With Storms Increasing, Protect Your Tech Gear from Damaging Power Fluctuations

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It has been a tough year for extreme weather events. While the connection between weather and technology may seem tenuous, heat waves, high winds, and lightning strikes can play havoc with all sorts of powered and networked electronic devices.

Anything that causes power fluctuations—spikes, surges, sags, brownouts, and blackouts—can hurt your tech gear. Protecting your most vulnerable devices doesn’t have to be expensive, but don’t be complacent because you plug your Mac into a cheap surge protector you’ve had since college. And note that many power strips offer no surge protection at all.

First off, why are power fluctuations problematic? There are two scenarios:

  • Too little power: Sags and brownouts are drops in voltage; a sag is a short-term dip, whereas brownouts last longer. Blackouts are complete power outages. Although they’re less damaging than surges, sags and brownouts can cause electronic devices to behave erratically or crash, and the fluctuation in voltage—particularly when coming back from an outage—can stress components. Losing power entirely will cause you to lose any unsaved work and possibly end up with document or even drive corruption.
  • Too much power: Spikes and surges are sudden, brief increases in voltage; the difference is that spikes are shorter than surges. Either way, the excessive power can degrade or damage sensitive electronic components, reducing lifespan or causing immediate failures.

The best solution to these scenarios is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Put simply, a UPS is a big battery into which you plug your Mac and other peripherals. It then plugs into a wall outlet and monitors the incoming power. If the power surges, falls below a certain threshold, or fails outright, the UPS switches the power source to its internal battery. This happens so quickly that your Mac never even notices.

If your gear is plugged into a UPS when a blackout hits, you get some time to save your work and shut down gracefully, ensuring that you don’t lose data or flirt with drive corruption. A UPS also protects against spikes and surges, filtering out the excess voltage so it can’t harm the devices plugged into it. The downsides to UPSes are that they’re an extra expense, their batteries need replacing every few years, and they take up space under your desk. For a home or small office UPS, consult Wirecutter’s recommendations. For larger installations, contact us.

If power outages are rare in your location, you may prefer to rely on a surge protector instead of a UPS. As the name implies, surge protectors filter out voltage spikes and surges so they won’t damage your gear. Surge protectors are smaller and less expensive than UPSes, and while they don’t have batteries to fail, their protection circuitry degrades over time, so they should be replaced every few years as well. Better surge protectors alert you or stop working entirely when they can no longer provide protection. Again, Wirecutter has good recommendations.

If most of your expensive tech gear is battery-powered, you could forgo even a surge protector. Outages aren’t an issue, and a MacBook or iPhone power adapter will protect against most sags, brownouts, spikes, and surges. The power adapter may incur damage, but it’s inexpensive to replace.

One final thought. No UPS, surge protector, or power adapter can protect against a direct lightning strike. Lightning is too fast and too powerful—it’s millions or even hundreds of millions of volts. Even turning your equipment off isn’t sufficient because lightning that has traveled miles through the air to hit the ground can easily jump across an open switch. If lightning strikes are common in your area, unplug your most expensive devices entirely during severe storms.

To sum up:

  • For a desktop Mac and peripherals, a UPS is a worthwhile investment if you ever suffer from power outages. Also, consider a UPS for essential networking gear—cable modems, routers, switches, and network-attached storage.
  • If power outages are extremely rare, or for equipment that doesn’t need to remain on during an outage, get a good surge protector. If it doesn’t automatically disable itself when it’s no longer effective, write the date on the bottom and replace it in a few years.
  • Although there’s no harm in doing so, it’s not necessary to plug battery-powered device chargers into a surge protector or UPS. A spike or surge may damage them, but they’ll probably sacrifice themselves to protect your gear.
  • When in doubt during severe storms, unplug your most valuable equipment to protect against a direct lightning strike.

(Featured image by iStock.com/HardRockShotz)

Social Media: How can you protect your tech gear from unexpected power fluctuations? A UPS is best in some scenarios, but a not-too-old surge protector is often sufficient.  You can also let your Apple chargers do their job without worrying about what they are plugged into.

Keep Your Apple Devices Cool in the Summer Heat

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June 2023 was the hottest month on record for the planet, at least until July 2023. Among the many ill effects of such heat are what it does to iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, and other digital devices. Excessive heat shortens the overall lifespan of lithium-ion batteries and increases the likelihood of both transient errors and hardware failures—iPhones warn you when they’re getting too hot because of these issues. Apple recommends using nearly all its devices in conditions no hotter than 95ºF/35ºC and storing them in locations that don’t exceed 113ºF/45ºC. (The exception is the adventurous Apple Watch Ultra, which can be worn in temperatures up to 130ºF/55ºC.) The most common place to avoid is a car parked in the sunshine on a hot day, which can easily exceed 130ºF within an hour and rise from there. So don’t leave your iPhone in the car during an afternoon at the beach!

