Category Archives: Blog

How to Take the Annoyance Out of Your Key Passwords and Passcodes

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We constantly say, “Use a password manager!” for good reason. Password managers make it easy to generate, store, and enter strong passwords. You don’t have to decide whether or not your password is strong or weak, remember it, and type it accurately every time you log in to a website. Seriously, just get 1Password or […]

Two Important Tips for External Storage Devices

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It’s tempting to think that most external storage devices—whether simple hard drives or more complicated network-attached storage (NAS) units—are relatively similar because they all do roughly the same thing. However, a recent problem with older Western Digital My Book Live NAS devices highlighted that there can be large differences. In that case, hackers figured out […]

Learn How to Paste Text So It Matches the Surrounding Text

Sometimes, when copying text from a web page, PDF, or word processing document, macOS will include the formatting from your source, leaving the words in an undesirable font/size/color. In actuality, you probably wanted it to match the styling of the text where you pasted it. Fortunately, most Mac apps have a quick trick to fix [...]

The Right Way to Tell Your IT Support About a Suspected Phishing E-mail

With spam and hackers at an all time high email is unfortunately becoming less and less reliable. Spam filters, addressing errors, and server failures are just a few things that can cause a message to go unseen. With certain types of email it can be worth the extra effort to ensure that your message is [...]

How to Resize Your Finder Columns

At Virtua, we love the column view in Finder windows (choose View > as Columns). It's just easier to read! No need to worry about missing icons, everything is sorted alphabetically and selecting a file shows a preview. Sometimes though, the column widths can be too narrow, cutting off file and folder names, or too [...]

Remove iCloud Drive Downloads to Free Up Your Storage

In iCloud Drive settings on your mac there is an Optimize Storage checkbox that, if checked, will store the full contents of iCloud Drive locally, but only if there's enough space. If you are looking to recover some of that local storage space without selecting that option, fortunately it is easy to do. First, you'll open [...]