Freebies!
Whoever said there's no such thing as a free lunch never realized that advice on the web is inedible.
This page will be continually updated with other common and/or easy-to-fix problems I run into as I work my way around the world. The current questions:
Help! My Mac's screen is suddenly showing negative colors!
Let's say your Mac should display a screen like this:
But instead it looks a bit more like this:
Somehow, the "show negative colors" preference has become activated. This is a preference through the Universal Access preference pane that allows people who have difficulty reading black text on a white background (or vice versa) to instantly switch the way the colors are displayed.
This preference is both activated and deactivated by the key combination control-option-command-8. Note that some long-term Mac users will refer to the command key as the "Apple" key, since on older Macs it had a little Apple logo on it. By pressing the ctrl-opt-cmd-8 key combo, you will be able to get back to your regular color display mode.
How does this happen in the first place, you may wonder? When you look at your keyboard, you'll see that the control, option, and command keys are right next to each other, while the 8 is far away. In theory, this makes it much more difficult to accidentally activate, but I've personally found that they make it very easy for a cat walking across your keyboard to activate them. I've also had at least one co-worker accidentally activate it by dropping a huge pile of papers on her keyboard.
Dude, where's my Safari Address Bar?
There are two possibilities, depending on what you're seeing. This is how the top of your Safari window should look, with the address bar:
If it looks like this instead:
Then you have accidentally hidden the address bar. To remedy this, you can either hit control-| (note that that is not an uppercase i, but a character you can get by hitting shift-backslash), or you can go to the menu item View > Show Toolbar as shown here:
Now if your problem looks a little more like this:
Then your address bar has been accidentally removed. I have seen this happen a couple of times, but have never been able to figure out how it got removed in the first place. The good news is, replacing it is pretty simple. First, go to the menu item View > Customize Toolbar as shown below:
Then drag the address bar/Google search bar back up. You can tell these items are being dragged because they're slightly greyed out:
Once it stops being grey and snaps into place as shown below, then you can hit the "done" button.
Special super-secret bonus link!
In 2010, I helped move a friend's comments from Haloscan to Blogger's native commenting system. It was ridiculously, hilariously complicated, and if you're looking for something a little more in-depth and perhaps headache-inducing, please check out the post on my personal blog, So You Want To Move Your Comments From Haloscan To Blogger....