(Featured image by iStock.com/Jorge Garcia Argazkiak)

Social Media: As many parts of the world struggle with record heat waves, remember that excessive heat—operating temperatures over 95ºF/35ºC—is harmful to portable electronic devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Keep your digital friends cool!

Clean Up Your Mac’s Desktop with Sort Options

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When we help someone with their Mac for the first time, we often notice that their desktop is a disaster. Icons are scattered willy-nilly and often piled on top of one another, making it hard to locate anything. For most people, the solution is easy—sort the contents of the desktop. In the Finder, choose View > Show View Options. We recommend choosing Date Modified from the Sort By pop-up menu to put your most recently used files in the upper-right, but other criteria might work better for you. If you have so many icons that they overlap, try reducing the icon size or grid spacing. You could also choose Date Modified from the Stack By pop-up menu to collect icons into stacks by date.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Liudmila Chernetska)

Social Media: We can’t help with a messy office desk, but if your Mac’s desktop is a confusing mess of randomly placed icons, using the Finder’s sort options will make it nice and orderly.

How to Protect Your Child’s Hearing from Too-Loud Headphone Audio

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Loud sounds are harmful to everyone, and many parents worry that their children are at risk for hearing loss due to too-loud headphone audio from iPhones and iPads. To lower the likelihood of this happening, Apple provides a Reduce Loud Sounds option in Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Headphone Safety for both iOS and iPadOS. Select it and set a limit, with 80–85 decibels generally considered safe. To keep kids from increasing the limit, go to Settings > Screen Time and set a Screen Time passcode. Then navigate into Content & Privacy Restrictions, enable the switch at the top, and then scroll down and set Reduce Loud Sounds to Don’t Allow. After that, the headphone output from all apps will be capped at the decibel level you specified.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Ivan Zhdanov)

Social Media: Too-loud headphone volume causes hearing loss, but Apple makes it easy to reduce loud sounds played through headphones and prevent kids from bypassing the volume limits.

Look Up Apple Device Details in Mactracker

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It’s difficult for even those who work with Apple devices daily to remember all the details. What processors were available with the 2020 iMac? What resolutions did the Apple Thunderbolt Display support? What are the differences between the fifth and sixth generations of the iPad mini? To find the answers to these and many other questions quickly, turn to Ian Page’s free Mactracker app, an indispensable repository of information about Apple products. Versions are available for the Mac and the iPhone and iPad.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Shahid Jamil)

Social Media: If you ever need to look up technical details about an Apple product, look no further than the Mactracker app, which provides specifications for every Mac, iPhone, iPad, and iPod ever made. It’s an indispensable free download.

Use the Hidden Album in Photos to Hide Private Images

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We’ve recently heard from people who have been embarrassed when they gave their iPhone to someone to swipe through some innocuous photos of a vacation, only to have the person swipe too far and end up at some NSFW (not safe for work) images. Ouch.

Embarrassment might be low on the list of problems such photos could cause. It’s not hard to imagine a male supervisor innocently sharing photos with a female employee but ending up embroiled in a sexual harassment situation if she were to stumble across the kinds of NSFW photos that regularly land politicians in hot water.

It’s safest to avoid taking NSFW photos to start, especially if the iPhone is a work-managed device. If that’s unrealistic, we recommend deleting any NSFW images from the iPhone as soon as feasible. A third option may be the best solution in the modern world—the Hidden album Apple provides in the Photos app on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. On the iPhone and iPad, you’ll find it with other albums in the Utilities collection. On the Mac, it appears in the sidebar under Photos. (If you don’t see it, you may have hidden it—we explain how to unhide it below.)

