 We'll show some basic tips and customizing and organizing your Macintosh computer. We're gonna demonstrate it on this machine I'm in front of right now, which is a pretty brand new MacBook Pro and it's running OS 11.6 big surf that's of interest to you. And so now I'm going to go and figure out how to minimize. So I purposely put a bunch of things on the desktop because one of the things that have come up has come up multiple times is how to create folders, how to organize and tame things. So that's one of the things that we'll do. The first thing I think I'm going to do is go to, I'm gonna go up here and I'm gonna go to the Finder. And we're gonna go back to this again and again and I'm gonna go to the Apple menu where it says system preferences. I'm gonna click on that and then I'm going to look around for accessibility. Give me a second, right here. And this is something that you might find handy. So I'm now in the system preferences and we'll go back to that again and again. But when the first thing I'm going to display and cursor and the cursor is this, the little pointer that you see. And can you see the size of it now? It's generally okay, but as our eyes age or whatever you may want to have a slightly larger cursor and find it. So I'm going to just drag the slider along and you can see as I'm dragging the slider it's also the cursor, the arrow is getting larger. So I'm gonna go for about here because I figured that would make it easier for you to see it as we go along. And another trick on a Mac, which I just found out by doing research for this is if you can't find your cursor, it's sometimes it's just hidden somewhere or whatever. If you give it a good shake, it actually gets larger. Do you see that? So as you shake it, it gets larger and you'll be able to see it. So that's a little tip. So I am going to right now organize the desktop. So I have a mouse right here attached to this. It has a touchpad on it and a keyboard but for this thought it'll be easier to put an external keyboard on it. And I am going to right click. And this is something that you might find pretty handy. There's a few ways to sort and organize your stuff. So you see how everything is kind of all over the place. I use the right click button on the mouse. You could also do control click by holding down the control key and clicking if you have with the keypad or with a mouse that doesn't have like the two buttons on it and we're also going to go into the mouse a little bit more in a minute. So I'm going to right click and it gives me all these choices and one of which is sort by. So you have the option to sort things through different criteria. I think the most popular one is usually by name so you can find things alphabetically. I'm going to do that. I'm going to do sort by name and everything kind of magically just kind of got into order. Now, when you do the sort it actually kind of locks it in place. So if I were to grab this folder says taxes and just want to move it it's not going to allow me to change the order because it's keeping it in firm alphabetical order. So now I'm going to right click again and go to sort by and there's an option for none. And when I do that it's going to go back to the kind of higgledy-piggledy helter-skelter way it was before. So this is the one that I use more often. I'm going to right click and do clean up by and when you do clean up it'll sort it. Well, let's see, I'm going to do by name. It'll sort it but it'll allow you to make some changes like say, oh, I want to make sure the taxes folder is right over here or I want to move this screenshot over here. So I hope that's a helpful tip. Okay. Now, so the two, so, okay, about organization and I'm also going to show you how to create a folder. So I'm going to right click once again or if you needed to you could control hold the control key down and click with the mouse or the keypad to get this menu and I'm going to go new folder. And when you do that if you don't touch the mouse or do anything it'll be blue as you can see and you can just type right in there without having to, you know, click on it again. So I'm going to call this one clean up. Okay. And then I'm going to, you can see it's still active like the, it's still flashing the insertion point over there. So I'm going to click and now it's kind of locked in. If you ever want to change the name of a folder again like I say, well, clean up was too vague. I'm just going to click on it once and then I'm going to pause and click on it again and then it's active and I can make it clean up, I don't know, now to motivate myself. So there we go. Now, once you have say this folder and I say I wanted to clean up I can just drag things into it. And I'm going to drag this one which is from one of our classes, the password log and I'm just going to take it and pop it over there. And recipes, I'm going to put recipes into clean up now. I'm going to put the pointer, the cursor right on it. I'm going to click down with my finger and keeping my finger down I'm just going to drag and let it go. And I guess I lingered too long and then it just opened up the folder. Now, if you have tons of things on your desktop and you just want to put them all into one you can lasso them. So I am putting the pointer over here. I'm going to click down just like I did before but now I'm going to drag it across and hopefully you can see how I am grabbing a bunch of things. Now you want to make sure you don't grab something unintended, but for here I think all those things can go into the clean up now folder. So and notice when I let go everything is kind of highlighted. So I can just go over and click and drag one and they all will come over. And I'm going to drop it down. I am also going to grab all these. Drag them over, drop them in. And then I'm going to grab this last one from a class we did two years ago a cat videos class, which was fabulous. And I'm just going to drag it in there. So now you notice how messy the desktop was before now it is tamed. But of course, all those things are still inside this folder. And so I mean, you deal with it. Can you go over like how should I right click? Yes. And I'm also going to go. We're also going to customize the mouse and the touchpad settings when we get into the control panels. But so if you have a mouse like this, hopefully you can see it. So this is a standard kind of PC mouse which has two buttons. And when you plug it into your Mac a mouse like this it'll automatically know that you can right click. And then depending on your dexterity and your biomechanics, generally you would put your hand over it kind of like this and move it around. And this one is the single click. And I guess I'm going to do that now doesn't see. And then if I use this finger up here, I can do the right click and that brings up the special menu. If you have one of the kind of sleek, cool apple mice that are like almost a touchpad themselves you have to go into the control panel to tell it to enable the right side to click and we'll go over that. Now, if you're using the touchpad, which so on the base of, and I can't show it to you because it's part of the computer. If I had a mirror, maybe I could do it. But there is the touchpad and I'm just moving my with a single finger. I'm just moving it around and that's good for navigation and I can go somewhere. Now, if I want to do the double click and they call them gestures. And so if you put your two fingers together and you click at the same time, then you get, it's the same as a right click and you get that special menu. So