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TECH SUPPORT & TECHSPLANATIONS
Our Apple-loving experts answer your questions.
There is no “one size fits all” in antivirus protection, as the solution you pick depends entirely on your risk. As a minimum, if you only download apps from the Mac App Store and are a light and cautious user of social media and websites, you should keep a couple of tools at hand in case you need to check out anything suspicious. Objective-See’s TaskExplorer (Free,
objective-see.com) and something like Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (Free,
malwarebytes.com) should suffice. People at higher risk might regularly download software from plain HTTP websites (as opposed to secure HTTPS sites) and already have had a couple of close calls from social media links and other websites. If that is you, you’ll need the protection of a subscription-based service – from Malwarebytes, for instance, Mac Internet Security X9 ( intego.com), or something similar. These will necessarily be more intrusive, though.
Also worth looking at are Objective-See’s other free tools, such as BlockBlock, RansomWhere?, and What’s Your Sign. Little Snitch ( obdev.at) is great for checking outgoing connections, too.
It’s essential not to leave it to software to protect you, though. The most powerful and effective antivirus protection is you, and your suspicions and caution.
If you don’t check every incoming email before clicking on links, and every web page you view, then no software will fully protect you from the consequences. Most phishing attacks, other scams, and malware exploit the weakest link, the human – sometimes very cleverly.
The invisible log
When I used El Capitan, I kept an eye on my Time Machine backups in Console. When that didn’t work in Sierra, I switched to running a small script. Now that I’ve updated to 10.12.4, even that doesn’t work any more. Why not?
You’re one of the few Mac users who is running in normal user mode, rather than as an admin user. One of the undocumented changes in the Sierra 10.12.4 update is that log access no longer works unless you’re logged in as an admin user, although log entries are still made. At the moment
no one is quite sure whether this is a passing bug or a permanently changed feature, however.
The best solution is to switch to your Mac’s first admin user account when you want to access the logs, using that script or any other means of doing so. There’s no tool which can work around this, and it affects both the bundled utility Console and the
log show command in Terminal, which can’t find or show any log entries.
In Terminal’s command line, you can use the sudo command to run as a named admin user from within your normal user account. It’s even possible to run apps that way. However, it can be tricky to set up, and can only be used interactively; you can’t do it when you’re not there.
Wake up! Why won’t my iMac Retina 5K’s display wake from sleep?
If you have one or more external displays and applied the Sierra 10.12.4 update, this is a known bug. Disable display sleep, and rely on a screensaver to darken your displays instead. This should be fixed in 10.12.5. If it’s your only display, run Diagnostics to see if it’s a graphics card issue. Details are at bit.ly/appldiag.
Shrink bloated PDFs I keep scanned copies of utility bills as PDF files. Although I haven’t changed the scanner settings since upgrading to Sierra, the scanned file sizes have shot up from around 600KB to nearly 4MB. How can I get them down to a reasonable size again?
This is the result of Sierra including new support for handling PDF data in its PDFKit library, which in its early releases had some serious bugs. Many of those have been fixed over successive updates, but some remain.
If you’re going to keep PDF files as long-term records, it’s worth taking the trouble to optimize their storage. Scanned PDF file size can be reduced by converting the documents, and scan settings, to grayscale or black and white, which shouldn’t affect the legibility or usefulness of most of your documents.
There are plenty of different thirdparty apps which can compress images in PDF files very effectively, and you should try some out to see how effective they are on your documents. Suitable products include Adobe Acrobat Pro, PDF Compress, and PDF Pro Compressor. Several are available through the Mac App Store, and some offer a trial through their website. Tweak their settings to get suitable file sizes without sacrificing legibility, and compress existing scans as a batch.
Eventually, as this new version of PDFKit stabilizes and it compresses embedded images properly again, its file sizes should reduce to those achieved in El Capitan. However, custom compression should bring you some benefits even then, and may be worth using on your old files created in El Capitan, too.
