Getting Rid of ?? and Icons from Top and Side of Finder Windows

When I open a finder window on my MacBook Air, I see icons and question marks across the top of the finder window and also a stray icon on the left-hand side under my Favorites.  I remember using the track pad to try and move a file out of the finder window and also accidentally dropping it in the top bar.  Another time I remember dropping a file accidentally into the side bar.

Well, this was driving me crazy. When I tried to delete any of the icons on the top it would just change them to the question mark.  When I tried to delete any of the icons on the left-hand side, it would just open the file or app.

Today, I decided to track down a solution. First I asked my husband and he suggested selecting the icon while holding down the control key.  I tried this on the icons on the side bar and I was able to see an option to remove. So, I immediately tried the same thing on the icons on the top bar. It didn't work. So, I tried the option key, which didn't work either.

I did find an Apple Support forum when I googled the problem and found that the command key is the one to hold down when you want to remove the icons on the top bar of your finder window. You then drag the icons from the top bar out to your desktop and poof, they disappear.

Just thought I would post it today for those who may be having the same problem. Tweet

Time Zone Dilemma Revisited

Now that I am back in my own local, I find that a lot of my iCal appointments are incorrect. Scheduled appointments are now on wrong days and at wrong times. It even said that today was Thursday in my iCal calendar, when it is actually is Wednesday. This is not good when you have important engagements or appointments that you need to attend.

I checked out the System timezone settings and such on all my devices, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iPhones and iPads when I arrived home to the new time zone. Content that this would fix everything, I started getting reminder calls from my dentist and doctors for upcoming appointments. When I checked my iCal dates and times, they were all wrong.  So it seemed that something else was wrong.

This morning I checked the iCal preferences under "Advanced" tab and unchecked the option to turn on time zone support.  This helped with displaying the correct day of the week for my calendar.

So, I googled "iCal time zone support" and found a link to an excellent article posted online.  I wanted to share this link: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Understanding_iCal_Time_Zones/
with everyone so that they can have a reference that addresses the time zone issues when traveling.

Enjoy! Thanks Jeff Gamet for a well-written article.

Update: You can benefit from  setting up "Time Zone Support" as ON when traveling if you are setting up phone calls from another location for certain times specified in the other person's time zones (i.e. not the current location's time). The burden of having to specify "floating" for all of your other meetings (e.g meetings where you are currently located) shouldn't outweigh the benefits of being able to set up a meeting in another time zone.

If you are traveling a lot, then ...

(1) Make sure you have turned on Time Zone Support on all your devices and laptops and computers.  On an iPad or iPhone, select Settings> Mail: Contacts, Calendars> Time Zone Support

(2) Whenever you create a new event in iCal, you will notice that there is a new pop-up menu to choose from where you can associate a time zone with your events. IMPORTANT:  you will have to manually choose the appropriate time zone for every one of your appointments.

(3) Then, while you're traveling, in the upper right-hand corner of iCal, there is a global pop-up menu that lets you choose which time zone your entire calendar is currently based in. As long as you have manually edited all of your appointments with the appropriate time zone, you will have an accurate calendar. But if you did not manually choose the right time zone for even a single appointment (or if you forget to change the global pop-up menu while you're browsing your calendar), your appointments will jump around and be very confusing.






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Resurrecting a Mac With a Full Hard Drive

Today, I volunteered to help a new friend who could not use her Mac laptop.  She could get the gray Apple icon screen on powering up, but eventually it turned to a blank blue screen with no icons or dock or hard drive image.  She mentioned at one point that she had been told by the Apple Genius store that her hard drive was full, and that she needed to hook it up with another Mac in Target Mode to access her hard drive to clean off some of the files.

I tried the option, command, P, R sequence of keys to execute a PRAM boot sequence.  This did not help. So with a suggestion from my husband we tried the Safe Boot Mode.  To boot a Mac in Safe Mode - power up the computer, after the first tone sound, hold down the Shift key and release once the gray screen and spinning wheel and progress bar appear. 

This worked and we were able to see the friend's hard drive, dock and files on the desktop.  From that point, I realized that she had been trying to remove some of her photos from iPhoto application to make room on her hard drive.  There were a number of things that she did that actually caused the hard drive to fill up.  She kept saying that she had multiple copies of each photo in iPhoto and could not seem to get rid of them.

This is the scenario that I believe caused this duplication:
She thought she could drag the photos from iPhoto application to the trash can to get rid of them.  She did not realize that the photos were being copied instead of deleted from the iPhoto library.  Every time she dragged a photo out to the trash, it was duplicating the photo instead of deleting it.  She did this a couple of times, and as she did this, more duplicates of the each of her photos were placed into the trash.  She was compounding the hard drive space problem without realizing it.

I deleted the trash can which got rid of the duplicates there, but in exploring her hard drive, realized that she had also possibly dropped these same files she was trying to delete into her home folder and had another two sets of duplicated photos.

Once I found these and selected them and put them into the trash and also emptied the trash, her hard drive space was back.  Now, she is able to use her Mac again.

There are several things that can be learned from this:
(1)  A file is still on your hard drive, present in your trash can, until you actually empty the trash.
(2)  You cannot delete photos from iPhoto by dragging them to the trash.  To delete a photo in your iPhoto library, you need to run iPhoto, select the photo or photos to delete, and then hit the Delete key.   The photos then are moved into the Trash can in iPhoto application.  You must also empty the Trash in iPhoto for these to be totally removed.

Additional notes added 4/2/2012:
(3)  Also, note that selecting an album and hitting the delete key does NOT really delete all the photos in the album (as these are really only alias or pointers to the real photos).  Remember to delete photos, do so by selecting photos icon from the left hand column and then deleting each photo individually or delete multiples that are selected from the main window on the right.  
(4)  There are a number of short cuts that you can use to select multiple photos at once to delete.  Using cmd A to select all.  Dragging the cursor to select multiple photos within the main window.  Also adjusting the size of the photos using the "zoom bar" at the lower left of iPhoto will allow you to see more photos at once, thus you can drag select more at once to select for deletion.  Selecting one photo while holding down the shift key, you can select other photos by clicking on them and holding the cmd key down.  This will allow you to select photos that are not easily in a group. Tweet