it'll just take a little practice and then it'll be like second nature to you in doing it. So once again, two fingers together. So I'm bringing them down onto the touchpad and wonder if I can show it. I guess I can show it a bit. Here are my fingers and if I'm over here, from over here and if I put two fingers down, then you get the special menu. Okay, I hope that that is clear. And once again, in this case, I have attached this external keyboard and a mouse just to make it easier for me to do this. But I can't also be doing this on the keyboard right here. That's part of the MacBook Pro. So now we're going to go to the Apple menu or the Apple icon and I'm gonna go into about this Mac. And this can be super handy because you might wanna know, well, what version of the Mac do I have? And in here, it shows you right now. It's showing us what version of the operating system. It usually has a number and then some kind of cool name. So in this case, it's version 11.6 Big Sur. So that is the current operating system, the current version. It'll also tell you what kind of chip. This is one of the newer Macs. So it has the new chip that Apple made themselves or have made for themselves. Tell you how much memory is in there. One thing that's handy when you look at this menu is you can click here, right away to get to software update in case you want to check and see if you have the latest system and what updates might be waiting for you. So we're gonna do that right now. Just gonna move this up here. So I'm gonna go over again how I got here. So I'm going to the Apple icon up here. I'm going to about this Mac. And now we're on overview. See how there are different tabs along the top. And I'm gonna click on software update. And I am connected to the internet. So it will go out there and connect to Apple. And it says, hey, your Mac is up to date. If you trust Apple and you just want it to be taken care of without you having to think about it, you can click this box and it will automatically do the updates for you. My habit is to kind of wait a little bit and then I do it myself. Okay. And I'm gonna use the back arrow up here. So I'm gonna go back again to the Apple icon about this Mac and we're gonna work our way across. So that's how you can once again, find out what model you have, what year it is. And it could be something I checked one of our older computers a while back and I was able to see it was I think a 2013. It told me also that I couldn't update it any further. So sometimes you might want to do that just to see find out what model you have and if it can take the latest updates. So I'm gonna go to displays. It's gonna tell us what we have here. I'm gonna go to storage and this could be interesting. So it's gonna tell you how much space you have on your internal hard drive. And I purposely left a USB stick in here so we could see that too. So this is the internal hard drive. And so it has 251 gigabytes of storage. It says flash storage. That means a solid state kind of like a chip and it doesn't have the spinning platters. So they tend to be quick and they don't suffer from the mechanical breakdowns you would get with a spinning platter and such. It also gives you a breakdown of what's being used in terms of storage. So just by, and this is another thing, sometimes you can just take the cursor and just let it hover over something and it'll give you more information and there are some kind of description. So here we know how much storage is being used for apps, other users, music creation, the system and other. And this is, notice how the icons look different. So this is the one for the flash drive and it's basically empty. Everything is available or I think there's one file on it. I am now gonna go to the next tab for support. And this can also be very handy. You can use this to get directly to Apple and get some information on some tutorials. Some Mac resources, Macsport. I'm not gonna go through it because it might take some time. We could do it at the end if you want but it can take you to some kind of sheets with information about the particular model you have and as well as tutorials and service. This is where you can find out about the coverage that it has. So now we're gonna go to the system preferences. So now the Apple icon and then system preferences. And this is where you can customize oh so many things about the operation of your Mac. Here and I'm not gonna go into iCloud today but basically iCloud lets you store sundry information and settings in the cloud which is basically just some computers elsewhere. So just not on your computer. And when you do that, you can get at the same information from multiple devices. So some people have iCloud set up and then as things happen, they'll get a ping on their phone or something that they've done on their laptop. So it's a good way for you to have your information backed up. You do when it gets to a certain point, you have to pay if you have a lot of things stored, you have to give Apple more Moola as you go along. But anyway, so I'm gonna go but anyway that's iCloud. And your iCloud sign in should be the same as and if you have a Mac or an iPhone, I think you should have an Apple account somewhere where you gave them an email address and a password and that lets you get in and buy things, control things and that should be the same email address and password for iCloud. So I'm now gonna go to general. This is something I think it's fairly new for the Mac where they have different modes. So right now we're in the light mode. I'm now gonna click on dark and we're gonna see how it changes things. So notice how this now is a dark background, different level of contrast. If you click on auto, then it'll make the decision for you depending on day and night and ambient lighting and things like that. I tend to like the brightness of the light one. So I keep it on that. And then accent colors, you can play around with that on your computer to make it look how you like. Icon size, I don't think we need to go on that. This is an interesting one, scroll bars. When you're in a window, so let me see, I'm gonna open up something. Let's see, maybe I'm gonna open up Safari and notice there's no scroll bar there on the right side. I'm going to move me down here. I say I'm gonna go to Google. Maybe I'm gonna go to news. And there is a scroll bar there. And if you have a mouse that has a wheel in the middle, like here, you can just move that up and down to move that when you have it over it. Or you can use the pointer to grab it. So I put the pointer on there, put my finger down, and I'm dragging it up and down. And depending on how this is set up, sometimes you'll see the scroll bar all the time. Sometimes it'll magically appear in context when there's a situation where you're hovering over it and then you could use the scroll bar then. I'm gonna minimize this now and go back. Yeah, so right now it's based on mouse or trackpad. I'm gonna change it to when scrolling just to see if that makes a difference. Yeah, so there's a scroll bar on the left side now, but I don't see one on the right side. But if I go over here and I probably click, oh, as soon as I started moving the wheel, then it appeared. So that depends on your own personal preferences if you want it to be hidden until you want it or if you want it on all the time. I'm gonna make it always just so I don't have to think about it. This one is kind of important. When you click in the scroll bar, you could have it just jump page by page. So if you're looking at say a website that's like, five