Old out, new in I have bought a new printer to replace an old one, and I want to connect it to my Mac running Sierra. What’s the best way to do this?
In theory, this is a pretty simple operation. Disconnect your old printer, connect your new one, and power it up. Open the Printers & Scanners pane. Click the + near the lower left to add your new printer, which your Mac should now be able to find.
Wait for an hour or so, then open the App Store app and check that there are no updates, as there may be a newer version of the printer driver than the one built into Sierra.
If you’re keeping your old printer in reserve, you need not remove the old one, but you’ll want to make the new printer the default one. If you’re passing the old printer on or recycling it, select it in the Printers & Scanners pane and click the — near the lower left of the pane to remove it.
The great majority of printers which can be used in Sierra are supported by drivers supplied by Apple as part of macOS. A few models may benefit from the installation of additional software, or even a different driver, supplied through the manufacturer’s support website. If the driver built into macOS works well, you should stick with that.
Sometimes the vendor’s own software enables additional features, but normally the driver supplied through Apple is the most compatible. Apple lists current supported printers at bit.ly/macprnt.
There’s always one Why does one external drive power down when my Mac’s asleep?
There are issues with power management settings on certain Macs. Even when Energy Saver is set to not put drives to sleep, some internal or external drives will go to sleep when the system does. The only workaround is to disable system sleep altogether.
No 4K is not okay Why won’t my iPhone 6 Plus play 4K video?
The 6 Plus supports H.264 video up to 1080p; supporting H.264 at 4K requires the next more powerful graphics chip, the PowerVR GT7600, fitted in the 6s, 6s Plus, and even the SE, although those, along with the 7 and 7 Plus, only support 4K at 30 frames per second, and still stream video over AirPlay/Lightning at 1080p.
How to connect with hearing appliances I rely on expensive, professionally fitted hearing appliances. My current iPhone is connected by its headphone jack to a special adapter, which transmits its audio output to those appliances. If I were to get an iPhone 7 which lacks that headphone jack, how could I connect this adapter?
Although the iPhone 7 doesn’t have a headphone jack built in, there’s a Lightning-to-headphone-jack adapter cable included with it, which should connect happily with the special adapter you use to transmit audio to your hearing appliances.
The snag with this is that an iPhone only has one Lightning port, so you can’t use that single port for audio output when you want to charge the iPhone, for example.
There are other adapters available which address this: for example, the Belkin Lightning Audio + Charge
RockStar, which costs around $40. You should also discuss this with the audiologist who deals with your hearing appliances; there are now more than 20 manufacturers that offer “Made for iPhone” appliances which connect wirelessly and directly with iPhones and iPads using Bluetooth. Apple provides a full listing at apple.
co/2rYLr2e, where it also explains what you need to do to pair them.
For example, Starkey’s Halo range of appliances is detailed at bit.ly/
haloaids. Once paired with your iPhone, the company’s TruLink app enables you to use extra features, such as Live Listen. This feature enables you to use the iPhone’s built‑in directional microphone to acquire sound, which is then transmitted by Bluetooth to your other appliances.
Speedier printing I’m using my fourth Canon printer, a PIXMA MG7750. Although I’m pleased with its output, Canon’s Easy PhotoPrint EX is painfully slow, and can take over two minutes printing a photo. What can I do to speed this up?
Minimize delay by connecting the printer using a wired Ethernet connection rather than Wi-Fi. After that, speed is a trade-off against quality: the higher the quality of print that you want, the longer the process inevitably takes.
Rather than using Canon’s software, compare speed and quality with something like Adobe Photoshop CC – a trial version is available – and also Sierra’s own printer driver.
Speed is compromised in more affordable printers; when you pay more, your printer has a more powerful processor and more memory, enabling it to do more work in preparing an image for printing. This gives the software on your Mac less work to do, and preparation is quicker.
Finally, ensure that you’re running the latest version of macOS, with its latest printer drivers. This is important because Sierra introduced considerable changes in printing and PDF to El Capitan, and those features have improved markedly with each update, and should continue to.