringtones
I’ve always liked assigning custom ringtones and text tones to particular people on my iPhone. Sometimes it’s useful. Sometimes it’s because a certain sound fits somebody’s personality so perfectly that not using it would feel like a missed opportunity. This page has…
10 Simple Ways to Keep Your Mac Secure
Macs have strong security built in, but that doesn’t mean they take care of everything automatically. A few basic habits can make a big difference in protecting your files, accounts and personal information. Here are ten practical things every Mac user should…
Using Multiple Photos Libraries On Your Mac
I regularly see Photos libraries with tens of thousands of pictures in them. That’s not necessarily a problem anymore, especially on a newer Mac, but it can still become an organizational mess surprisingly quickly. Some people are perfectly happy keeping everything in…
Use iPhone Reader View to Get Straight To The Content
I read a lot of articles on my iPhone. Some come from social media, some from news sites, and some get sent to me by friends or clients. The problem is that a perfectly good article can sometimes be buried under so…
How To Clear Your Browser Caches and Cookies
If a website won’t load properly, keeps showing old information, won’t let you sign in, or is simply behaving strangely, clearing your browser’s cache and cookies is often an easy fix. Your browser stores temporary website files to make pages load faster.…
What’s Inside Your Mac? The Main Parts Explained
I often get asked some version of this question: “What exactly am I paying for when I buy a Mac?” It’s a fair question. Apple gives you a list of specifications involving chips, memory, storage and graphics, and unless you spend your…
Memory (RAM) vs Storage Capacity
Memory vs Storage: What’s the Difference on a Mac? One of the most common questions I get from Mac users is some version of this: “Do I need more memory, or do I need more storage?” It’s an easy thing to mix…
Understanding System Settings on Your Mac
If you’ve used a Mac for a while, you may remember something called System Preferences. Apple renamed it System Settings and redesigned the layout to make it more consistent with iPhone and iPad. The names and locations of some controls have changed,…
How to Deactivate Your Facebook Account, and Whatever Happened to Pirate?
Facebook has changed a lot over the years. The menus have moved, the settings have moved, the privacy controls have moved, and occasionally I suspect Facebook itself isn’t entirely sure where it put everything. But two things are still worth knowing: how…
Your Mac Says Your Startup Disk Is Almost Full. Now What?
If your Mac warns that your startup disk is almost full, don’t panic. It simply means your Mac is running low on available storage space, and that can slow things down, cause apps to misbehave, and make macOS updates difficult to install.…