pages, every time you click, it'll move one page at a time. Or you can have it do this one where it jumps proportionately. Like so if you have a line this large, it'll go to that spot. Like it'll go to 75% if you're three quarters of the way down. And I don't know if you want me to demonstrate that or not. Let's see, I'm gonna leave it on jump to next page and go back to Safari, which is Apple's browser. And so I'm gonna click here. I'm actually gonna drag it all the way up to the top and see I'm gonna click once. So it's doing one page at a time. Now I'm gonna go back to our control panels. And I'm gonna go jump to the spot that's clicked and go back here and let's see how it behaves. So if I go down and I click here, hopefully it'll take me down to the bottom of the page. And in this case, I don't think it really did that. I think it was going page by page. So I think that was a theoretical but didn't actually happen in reality. So default web browser right over here. This is fairly important. You may prefer to use Google Chrome or you may prefer to use Firefox or Safari which comes directly from Apple or some other browser. You can tell it, you can pick that one. So these are the browsers that we have on the computer. I always have multiple browsers because sometimes a website just won't work as well with one or the other. And so it's good to have some options or if something's just not working right that day or it needs to be updated. So in this case, I'm gonna leave it on Google Chrome so that if I click, if I'm clicking on a link somewhere, it's automatically gonna go to Google Chrome first. If I default, it's usually Safari on the Mac. So I must have changed that at some point. And by the way, this is a new profile. I just set it up a day or two ago. Okay, I don't think I'm gonna now move this again. Okay, so that's general. So we're not gonna cover everything because we only have so much time and I only have so much knowledge but we're gonna go back, I'm gonna click on the grid. Here we go. And desktop and screensaver. So this can make a big difference in your life like how you want it to look. So right now, we have this kind of pretty pattern that came directly from Apple. I'm gonna click on desktop. So it's about how this background is going to look. And I'm gonna click on colors. And I tend to do mine, I try to make it less busy so I can see all the folders that are on the desktop. So in this case, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna pick this kind of aqua blue. It's a little bright, or maybe I'll go for this one. So yeah, we'll go green today. Okay, so just by doing that, I now have a different background. I can also, and I'm gonna close this for a minute, I'm gonna go to the clean up now folder and I'm gonna look for bugs bunny. And I'm gonna right click on that picture. So remember the right click using the right side button or holding control and clicking. And I am going to set desktop picture. And this is a time where one can panic and say, well, no, it's all out of whack and everything. So in this case, I'm gonna right click again and I'm gonna do change desktop background. And it takes me back to this menu that we were looking at and see how bugs is in there. And this setting is fill screen, but there are other choices. So I am going to make it center and depending on how large the actual file is. This one I figure, isn't that large because you can see how it's kind of broken up. It's kind of pixelated and jagged around the edges. So I'm gonna go to center and oh, okay. And I'm gonna move this out of the way and that's bug giving us, you know, a little kind of giving us, was it, razzing us. And I can also change the background color. So in this case, I'm gonna click, while it's in this mode, I can click on there and you have a choice of different, I'll bring it over here, different ways to pick the color that will be the background behind bugs. And I'm gonna try and see if I can find something that'll work with, I think I'm gonna go for a shade of gray. So I'll go with aluminum or I can go, I'm gonna go with that one, nickel, okay. So that is a way that you can change your desktop and both the whole thing, as well as put a picture in the center around. I'm going to go back to system preferences and here we go. So that was doc, okay, oh, okay. So that was desktop and screensaver. I didn't get into screensaver much, but basically you can also just play around this when you want. But there are a lot of different beautiful images as well as vocabulary words hidden in the screensavers. And the screensavers performed a very important function in the beginning of computers where with the old style of tubes and displays, they would get burn in if the same image was on the screen for a long period of time, but we kind of etch in there. And so the screensaver kind of helped with that. It doesn't really apply to our current displays, but it's fun to have a screensaver. And you can pick from a bunch here and you can also add them. You can decide how long until it takes effect. So that's something you can play with on your own. Go back here. Yeah. Can you go over if, how you can use your own photo as like a screensaver or like a desktop? Definitely on the desktop because that's what I basically did. But so I'm going to go to clean up now, which is that following. And I'm going to go for here. So say this was a picture I happened to take of Tom Waits. This is an album cover that's here. So you can make believe it's a photo you took of a sunset or a family member. And I'm going to use the right click button. There are multiple ways to do this, but I'm doing it with the right click so I can get right to that menu. The same one where we can make a folder or whatever, but I'm going to go down to set desktop picture. And if I minimize this, move this, it is now the picture. So that's one way we can also go at it from the control panel. Let's see, so I'm going to close that. Going to go up to system preferences, desktop and screensaver, going back to desktop, and we could then go and find it. To remember how I did that before, click money, center. Oh, so offhand I don't see where to get to the picture from there. So you can hunt things down, like right now I'm going to the desktop, clean up now. So you can also hunt it down this way and I'll pick a different picture. Here's just something, a screenshot of this is canopy which is a great service the library has. And if you don't know about it, it's free movies to you that you can stream on just about any device like a Roku and Apple TV or a laptop or a phone or a tablet. So anyway, so this screenshot, I believe, so I opened it, okay. So it didn't set it, did it? Let me see. No, so I think the right click is the easiest way to do it and that's how I tend to do it, but if we're under desktop photos, I'm gonna go to, yeah, so I'm gonna say for now that the best way is to right click and pick it from there. There's other ways to get at it also. But one thing that does happen, once you have it, the photo set, you wanna go to this menu to be able to change it if you wanna enlarge it, like right now I have it set as center, we could make it fit to screen, which will change, then it'll make it go all the way to the top and bottom, but it might not work well for some images, like this one doesn't have really the resolution to do that. So I'm gonna go back to center. I'll also show you tile just for sport, then it just puts multiple copies of it all across. So that might be entertaining, but it also could give you a fit. It's