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Tom Nelson

Tom Nelson
179 posts
Writer
Tom has been an enthusiastic Mac user since the Mac Plus. He’s also been known to dabble in the dark side, otherwise known as Windows, and has a well-deserved reputation for being able to explain almost anything to anybody. Tom’s background includes more than 30 years as an engineer, programmer, network manager, software tester, software reviewer, database designer, and computer network and systems designer. His online experience includes working as a sysop, forum leader, writer, and software library manager.
Mac Energy Saver lightbulb icon on top of Energy Saver Preferance Pane

Use the Mac’s Energy Saver Preference Pane

By making some adjustments in the Energy Saver preference pane, you can better tune your Mac to run at peak performance, save energy, reduce potential data loss when power fails, and extend the runtime and battery life of portable Macs. In this Rocket Yard guide, we will explore the Energy Saver preference pane and see how you can customize energy performance.

Messy macOS Desktop

Managing The Desktop: Tips for New Mac Users and Old Hands

The Mac has so many features that it’s not uncommon for new Mac users to overlook helpful tricks, as well as for old hands to simply forget about them. In this New Year, the Rocket Yard takes a look at often overlooked but surprisingly helpful tips for managing Mac's desktop.

Mac Family Sharing Icon - A Rocket Yard Guide

Guide to Family Sharing: Managing Sharing Options

In part one of our Guide to Family Sharing, we learned how to set up the service. In part two of our Guide to Family Sharing, we’ll take a look at how to share various purchases and subscriptions, and make use of shared Photos and iCloud storage!

Mac Family Sharing Icon - A Rocket Yard Guide

Guide to Family Sharing: How to Set It Up

Family Sharing is one of the many perks of owning an Apple product: the ability to allow up to six family members to share purchases made in the iTunes/Music Store, App Store, and Books Store, as well as share subscriptions to Apple Music, Apple News+, Apple TV, and Apple Arcade. You can also share the storage space provided by an iCloud storage plan. In this Rocket Yard guide, we’ll explore how to set up Family Sharing on your Mac. Family Sharing works across all Apple devices, allowing you to use a Mac or iOS device to set up and manage Family Sharing, but this guide will concentrate on the process for a Mac.

macOS bash to zsh shell change

Moving From Bash to Zsh: Terminal Changes in macOS Catalina

macOS Catalina has a number of new features and capabilities, but one change that’s often overlooked is the new shell used in Terminal to interact with the Mac via the command line. The quick take away is Apple is moving from the Bash (Bourne Again Shell) to a newer Zsh. In this Rocket Yard guide we’ll look at how this change to Terminal and the command line affects you.

macOS Snapshots

Working with macOS Snapshots

Snapshots are a feature of APFS (Apple File System) that has been part of the macOS since High Sierra. A snapshot captures the state of an APFS formatted drive, and preserves all the files on the drive, as they appeared when the snapshot was taken. If you ever need to, you can roll back the drive to its previous state. In this Rocket Yard guide, we're going to take a look at APFS snapshots, how they’re created, managed, and deleted, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of snapshots.

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