Time Machine is by far the simplest way to keep regular and reliable backups of a Mac, and usually the automatic backups start and finish without any incident. On some rare occasions though, Time Machine may get stuck* on the “Preparing Backup” stage for an inordinately long amount of time, causing a backup to never start, let alone finish. It’s these failed backup attempts that we’re looking to remedy here.

We should point out that if you haven’t backed up a Mac in a while, say a few months, it’s normal for the “Preparing Backup” stage of Time Machine to take a while to gather data before beginning, particularly if you have a large drive to backup. What’s not normal is for the Preparing Backup stage to take 12-24 hours, getting stuck in that stage overnight or all day long, for example (unless perhaps you have some truly absurd amount of disk space, then it may take that long and be normal).

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Typically when an external display is connected to a Mac, it will automatically be detected and start working instantly, with the Mac either extending the desktop or mirroring the screen over to the newly attached display output. Sometimes that doesn’t happen however, and when a secondary screen is not detected automatically by the Mac, you’ll want to trigger the “Detect Display” function in Mac OS.

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In appreciation of Cosmos Day (also known as the Sunday that airs the Cosmos TV show), we’re bringing you six space-themed Cosmos inspired wallpapers to send your desktop and mobile backgrounds into another world. Each of these was crafted in the good old photoshop alternative of Pixelmator using NASA imagery as a starting point.

Each image is a high resolution 2500×2500 and fairly large to preserve maximum quality, weighing in around 2.5MB each on average, so you’ll be able to use it on most resolution displays, whether you’re putting these on a 24″ display, iPhone, a retina iPad, or a retina MacBook Pro. Go ahead, bring some Cosmos to your wallpaper*.

Click on any thumbnail image below to open the larger full size version:

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This weeks featured Mac setup is the desk of systems engineer Dave B., let’s get right to it and learn a bit more!
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Longtime users of the Google Chrome web browser may be puzzled to discover the appearance of a mysterious Chrome Notifications menu bar icon, appearing as a little bell icon along with the other Mac menu bar items. Unlike removing some of the other OS X menu bar icons though, you can’t simply drag it out of the menu bar to remove the icon, and even more strangely, you can’t disable the possibly superfluous menu bar icon from it’s own drop down menu.
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If you’re a fan of using gestures for navigation, you’ll be pleased to know that you can navigate browser history in Safari for iOS (versions 7+) by simply swiping back and forth. This basically functions as an alternative to the traditional Back and Forward buttons in Safari, allowing for quick swipes to go forward or backwards a page as needed while you’re browsing.
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Microsoft has brought the popular Office suite to the iPad, including full featured versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Each app is offered as a free download through the App Store for iOS, but there are some functionality differences between the free and paid subscription plans. To put it simply, the free plans of the Office apps can only view, copy, and share contents, while the paid plans are necessary to gain complete editing and new document creation across the Office suite.
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Netcat is a powerful command line tool that can read and write data across a network connection using TCP/IP, it’s commonly used for relays, file transfer, port scanning, amongst other things. Though netcat origins are from the unix and linux worlds, netcat is also built into Mac OS X, and we’re going to use the nc utility as an easy way to send data and other text across two networked computers.
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You can quickly get the Sunrise and Sunset times on a given day for any location, right from your iPhone or iPad. So whether you’re planning a romantic rendezvous for sunset, just want to see the sun peak over the horizon, gearing up for some dramatic lighting photography, or you’re aiming for dawn patrol waves or untracked powder at sunrise, you can quickly determine when you’ll need to be heading to your preferred spot to have the best experience.
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While Safari usually works just fine for browsing the web, there are times you may encounter a persistent error message about verifying the identity of a particular website. The precise error message may read something like this, and appear on almost any site, where “URL” is a variety of domains:

“Safari can’t verify the identity of the website “URL”

The certificate for this website is invalid. You might be connecting to a website that is pretending to be “URL”, which could put your confidential information at risk. Would you like to connect to the website anyway?”

First, this may be a completely valid security warning, and you’ll want to click on the “Show Certificate” button to attempt to verify everything looks as it should yourself (the domain you are trying to visit is trusted, matches, etc). On the other hand, this may appear as an erroneous message from Safari too, and that’s what we’re looking to troubleshoot here.
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If you share your Mac on a network you may be interested to know who is connected to the Mac at any given time. This may include listing currently logged in users through a variety of network protocols, even locally, or perhaps just a history of users logins over a period of time. While Mac OS X Client doesn’t offer the same level of information as Mac OS X Server, you can still find user connection details by using a variety of tools built into all versions of Mac OS X.

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Have you ever needed to know what type of security and encryption method a wireless network is using? While the Mac will figure this out itself when joining most networks, you may need to relay the information to others, or specify it yourself when joining other networks. You can get the encryption protocol in use by a router without ever having to log into the router, or even connect to the wi-fi network at all, just by using a simple trick in Mac OS X.
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Every time you connect an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a new computer, you’ll get a “Trust This Computer?” alert dialog popping up. If you’ve updated iTunes or reset an iOS device to factory settings, sometimes you’ll even see this Trust dialog box on a computer you’ve already chosen to trust from that device. Most people want to tap on “Trust”, but if you accidentally tap on “Don’t Trust” instead, the device disappears and it’s no longer accessible from iTunes on that computer, right? Wrong, you just need to trigger the dialog again so that you can trust the device.

It’s usually fairly easy to undo the “Don’t Trust” action and regain access to iOS devices, so if you find that you’ve accidentally tapped it – oops – here’s what you can do to “Trust” that computer again and be able to sync the device as intended.
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If you’re attempting to upgrade or restore an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Apple TV by way of iTunes and you encounter an Error 17 alert, you’re probably experiencing an issue with the computer connecting to Apple’s servers. This can be caused by a variety of things and users may see it either when trying to update or restore normally through iTunes, or even when using firmware IPSW retrieved directly from Apple.
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This weeks featured Mac desk setup comes to us from web developer and student Jonathan C., who uses multiple iOS devices and Macs tied together with the help of Teleport to work in unison. Let’s learn a bit more about each device and how they’re used!

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Power Search for iTunes is a feature that allows many additional search parameters to be used when looking for all media types offered on iTunes, including music, apps, movies, TV shows, books, podcasts, and iTunes University. But what was once built directly into iTunes has been removed by Apple for some reason or another from the latest versions of iTunes 11, and unlike other things gone missing, now there’s no known way to return the enhanced search feature as a native functionality.

But not all is lost, because it turns out that Power Search can be accessed and used in iTunes 11 by using some fancy URL magic, which you can open from any web browser. Yes, you use a web browser to access a feature in iTunes… that may sound weird but there’s not much to this, though you will need to click through from Safari, Chrome, or Firefox to get Power Search working.
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The iOS interface is easily identifiable by it’s ubiquitous usage of whites and bright colors, which can be both pleasing to the eye but also excessively harsh when an iPhone or iPad is used in darker ambient lighting situations. New versions of iOS offer an ability to adjust that bright whiteness with a setting called Reduce White Point, which offers a subtle reduction to the overall brightness of the user interface.
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Have you ever seen a plane flying overhead and wondered just how high up it was, where it was going, or what flight number it identifies as? Now you don’t need to wonder anymore, because your iPhone (or iPad) can tell you exactly what flights are flying above you by way of the ever-useful iOS assistant Siri.
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