just very, very busy and you may not be able to find your files. Once again, I tend to like a relatively simple desktop so I can find things. So I'm gonna go to center and we're back to that. Okay, so I hope that was clear enough. So I'm gonna go to dock and menu bar. This one, I think can be pretty handy. So the dock is the area down here. Can everybody see that? Where you have all the programs that you might be using, applications and things. So you can grab the slider bar and make it large. That's interesting that it's not doing it. Give me one second to figure out what's not going on. So for some reason it's not responding. Let me check it again. So dock and menu bar and if I... Okay, there we go. So I guess I was at max. That's why it was user error in my part. So you can see how it's teeny tiny there and you can grab the slider and get it to a size that works for you. So I was already maxed out. And you can choose to have it on the left side, the right side or the bottom. I think most people tend to do the bottom. The genie effect is kind of handy. Let me see, animate. Oh, here's something that I do all the time with mine is I automatically hide and show the dock. So I'm gonna click on that and then it goes away. So you have more screen available to you. And if you ever wanna see it again, you just bring the cursor down and rest it for a second and then it pops up. So that can be kind of handy. It makes your desktop less busy and you have more room with which to work. And let me see about, okay, so I'm gonna now, but for our purposes right now, I'm going to have it stay there and the genie effect should be working. So I'm not really sure magnification. Oh, there we go. So I had to check the box first for magnification. And then when you rest the cursor on top of it, you'll see it very large and that can help you and also notice you're seeing the text. So I'm gonna leave it on that. I'm gonna leave large magnification, leave it on the bottom. I'm gonna have the genie effect so that it popped up like a genie out of a lamp. And I'm going to turn on automatically hide because now we'll have a little bit more screen real estate which to work. And now I'm gonna click back over here. Mission control, I think we need to go limited time when we go there, but that's, you can set up a little hotspot so that every time you put the cursor over here, it'll do something for you like make it go to sleep or something, I'll save that for another day. Siri, I think you probably all know about Siri. So it's kind of like also like Amazon has Alexa, whatever, but you can turn it on. It'll ask you to say a few things so it gets to know your voice and then you can go, hey Siri, what time is it? Hey Siri, what's the, you know, tell me a joke or things like that. So you can have that and it's on your, I guess all your Apple devices have it as an option. Spotlight, I don't think we need to go much in that. Language and region. This came up the other day, we're helping someone, but if you use multiple languages, you can add them in here and then they'll be available to you in different applications and also as menus across the system. Notifications. This is something that you may notice sometimes you get an annoying pop-up when you're doing something like maybe this and then all of a sudden I might get a notice from some program. So you can tell it to, you can have a do not disturb. A lot of people do that for nighttime and you can go individually and turn things off. So here I'm on books. So I'm gonna say allow notifications, I'm gonna go, no, I don't want books to alert me when things are coming up. Calendar, I might wanna leave on. FaceTime, I'm not expecting anyone calling me so I'm gonna turn that off. But you can go individually, unfortunately you have to do it individually near as I know and you can turn things off so that they don't just pop up and give you a message like an advertisement or even something helpful. Internet accounts. Say you have Gmail and Yahoo and something else like that you can use this built-in application to connect to those accounts and then you can see all your accounts in one place. You can look at them selectively or you can see all your mail in one place. It works very well. I tend to use the individual app. So if I was using Gmail from Google, I would actually, I would probably log in, well, I guess on the Mac, not on it, I'm sorry, I was thinking about a device. I would probably log in from the website. And so, and I think Michael tends to do that too. How about when you're on a PC, Michael, do you tend to go individually? Well, I do. Yeah, so, but many people find this convenient because you can put multiple accounts from different providers in one. So that's what the internet accounts one is. While in Apple Pay, you can add your accounts to that and it'd be part of Apple's, I guess, economy. And it can make it easy for you to pay for things specifically on the phone. I don't have anything myself set up in that. Well, and certainly not on this device. Touch ID, we did not set that up on this, but this is a way that you could tell it to know you by your fingerprint and you would do it a few times and then you would just do that to be able to log in. So, and you've seen that probably on phones like the older iPhones, less expensive models, they still have a little circle for you to do that. And on some of the newer phones, they're doing like a face recognition. But you can also do that with this touchpad on the touchpad down here. You can train it to respond to that. Okay. Users and groups, this, it can be very handy. So, if you look along the left side here, you can see we've created multiple accounts for us here at work so that we can do different things, have different permissions and say, I can log in on one and Michael could log in on another. And we created one just for this class, which I mentioned, and that one we called Zoomie. And so, if you have multiple people in your household, you may want to have set up individual groups, individual accounts so that you can keep your information private. And also, you should make sure if it's your computer that you have an administrative profile. So this one, we made it an admin profile so that we could do whatever we needed to do today, whatever changes. But if you have a family member and you're not too sure that you trust them or someone's visiting, you would probably want to do a standard. You see that one when I rest on that? So a standard account, which lets them do everything, but they can't make changes to your system preferences and things like that. And if you have, and I always have this turned on on my computers, on my Macs, is guest user. And you just have to, and that's something you don't even have to configure. You just tell the Mac to turn it on and then you will have an account that will always erase at the end. So if you have someone that you once again, you know, you don't trust them all that much with using your computer. It'd be great just to put them on guest user. And then when you restart, when you log out of that account, everything gets erased. The way you would administer this is you would click on this padlock. See how it says, click the lock to make changes. You would have to use a username. See, so in this case, it's the one for this account. And I would put in the password. I'm not gonna go through this right now, but that's what you would do. So once again, make sure that you create for yourself an administrative account and that you know your password and that you write it down and