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I had to deal with (among other things) a contrasty monitor on a Mac Mini that looked terrible. No matter what I did -- change the display profile, adjust the brightness and contrast -- it still looked bad. I couldn't even calibrate it. The monitor was connected to the Mac via a Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter, so we even tried replacing the VGA cable but that didn't work.

I did notice that if I simply unplugged the monitor and then plugged it back in again, the weird contrasty setting would go away. I thought that maybe the Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter needed to be replaced but kept poking around.

In my earlier printer article, I mentioned that I'd delve into the specifics of a network issue that a client had. After their network had crashed the day before, they got everything back up and online, but not exactly the way it had been before. This caused them to not be able to print as well as have connectivity issues on the guest network they provided to their customers.

In researching their printer issue, I did a bit of research into their network. Network diagrams are so very helpful and crucial. Their internet was provided by Verizon via a DSL connection into an Actiontec GT784WNV router. From there they had an Apple Airport Extreme connected via ethernet providing wireless signals for employees and a separate signal for customers.

After poking around a bit, it became clear that the Verizon Modem and the Apple Router were providing overlapping NAT and DHCP functionality. The IP address of the computer I was using (192.168.1.2) was the same IP address as the Airport Extreme. That never makes for a good combination. I figured it would be a quick fix -- put the Verizon Modem in bridge mode and then let the Airport take over the heavy lifting. Maybe I'm spoiled by very rarely having to deal with DSL connections, but boy was I wrong.

After getting to the router by entering its IP into a web browser (192.168.1.1) I found the Bridge Mode setting and enabled it. I was a bit skeptical about wiping all the settings from the router, but what could go wrong, right? A lot.

From there, I couldn't get the modem back online. No luck. Multiple resets, etc. I don't have much experience with PPPoE, but I had to learn quick. After calling Verizon, here's what I ended up having to do to get back online:

Reset the Verizon Actiontec GT784WNV modem using a sharp object and press the red circle button on the back for 5-10 seconds.

Plug an ethernet cable from the back of the modem directly to your computer.

Enter 192.168.1.1 into a web browser to see the router's configuration page. The username is admin and the password is password1. Make sure your IP address is 192.168.1.2 by checking the Network Preference Pane. If it's not, set it yourself, and make sure the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0 and the gateway is 192.168.1.1.

Enter your PPPoE login credentials to the GT784WNV. This is going to be in the form of a username and password. I ended up having to get our password reset since no one there knew it.

Once you've logged in with PPPoE, verify that you're able to access the internet.

Now enable RFC 1483 Bridged Mode on the GT784WNV.

Open up Airport Utility to configure the Airport and on the Internet Tab select PPPoE in the Connect Using: dropdown.

Input your credentials and reset the router. You may have to change IPv4 DHCP Range on the Network Tab to a compatible one.

I recently had to troubleshoot a Brother  HL2270DW printer that simply wouldn't print. All jobs, including test pages, would end up stuck in the printer queue with a "can't communicate with printer" error. The client had had some network issues the day before, so I assumed that was likely the case, but I didn't want to jump to conclusions.

The printer has a fairly cool setup feature where you plug it into a computer via USB, run the setup utility, tell it which network to join and then unplug it from the machine. Way better than trying to thumb out an SSID and WPA2 password like some of the older Brother printers I've dealt with. During one step of that process, the utility asks you for an network address. You can use the default one provided by the router on your network, or provide your own, provided you know the correct IP pool, subnet and gateway. Check the network settings preference pane on your machine to have a look what they are.

Sure enough, when I put in a proper IP address, the printer had no issues. This told me it was something else on the network causing the issue. I'll save the details for another post, but it ending up being two routers on the network were taking care of DHCP duties and giving out addresses on different subnets, making the printer invisible to certain devices.

I rarely spend money on apps in both the Mac or iOS app store. Maybe I'm cheap, who knows. If something's free I'll certainly have a try at it, but I don't want to part ways with my hard earned $ if I'm not certain it's worth it. Both Apple and developers seem to periodically discount their apps (or make them free) and right now is a great time to get a few apps that I have found really useful in the past few months.

