Some email scams are obvious, others are not. The best ones (or worst ones, rather) are those that take advantage of familiarity to trick you into clicking on them.
I recently received a email with the familiar Facebook colour scheme and layout. I noticed that the sender was not “Facebook” but was from some stranger, “Ava”.
The subject heading of the email read:
You have unread messages that will be deleted in a few days
Do you turn off your Mac when you’re not using it, or do you put it to sleep?
Instead of turning your Mac off it can be put to sleep so that it can be revived instantly when you next want to use it. To do so is really easy, in fact, there are several ways to put your Mac to sleep.
In the image below I show how you can hold down the ⌘ key, then the ⌥ key, and then the ⏏ key to put your Mac to sleep.
Inducing sleep with Command-Option-Eject
Sometimes you might just want to put the display to sleep while the Mac continues to work. ⌃⇧⏏ will put your Mac’s display straight to sleep, without warnings.
The ⌃⏏ combo will pop up a confirmation window that gives a few different options: Restart, Sleep, or Shutdown.
You can go a step further and shut down the computer completely with ⌃⌥⌘⏏.
I bought my Mac back in the days when every Mac came with an infrared remote control. I personally use the remote control many times throughout the day, mainly for audio and video and always have it on hand.
Holding down the ‘Play’ button on the remote control for a few seconds will send your Mac to sleepy bo-bos.
Visit the Keyboard Kung Fu page for more tips like this by clicking on the icon below.
Would you like to know how to easily improve your display and sound settings?
The aptly named “option” key (the one with the ⌥ symbol) provides several options when combined with particular F keys. For example, ⌥F1 brings up the Display window of the System Settings. This is because F1 is the ‘decrease brightness’ key. Similarly, F2. is the ‘increase brightness’ key and like the F1 key, when combined with the ⌥ key, brings up the system’s display settings.
Change the Display settings with Option-F1
On the top-right region of the keyboard are the volume settings, F11, F12, and F13. Using the ⌥ key with any of these will provide instant access to the Sound panel of the System Settings. There you can adjust your mic’s input volume, or adjust the volume of your alerts.
Mission Control is great for quickly and easily getting an overview of and access to all your open windows, your Dashboard, and all your open applications. Customising your Mission Control settings to your own choice of key triggers is just as easy.
Use the ⌥F3 or ⌥F4 keyboard combination to bring up the Mission Control settings. From here you can set what key combinations you prefer for accessing things like Mission Control, open Applications, showing Desktop or Dashboard and also for setting the Hot Corner triggers for your mouse.
Master Po: Do you hear the grasshopper that is at your feet?
Young Caine: [looking down, sees the insect] Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
Master Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?
Let’s say you’ve sent a lot of files to the Trash and you would now like to empty it. You probably know that you can right-click on the Trash icon and choose “Empty Trash” but did you know…yep, you guessed it, there is a keyboard shortcut for that!
This is a general keyboard tip for the Operating System. That is, it applies to the Finder and will have a different effect that the one described here if you use it while using an app, such as Chrome, for example.
Empty the trash with CMD-Shift-Delete.
While in the Finder, or on the Desktop, which is technically a part of Finder, put your thumb on the ⌘ key and while holding it down put your index finger on the ⇧ key and while holding both those down, add you middle finger to the mix by tapping it on the delete key.
Empty the Trash = ⌘ ⇧delete
A small message will pop up asking you are sure you want to permanently erase the items:
You can bypass the need to confirm that you want to empty the Trash by adding the ⌥ (option) key. It’s a bit of a handful, literally, but it is not too difficult as you can hold the ⌥ key down at the same time as the ⌘ key with your thumb.
Empty the trash without confirmation = ⌘ ⌥⇧delete
You can always drag a file into the Trash, but there is a much faster and easier method of getting rid of unwanted files.
Instead of wrestling that file to the ground and dragging it into the Trash, kick that file straight into the bin using the ⌘ delete combo! Just select the file by clicking on it with your mouse or using your shift and arrow keys, and then hold your right thumb on the ⌘ key and tap the delete key.
Take out the Trash with Command-Delete
As you may have noticed in the image above, and in the previous post about selecting the URL, on some keyboards the ⌘ key also has an Apple logo on it (my thumb is covering the ⌘ symbol in the photo above). To add some confusion, the Command key is sometimes referred to as the “Apple key”.
The beauty of the ⌘ delete combination is that, unlike the drag and drop method, you don’t have to go any where near the Trash. So if you prefer to keep your hands clean you can send unwanted files to the trash in one swift move with ⌘ delete.