keep it somewhere safe in case you forget it so that you can always be in control of your account and that you could delete accounts as people, you know, as needed. Accessibility, accessibility, there's tons of things. The Mac is very strong on adaptive needs and I'm not gonna go too much into it. Other than I showed you, if we go to, was it display? Okay, under display and then go over to cursor, that's where you can adjust this, right? See how, and that I think it comes unusable at that size but I'm gonna leave it there. So that's how you can do that. You can tell it the Mac to be able to speak, you know, menus to you, you can have it speak text within documents depending on how you set this up. Okay, so that's accessibility, screen time. It keeps track of how much you're using the computer. Could be handy to know that, discipline yourself, extensions, things that get added to help your computer do things. Sometimes they get added and there are things that harm your computer. So it's good to take a look and make sure you don't have something offending in there. Security and privacy. I'm trying to give this something worth getting into. So in this case, if it goes to sleep after, so it was a recording session, after five minutes, I'll have to log back in. I'll have to put the password back in and you can choose how long you wanna wait before it logs out. In this case, I'd have to put the password in because I'm making a change, an important change to the system. So I'm just gonna cancel out of that. I'm not gonna really get into firewalls or the file vaults. The file vault kind of encrypts all your data. You'd have to be, I think most people are not that concerned about it. I'm gonna go down here now to software update. So that's what we saw before. We just came at it a different way and it's gonna check for updates and see nothing's changed in the last 40 minutes. So I'm gonna click back over here, network. This comes up often, right? So right now we're using the Wi-Fi and I imagine many of you at home or when you're out, you're connecting to the internet wirelessly using Wi-Fi signals that get broadcast. When you're here at any location of San Francisco Public Library, you should see this one, hashtag SF library Wi-Fi. So you would choose that and then it will, if all goes well, especially our system I think tends to like connecting to max, it seems to work effectively. You would have a pop-up screen, a permission page come up and you would click continue to the internet. I forget what the exact phrasing on it is and then you'll be using free Wi-Fi at the library. You've probably seen similar things if you ever go to Kaiser or UC Med or certain large company buildings, they'll have free Wi-Fi and you usually have to click on some splash page and say you accept the terms. You don't need to use a password to get into the library's Wi-Fi and you can tell if you need a password by that, see how there's padlock. So these are ones that are all locked and you would need a password to gain entry. And you can also see along here on the right side about how weak or strong the signal is for your device in your location. And also generally don't connect to a network which is unknown to you. Okay, I'm gonna go back there. Actually, I'm gonna take one more look at Wi-Fi. Again, that network. So Wi-Fi on. Okay, and by default, up here, you'll see in the menu bar and also just like the dock, so I'm gonna go down to the dock again. Know how you can hide it and you can do the same thing with the menu bar up here. But I think when you do that, people often get confused and frustrated and say, how come I can't see it? So but you can make that hide and then reappear. But anyway, so I'm gonna click on here and that's a quick way to get to Wi-Fi, turn it on or off and also look for networks. Now, okay, Bluetooth. So many of you probably have used or seen Bluetooth devices. Very often people have headphones, earpieces, a mice, wireless mice, and they basically use this Bluetooth communications protocol. And this is where you can turn it on, turn it off, look for devices and connect them. The, very often the Apple like the Mac, I guess, desktops come with a kind of smaller version of this keyboard and that's usually a wireless one that you connect via Bluetooth. Sound, oh, this is, so you can customize all sorts of different alerts. When the key things here is, I'm gonna go to output, output volume and show it volume in the menu bar. So if I uncheck that, you, we won't see the sound appears a control panel. So I'm hoping that now if I go back and system preferences and then go to the sound and I click on show volume in menu bar, there it is. So if I click on it, we have lots of audio options. This looks a little different than the previous version of it. So output, you can change the volume by sliding it here. On most keyboards, there'll be an icon. So I don't know if you can see, they bring up close, but on the top row, let me see, there is usually three volume buttons and one will instantly mute it, another will lower it, another one will raise the volume. And from the keyboard, that's usually I find the easiest way. The newer Mac like this MacBook Pro, they have an LCD screen along the top and then you have to touch the screen and then slide it. Apparently it's, you know, it's cool and whiz bangy. I find it a little annoying because it takes me a little bit longer to do it. I'd rather just tap a button. And of course you can connect, the MacBooks still have an output volume, like the little like headphone jack that you can plug in headphones or plug in external speakers. And of course you can also add Bluetooth speakers and have or some other protocols of speakers to have wireless sound. Okay, what else we got along here? Sound, printers and scanners. So this is if you got a new, you know, printer or scanner, you know, whatever HP can in different brands, Epson, this is where you would go to install the software to make the device work up with you. Sometimes you'll go directly to the website of like HP or something like that to get to download a particular app to do that, but you can do it directly from here. Okay, keyboard. So let's see what we get. Tanks, shortcuts, input sources. Nothing's anything much to go on about with the keyboard. Trackpad, there is definitely differences. So here is when we were talking about the, and what's nice is it has this little kind of mini video giving you a demonstration of how to do the two fingers. If you, right now, this is set to have, if I use the two fingers, I get, it'll be a click. So if I go over here, I get that. If I turn it off, let's see, I don't think, and then I, so right now I've taken my two fingers and did it, it's not giving me that special menu. So I'm gonna turn that back on, tap to click. I think there are different opinions on that. That means that you can just tap it and have it respond. And depending if you have any kind of shakiness or any kind of dexterity issues, it can be, you can wind up in a different menu or a different place than you intend. So I tend to not have the tap to click on unless you're a very, I think, skilled and precise user of the touchpad. You can change the speed at which it moves across, you can move across the screen. It can be super slow, super fast, something in between seems to make sense. And also the feedback when you click on the pad, like if you want it to be very firm or light and we have it set firm for medium. Apple has their own vision of, I don't know how many years ago it started with a scroll direction