Did you know that you can make calls from your Mac laptop or computer, or your iPad or iPad Mini, and have it dial out on your iPhone? Your Mac or iPad can dial numbers from your contacts, and even from websites, by dialing out on your iPhone. Here’s how to make calls from your Mac or iPad, through your iPhone.

Wondering how to stop your Mac from using your iPhone keyboard shortcuts? If you are trying to prevent your keyboard shortcuts from being synced from your iPhone to your Mac, here is everything that you need to know.

So you just upgraded your Mac (probably to Yosemite) and now you are getting annoying browser errors that say “To view this web content you need to install the Java Runtime Environment.” More annoyingly, after clicking through to Oracle’s Java.com to “Download Java for Mac OS X” and installing it, you still get the error! Here’s why, and how to fix it.

If you are suddenly finding your Mac hard drive much more full than you think it should be, you may also be wondering how to find the big files that are taking up so much space. Simply sorting your files in finder by size doesn’t cut it, because you may need to go through dozens or even hundreds of directories. What you want is a way to see all the files, across your entire Mac, that are huge. Here’s how to find all of the really big files on your Mac hard drive.

Starting with OS X 10.7, Apple caused your Mac to start making “Mobile Backups” of “Local Snapshots” to the MobileBackups directory (technically .MobileBackups) on your hard drive. It does this whenever your Mac is away from your Time Machine backup drive, such as your Time Capsule.

How do you force OS X to use the app that you want to open different files? For example, you may have two or three different word processing type program, but you really want to use Preview to open document attachments that people send you in email. Your Mac may default to an app pre-defined by OS X, or you may have a program that is checked as the ‘default’ in the program settings. So how do you change that behavior?

If you find that Finder on your Mac or Macbook has started hanging or freezing (giving you the spinning disc or beach ball of death), try these steps. These have worked for us, and others.

If you are trying to find your mail files on your Mac or Macbook, and wondering “Where are the mail files on a Mac”, and maybe even feeling a little bit dumb because you can’t find your mail files, well, that’s because in later versions of OS X, mail files are hidden! Apparently you’re not supposed to find your mail files on your Macbook or Mac! But we are going to tell you where your mail files are hidden because, well, that’s just how we roll.

Imagine a bracelet-like armband device that you wear on your arm, that lets you control your Mac or PC, iPhone iOS or Android phone, with a mere flick of your arm. Actually you don’t have to imagine it, because it’s here, and it’s called Myo.

Getting SMS text messages on your Mac or iPad may just be the holy grail for many Macbook and iMac users, but until now iMessage has not worked with messages sent from Android phones. If the person with whom you are messaging has an iPhone, then you can message them from your Mac with iMessage, but that has not been the case for texting with Android and other non-iOS phones.

Is your Macbook built-in iSight camera not working with Skype video chat? If you follow these simple steps, your Mac camera should work again with Skype video chat.

Macs are known for being wonderful machines, easy to use. So it seems odd that there is no obvious way to paste one image into another to combine twoimages on a Mac! We love the free Skitch for most of our image creation and editing needs, but the one thing that even Skitch won’t do is combine two images, not even allow you to paste one image into another. But there is an easy way to do it; you just have to know the secret – and here it is.

A lot of people don’t realize that they can actually send and receive text messages on their Mac computer. In fact, it’s one of the best kept “secrets” out there, which is too bad, because being able to type text messages with a regular full keyboard is glorious! So, here’s how to use your Mac computer, be it Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, or iMac, and the included Messages program, to send and receive text messages.

With some of the latest versions of Mac OS X, such as Mountain Lion, a Flagged mail folder persists on the sidebar, along with the other “system” folders such as the Inbox, Drafts, Sent, and Trash. It turns out that lots of people (us among them) don’t want a Flagged mail folder at all, let alone taking up real estate on the sidebar. Fortunately, there is a way to get rid of that Flagged mail folder – to delete that Flagged mail folder (at least from view). So if you want no flagged mailbox, here is how to do it.

It’s happened to most of us at one time or another. You leave your laptop open and a family member accidentally sees an email that you’d rather they didn’t (perhaps you are planning a surprise party for them), or a friend sees an embarrassing chat in your instant messenger program, or a colleague finds that website you were looking at during your lunch hour. If only there were a way to password protect individual software programs and applications (increasingly known as simply ‘apps’ ) on your Mac or Windows PC. Well, there is!