There are four essential things to know about the Hidden album:

  • You don’t add photos to the Hidden album by dragging or using an Add to Album option. Instead, you choose Hide from a contextual menu. On the iPhone and iPad, touch and hold a photo (or a set of selected photos) and tap Hide in the menu that appears. Or tap the ••• button and choose Hide. On the Mac, select one or more photos, Control-click them, and choose Hide X Photos. To remove a photo from the Hidden album, use the same approach with the Unhide command.
  • Unlike regular albums, whose photos also appear in All Photos, photos in the Hidden album won’t appear anywhere else, including in searches. That’s the point of the feature.
  • You can hide or show the Hidden album on each of your devices independently. On the iPhone and iPad, control whether it shows up in the Utilities album collection with Settings > Photos > Show Hidden Album. In the Photos app on the Mac, control whether it appears in the sidebar using View > Show/Hide Hidden Photo Album. Obviously, if you’ve hidden the Hidden album, you must show it to look inside.
  • If you use the Hidden album, we strongly recommend protecting it (and the Recently Deleted album) with Face ID or Touch ID so only those with biometric access to your device can view it. On the iPhone and iPad, enable Settings > Photos > Use Face/Touch ID (see above). On the Mac, go to Photos > Settings > General and select “Use Touch ID or password.” Again, these settings are per-device, so what you set on the iPhone won’t automatically carry over to other devices. But really, turn it on everywhere.

Overall, the Hidden album is a welcome feature, and if you have any photos that could embarrass you if someone were to stumble across them, put them in the Hidden album and turn on the biometric protection.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/AlexZabusik)

Social Media: Although it’s safest to keep all NSFW images off your iPhone entirely, if you have photos that could be embarrassing or legally troublesome if the wrong person were to stumble across them, protect them using the Hidden album in Photos.

Consider Moving Your Mac’s Dock to the Side of the Screen

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For most of us, our Mac’s screen is wider than it is tall, so longer Web pages and documents often benefit from more room from top to bottom. To maximize the amount of usable vertical space and reduce the need to scroll as much, you can set the Dock to hide automatically and appear only when you move your pointer to the bottom of the screen. A better approach is to position your Dock on the side of your screen where it’s less likely to use space you’d prefer to have available for content. Many people prefer the right side, but you can also try the left to see how it works for you. The easy way to move the Dock is to Control-click its separator bar and choose the desired side from the Position on Screen menu.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/MikeLaptev)

Social Media: The default location of the Dock on the bottom of a Mac screen isn’t ideal because it takes valuable space that could contain content. Try hiding the Dock automatically or moving it to the side of the screen.

Convert Image Formats Directly in the Finder

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If you need to convert images to JPEG, PNG, or (unlikely) HEIF, try this hidden Finder feature: Control-click an image in one of those formats or other common image formats like TIFF, GIF, or PSD, and choose Quick Actions > Convert Image. A dialog lets you choose the destination format, the image size, and whether you want to preserve metadata. For straight conversions, stick with Actual Size, but if your goal is to shrink the file as well, you can choose a smaller image size. Leave Preserve Metadata selected unless you want to remove things like location metadata for privacy reasons. You can even select multiple files to convert them all at once.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/marekuliasz)

Social Media: A hidden feature of the macOS Finder lets you quickly convert selected images from their original format to JPEG, PNG, or HEIF. If you regularly need to convert images between formats, it could save you some time.

AirNow and Paku: Two Helpful Apps for Monitoring Air Quality

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Smoke from wildfires is causing significant air quality problems for much of Canada and the US. It’s important to check the Air Quality Index (AQI) before spending a long time outside, and that’s especially true for sensitive populations (children, the elderly, anyone with asthma or other breathing issues) and for those exercising outdoors. Although numerous weather apps report air quality, their data can vary widely. Instead, turn to the official AirNow app published by the US Environmental Protection Agency. It provides the canonical AQI readings, and its Fire & Smoke Map lets you see where the smoke is and how that relates to air quality. (The AirNow website provides the same tools on a Mac, plus a lot of helpful background information.) For hyperlocal readings, check the PurpleAir network of inexpensive air monitors. PurpleAir’s website works in Safari on the iPhone, but the Paku app also provides iPhone widgets and Apple Watch complications showing the AQI from nearby monitors.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Daniiielc)

Social Media: With wildfire smoke causing air quality problems throughout North America, it’s important to check the Air Quality Index before spending a long time outside, particularly for exercise. We recommend the AirNow and Paku apps for the iPhone.

Adjust AirPods Options in the Settings App

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If you sometimes have trouble configuring your AirPods, here’s the trick. The AirPods settings screen is available only when the AirPods are connected to your iPhone, so you must open their case or put them in your ears. Once you do that, a new item with the name of the AirPods appears at the top of the Settings app. Tap it to switch between Noise Cancellation and Transparency, configure what the press-and-hold action does, and start ear tip tests.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Vasily Makarov)

Social Media: Baffled about where the AirPods settings screen is hiding? To find it, start by opening their case or putting them in your ears, and then look for an option near the top of the iPhone Settings app.