being natural. So it's the opposite way that Windows machines work and the opposite way that old Macs used to work. So I always turned it off. And then I just feel like then things are moving in the direction that I'm expecting them to. But right out of the gate, you have to turn that off if you feel similarly. And here they can use more information on other kind of gestures that you can do. See other things that are important, trackpad. Same thing with a mouse, I'm using a mouse right now. You can change the settings on it. And once again, and this is a standard mouse, if you have one of the sleek Apple mice, then you definitely have to, and it'll know that and then you'll have to engage that right click if you want it to work. But you can also change the scroll speed on the mouse. I'm gonna make it fast. Oh, that's for scrolling us for up and down. For tracking speed, let's see what happens. It's really fast and let's see what's really slow. Yeah, see how that's now it's on the slow settings that takes a lot of work to get across the screen. And if I'm gonna do it right in the center and that seems to be about right, okay. So now I'm gonna go back to that. I'm back to these. So sound printer, scanner, trackpad, mouse displays. Sidecar, I haven't used it yet, but it lets you use, if you have a new, new-ish Mac and a new-ish iPad, you can have a, you can use the iPad as a bonus screen, as an additional screen. So it seems pretty nifty. If you have the equipment, I haven't done it myself. Mouse, sidecar, battery. Shows you, you know, what your current status is right now. It's interesting, it's 60, I'm plugged in but it's only showing 69% from battery. And you can hear you can customize settings for when to turn, like, when kind of, I guess conservation, I think. So you can tell the screen to go to sleep after a certain period of time, but the hard drive to sleep, things like that. Battery, date and time. You should let Apple kind of pretty much do that for you. You can tell it, you know, go to time zone, pick where you are. So right, our location is San Francisco, date and time. And you can choose how it displays up here on the upper right, but basically it'll, you know, it'll connect to the internet and give you accurate time. Okay, sharing, I think most folks should not delve into that too much unless you know what you're doing about, you know, sharing information. And so I would leave that alone. Let's see, time machine sharing. Time machine is very important. I can speak from experience because I didn't back up my iMac at home and I had some corrupted files and I've yet to be able to access my photos on my iMac. So you should have a separate external hard drive that's large enough to have all the information that would be on your computer and you would plug it in. And when you plug it in, it'll, time machine will probably pop up and say, hey, do you want to use this as a time machine to back up your information? And the first time it'll take a while, it'll, because it's basically gonna, it's gonna copy all your information. And then when you plug it in periodically, it'll then just update. And then if anything ever goes awry, you can, you can restore from that backup. It's a pretty snazzy system. People who are super careful have more than one backup hard drive and they rotate them and keep maybe one off site and things like that. I think those are the main things about going, just generally going through the control panels and knowing what they do and some things about organizing your computer. Also, let me see. When you're down here at the dock, the finder is over there on the left. When you click on that, it's a quick way for you to get to things. AirDrop, we didn't mention AirDrop. AirDrop is a way, you have to have Bluetooth on and you have to have AirDrop on, but you can then share files between two Mac devices. Could be an, or Apple devices. So it could be an iPhone, an iPad, a laptop, a desktop, but it's an easy way for you to wirelessly transfer particularly large files. So it can be handy. It takes a little, it may take you a few tries before you get it connected, but that's what AirDrop is. And once again, it's on the phones as well. So here you'd see the documents that you worked on recently. Here it shows you all the applications. So here's something I didn't show you, I meant to. So in the applications folder, that's where all your programs are, all the applications. And say this one here, tune in. If I want to be able to get at it easily, I would put my finger down and then drag it over here to the dock. And then I would keep my finger on it until I find the spot where I want to place it. So in this case, I'm gonna put it right over here next to Chrome, cause I like to use it often. And that way that program is there for you and it'll do is one click. So you can do that with all these different applications. And for those of you who have never used it, tune in to commercial product, but it's a free version with ads, but you can listen to radio stations from around the world, including our local stations like KPFA or KPU or KLW, KQED, and you can listen to them right from your device. Brian? Yeah. Can you explain Time Machine again? Sure. So I'm going to go back up to System Preferences. And down here is Time Machine, click on it. And here it says it. So it's basically a system for creating a complete backup of your computer. So you would want to have a hard drive. I don't have one here, but say this looks kind of like a hard drive. You could get one from various stores, there's different brands, but you would get one that was at least the size of your computer, of your computer hard drive. So this one is 256 gigabytes. So I'd make sure I had one that was well above that. So I'd probably buy a one terabyte hard drive, say. And it would have a connector on the end. And when I plug it into the computer, Time Machine will probably pop up and then say, would you like to use this device, this hard drive in Time Machine to back up your information? And then you would go, yes. And then you'll have to wait a while because the first time it will take a while, but then it's going to back up your entire system. And then you can leave it plugged in or you can take it out and plug it in periodically, but it's a way for you to have a complete safe backup of your system if something goes wrong, you accidentally delete something or the hard drive fails. And unfortunately that does happen. And the other point I was talking about is that some people, if you're being super careful, they have more than one backup, especially if it's like, this is your business or something like you, and you say you're a photographer, you would have more than one backup hard drive and you would plug them in and swap them periodically to make sure you had a current safe version and maybe keep one at a family member's house or something like that. And so in the Finder, go back to the Finder. So this is, I think that's, this is where you can also, so you can get to applications. You can see what's on your desktop here, very often things will automatically go. If you're writing a document, it'll go into the documents folder, so that's how you can easily get to it. Very often if you're downloading something from the web and you're looking, well, where did that file go? It's probably over here in downloads. So earlier today, I downloaded the PowerPoint and that's where it went. So just remember that's there because sometimes you can get stressed out trying to find something you've downloaded and that's