Clearing Safari’s Auto Fill-In

One of the many great features of Safari is the Auto-Fill function. You begin typing and it fills in the rest. This is helpful for forms with your name and address, but what about all of those sites you’ve googled that automatically re-appear every time you search?

You can clear out all or some of the auto-fill items.

1. Under the Safari menu choose Preferences.

2. Click on the Auto-Fill icon. Your personal information is pulled in from your Address Book card and everything else is stored under “other forms.”

3. Click Edit next to Other forms to see a list of all the websites with stored information. To clear out the fill-in information, click on the site and click Remove or choose to Remove All.

4. For example, to clear out the google search fill-ins, click on google.com in the list and click Remove.

The next time you search, nothing will automatically fill in but it will begin remembering your new entries.

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Setting Your Mac to Automatically Turn On and Off

Turning your Mac on and off several times in a day is not very energy efficient. But it’s good housekeeping to restart your Mac regularly. Restarting takes care of all kinds of behind the scenes file maintenance to keep your Mac working efficiently.

Many of my clients forget to do this and so here’s a way to schedule a daily or weekly shutdown and start up. This is also great if you turn off your computer every night and don’t like waiting for it to start up in the morning.

1. Under the Apple menu, choose System Preferences

2. Click on the Energy Saver icon

3. In the bottom right corner, click on Schedule

4. Put a check next to Start or wake up and choose your preference for how often from the pulldown menu.

5. Set the time.

6. On the next line, choose Shut Down from the pull down menu and set those preferences.

7. Click OK, close your System Preferences.

Restarting will perform the necessary housekeeping duties. Shutdown will also save energy and even give the computer a chance to fully cool down.

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Skype Security Preferences

It used to be that long distance phone calls were the only way to stay in touch with faraway family and friends.

Now there’s Apple FaceTime and iChat for video chatting with Macs and iPhones and iPod2 users and also Skype, which works with anyone on any computer.

As with any program where you communicate with the world, it’s important to check your privacy settings and ensure the safest, most secure situation.

Today’s tip offers some Skype Security Settings to keep your online identity safe and secure.

When you first sign up for your Skype account, you have to fill in your name, email address.

Only fill in the required information, noted by an asterisk. You do NOT need to share your address, sex, birthday or anything else that doesn’t have an asterisk.

Once your account is set up, it’s important to set your Privacy Preferences.

1. From the Skype menu, choose Preferences.

2. Click on the Privacy icon.

3. I recommend changing all of the choices to ONLY SHARE INFO with people on your contacts list.

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Changing How You Choose Colors

You can apply colors to text in email, your calendars in iCal, as well as within your other programs.

When you click on the Colors icon, a palette of colors appears.

But did you know you can change how you choose your colors?

Across the top of the Colors window are five icons, for the five different ways to view colors.

The furthest left icon is for the Color Wheel. You can slide the vertical scroll bar up and down to adjust the intensity of color.

The second icon is for the Color Sliders that allow you to adjust the values of a color, adding and removing red, greed and blue until you get the desired color.

The middle icon allows you to choose colors by Palette.

The fourth icon shows you all of the colors as a Spectrum.

The icon to the far right is the simplest way to choose color–from a box of Crayons. The Crayon Box is also the easiest way to get back to using black.

BONUS:

You can also create and save your own colors.

Try this:

1. Go to the Color Wheel and click to choose a color.

2. Slide the scroll bar to get the perfect intensity.

3. The color chosen appears in the rectangular box at the top.

4. Drag the color from that box to one of the small squares at the bottom of the window and that color will now be available in every color tool and in every application that allows you to use colors.