a quick way to get to it. And also from here, if I wanted to eject this flash drive, I could do it here, I could also do it there. So I'm gonna close this and that's another thing I didn't mention about. So the flash drive is basically visiting and when you're done with it and you want to say, put it somewhere safe, take it with you, like say you brought over, someone brought it over some photos and you copied it over from there. And I'll do that, I'll show how to copy something. So on flashy, I guess there is nothing on there. So I am going to open up cleanup now. I'm gonna take this picture of bugs and I'm just gonna drag it on. And notice how when I bring it over there, it kind of highlights around the hard drive, the flash drive. So I let it go and now that file is on there. And when you're moving something, copying something from one device to another device, you really are copying it. You're not moving it from one to the other. You have a version here and when you move it to another device, it's making a copy and it's going there. So if I'm happy with it and I have something on this drive, I can use the right click and amongst my options up here is eject flashy. If I do that, then when it disappears then I know it's safe to pull it out. So I have it attached. In this case, I have a USB port on the keyboard. So I'm gonna pop it out now. Now you always wanna do that. You don't wanna just drag or pull a flash drive out because you might have files open, you didn't realize it and also the system wasn't expecting it. So the safe way to make sure you don't have corrupted files is to always do that. You right click or something like that but you want to eject the drive and then wait for it to disappear and know that it's safe. Do you want me to also plug it in again just to show what that's like? I'm gonna do it anyway. So in this case, I have a port on the keyboard. Generally you would plug it into the side of the computer if it has that kind of port and there it is. And if I wanted to, I can now drag bugs back and notice how it's still in both places. It's copied it. Now, let me see, keep up. Now, if I wanted to actually move it, like say, okay, I just wanted to deliver this file. I don't want it hogging space on my flash drive. If you hold the command key, which is at the bottom of your keyboard, if you keep your finger down on command and grab something and then let it go, it'll actually move it. So notice it's no longer here. So there may be times when you don't wanna, once again, you don't wanna copy, you just wanna actually get it out of one place and into another device. That's how you do it. You hold the command key and then drag it. Okay. So Brian, can you go over how to back up photos from your Mac and how do you move photos from your iPhone to your Mac? With photos, like, so here's my Mac, which has all these messages popping up on it. My phone, you have multiple ways to store your photos. So in this case, I have them all on my phone. I don't have iCloud on it, but I think most of folks who aren't storing like tons and tons of photos, if you have iCloud set up, it's going to be saved for you in Apple's iCloud area. And then you can get at it by logging into another computer that's using the same iCloud account or another device. So that's one way of just having it stored by Apple and then it's there waiting for you. You can plug in using a cable and Apple is, you know, so in this case, you know, this uses the Apple Lightning cable and depending on what laptop or computer you have, you would plug it into connected devices and then it can do a backup either on the computer or you can open up photos, which is over here. I'm not going to be able to do it because I'm not synchronized with this one, but you click photos. See, close that. And it can backup directly from your phone to your photos folder. And that's what I tend to do. And you can also just backup the whole device. It'll actually ask you when you plug in, if you were to plug in your iPhone or your iPad to your desktop or laptop, it'll actually prompt you to do you want to do a backup. And so there's a backup of kind of like general things and then there's a backup that you can do directly to your photos. There's multiple ways of backup. I think most people, if they're not storing tons and tons of stuff, they're doing it in iCloud. Another option is using Google Photos. So if you're a Gmail user, you already have access to all these Google products and one of which is Google Photos and it'll let you backup. Is it still unlimited, Michael? It's not anymore actually. So it's only up to the amount that they give you which are like 15 gigabytes for all your products. I think Apple is five gigabytes. And if you're someone who uses like a larger format camera, you could get to five gigabytes pretty quickly. You can use Google Photos to backup and also then in 15 gigabytes, it's a fair amount for most folks. They do tend to sometimes compress your photos. So if you're a professional photographer, you would have, you'd probably be paying some service to backup your photos in full proper resolution with no compression or anything. When you're using it with the Google Photos, depending I think if a file is very large, it compresses it a bit. Most of us wouldn't notice it, but that's one way that's free to be able to backup your photos from pretty much any device using Google Photos. You can backup your entire phone onto a MacBook depending on how much storage you have on your MacBook. Like this one is 256 gigabytes, some phones, right, or 256 gigabytes. And depending if you filled it up with photos, you might run out of space on your laptop. But if you have like say an iMac and it has one terabyte of storage, then you probably have more than enough to backup all your photos and everything from your phone. And then that external drive, if you have it set on a time machine, it's gonna back up everything that's on your computer, including whatever photos are in photos. So Brian, how do you remove things from the dock? Oh, you just pull them straight up. So here I'm going to remove FaceTime. So I'm resting on it, right? And I put my finger down and I'm just going to, well, let's see, you should just be able to drag it up. Let me see. Unless something's changed. There we go. Sometimes it's just how you finesse it, but you're basically taking it straight up for a few seconds and letting it go. And then that removes it from the dock. And then should I have the external hard drive connected to Mac all the time? I'm not sure what the wisest answer that is other than if you always have it connected to the hard drive, if something happens, rather to the computer, say you have a power surge or something, the hard drive could get damaged. So I would think backing up periodically would probably be the wisest thing. And once again, and some people just pay Apple to have everything up, all the key things in the cloud, but I think that can get expensive if you have a fair amount of files. I think you went over earlier about like browsers. So can you go over what are the benefits of having more than one browser? If you, let's say for example, you already have Safari installed on your Mac. It comes as a default, but what are the benefits of having more than one browser? Okay. The key thing is, I think once it was that, sometimes things just don't work. So in fact, we just had one the other day, a small thing of where we were doing, I think a Google, kind of like the Zoom, but it was on Google. I have my default browser as Firefox and I couldn't change the backgrounds on that. But when I used Chrome, I was able, it had that functionality built in. But there are sometimes just, some web browsers just will have work a different way, have features that you like or like I said, or sometimes you're dealing with a website that one browser just won't work well with it. Say you're filling out a job application or something. So it's good to have different options. And some people just really like one browser more than the other for whatever reason. Safari, it's built in, it's updated all the time by Apple. They have that nice kind of reader mode where you can tell it to ignore pictures and ads and just kind of show you the text. But I think all the other ones have some version of it also. I think Google Chrome is the most popular and widely used. So it's probably more compatible with most things. But I just like to have multiple options. And I know we've also tested out another browser called, was it Brave Michael? Yes. And we don't necessarily recommend it, but we've tested out and it works very well and it has some very nice security features in there about privacy. Is there anything that you want to say about browsers, Michael? So certain things might work well on certain browsers. I've gone to a website where it completely didn't work at all on a certain browser, but it worked fine on a different browser. So it really depends on your experience and it's kind of like hit and miss. So like Brian said, if you have more than one browser, you could have like a backup. But if you have just one browser and you're fine with that and that's totally okay, but if a website doesn't work, you might have to get like another browser as well. And one thing we didn't mention is there's also incognito mode or private browsing mode. Do you want to describe a little bit about that, Michael? Yes. And that's across platforms. You could have it on a Mac or you can have it on a PC. So like if you have Firefox, I believe it's like private browsing or if it's on a Chrome browser, it's like incognito mode. So what this does is if you open up like a website in that browser mode, then whatever you do in there and you close it, everything gets deleted. So like if you're signed into like your email, you're signed into like a bank account and you're in like private mode or incognito mode and you close the browser, you automatically get signed out and all the history gets cleared off. But if you're in regular mode and you forget to sign out, the next person to go or use your computer might have access to whatever you logged into before. So that's one of the positive features if you use private browsing or incognito mode, because you don't have to worry about logging out, but you should remember to log out, but just in case if you don't forget, don't remember to log out. And for those of you who might be using like a public computer somewhere and you're logging in, say your Gmail account, you really have to go through several steps to properly log out, even if you're in incognito mode, I believe. So you have to make sure you actually sign out and then you see a page where it says like remove account and then you have to then still say yes to it's like three steps, but if you're using a public computer, not yours at home, make sure you get all the way out. People, they wouldn't necessarily be able to get into your account but they could see your email address, but they can't see your password if you've logged out, but do that and then also make sure you close the browser entirely. And if you have an option of restarting the computer, that's even better. That be fair to say, Michael? Yes. Someone asked about delete to trash. Yeah, you should. So when it's in the trash, it's still recoverable. So it's in there and it's still taking up some space and you could still drag it back out onto the desktop and then access it. So if it's something you're unsure of, you can just leave it hanging out there, but if you want to basically, really get the stuff off your computer, then empty the trash. Where to go to find the interdrop option? So I found by you, so going down to the dock and then going to the finder, then you find the airdrop. And right now it says allow me to be discovered by no one. So I can make it people that are in my contacts, that are in my device or I can make it everyone. So if you run into a friend say at a cafe and they say, oh, you must have these photos I took of us together when we were camping or whatever. This is how you could then just turn it on and tell it to be discoverable. They have to do the same thing on their phone and then you can then pick a file, pick a photo, pick a video and then you can send it. Let me, I'm not gonna be able to do the whole execution but I'll show you like how you might do it from your computer to at least get started. So I'm gonna go to the folder that has all the stuff in it and I think I have a video in here somewhere. So if I right click on it, let me see share. Okay, here we go. So I'm gonna right click on the thing I want to share could be a folder, could be a document and go to share and then see there's only different choices one of which is airdrop and then it's kind of talking you through it and say, okay, so on a Mac ask them to go to airdrop and the finder. So if we had another device on right within proximity and Bluetooth was on then we'd be able to send those files back and forth. Is that helpful? My experience has been that sometimes it just takes a few tries for it to work but when it works, it's pretty great and you can send a pretty large file that way. So Brian, there was a question about like going to history and deleting your browsing on public computers. Well, if you're doing the incognito mode or the private mode, you shouldn't have to do that but depending on your browser, right? So if we're in Safari. Oh, and I'll look to add that since our library computers they have a special software where when you log out everything gets wiped anyway. So you won't have to worry about that. Right. But it's still wise to save just in case something, we have it set up to do that but you're still better off making sure you clear things as well as you can beforehand. Don't you think, Michael? Yes. It should be a habit that you have but all our computers are set to automatically wipe everything out. So I was going to go to Safari. Was it under preferences? It's in different places on every browser and also between your phone or your tablet or computer. So remove items. So here's something you can also, you can customize. You can tell it to automatically remove you're on your own computer. It can clear your history, you know, that day. And you can also, you can also tell it. So I'm sorry, I'll tell you what. So I went to Safari preferences and so here you can customize it. Like I said, if you just want to make sure your history is cleared after every day you can set it there. You can also tell if you don't want downloads if you don't want your files to go into downloads you can pick a different location. I tend to make mine to desktop just so it's always there for me to see. And under Safari, you go to clear under under Safari menu, you go to clear history and then it's important to take a second and not just click on it because you have options. You want to just clear the last hour or do you want to clear all history? And so if you do clear all history and then click that then it's going to get rid of everything from the whenever we've started using it. And there's similar things on Chrome and on Firefox.