Clear for Mac ($4.99)-- My buddy Josh turned me onto this one, a very simple list maker that leverages all sorts of multi-touch functionality to make creating, editing and checking off task lists fun. I got it for free on iOS a while back, but it's nice to have the iCloud syncing functionality between iOS and Mac.

Scanner Pro for iOS ($2.99)-- I've been trying to get better about tracking expenses and receipts and this app uses your phones camera to turn photos into PDFs. Once I've got a PDF I can trash the receipt. As a bonus, it will automatically upload your receipts to Dropbox or Google Drive.

A while ago, my iPhone 5's lock button stopped working. I took it to the Apple store and didn't have Applecare and sure enough they wanted $140 to repair it. I took it to another shop and they did it for about $75, but after a few months it went out again. I follow a couple of Mac blogs very closely and noticed that Apple started an iPhone 5 Sleep/Wake Button Replacement Program. After a couple months of being annoyed, I took it in last night.

The process itself was pretty painless. A Genius Bar tech will run the serial number of your device against their database and then wipe your phone (make sure you've backed it up recently and turned off "Find My iPhone".) After that, they'll do a quick diagnostic test and note the physical condition of your phone (i.e. has it been opened before?) If everything passes, they'll send you on your way with a loaner 16GB iPhone 5.

I'm not planning on doing much with the phone in the next week, but I downloaded a few apps and signed into my iCloud account for access to my contacts.

This got me thinking about how Apple notifies customers that qualify for these programs. I've brought the phone in to a Genius Bar before, Apple must know the serial number of my device, so why didn't they contact me about this? Why did I have know that this program existed and run my serial number against their database? They're obviously trying to replace as few of these buttons as they can, but hasn't Tim Cook declared recently that they're 100% focused on the customer or something like this?

My friend had an original MacBook Air that had broken hinges. There was a replacement program for this as well, but since she isn't as much of a nerd as I am, she didn't know about it and they repair window has since passed.

One of clients has a particularly complex network. This always makes troubleshooting a connection issue tough, but if you know the network it isn't much of an issue. I can't vouch for the design since I didn't do it all myself, but basically the complexity boils down to a couple things:

They can't get a reliable internet connection from one ISP, so they have a DSL connection to fall back on from another ISP and thus a failover switch to switch between the two.

They have another location and need site-to-site VPN capability, thus they have the exact same router as their other location.

Prior to this second location, they used Airport Extremes to provide wireless internet and connected the upstairs router to the downstairs router wirelessly. When I installed this new VPN router, I left the Airports as the wireless access points.

Most of their downstairs computers are routed through a network switch that is connected to the downstairs Airport Extreme.

Today I got a call saying that someone at the gallery couldn't connect. They just had some work done on their phones and things were no longer working. They'd tried to unplug and re-plug everything, still no dice. I put their static DSL IP into the browser and got a page for their router, so I knew they were online.

Since the Wi-Fi wasn't working, I asked them if they could check on the downstairs Airport Extreme -- what was the light on the front doing? Green or amber? Apparently, the light was off and the Airport was unplugged so therefore no one at the gallery was able to connect. Once it was plugged back in, everything regained a connection.

A client recently contacted me that she noticed all her contacts were gone in her email. She suspected someone had gained access to her @yahoo.com account. I'm not sure why email hackers always delete address books, but it's the second case of it I've encountered so far.

Furthermore, this person also noticed that they hadn't been receiving email for about 10 days. She'd been on vacation, so she at first thought maybe people just magically knew she was on vacation and stopped emailing her (we can dream, right?) She didn't have an auto-responder on either, so this seemed even more fishy.

After we changed her password using her recovery phone number (make sure you have one set up!) and gained access to her account, I noticed that, sure enough, all of her more than 2,000 contacts had been deleted. They weren't in the deleted contacts section, so I filled out this handy little form that Yahoo provides to get them back. Keep in mind this process will wipe the current address book, but since she didn't have any in the first place, that wasn't much of an issue. Within about 3 hours someone from Yahoo contacted me to let me know they'd been restored.

From there, I snooped around a bit more, sending and receiving test messages. I noticed that messages I sent to the compromised account were not arriving in the inbox. In addition to that, messages sent from the compromised account were signed with a different account, "[email protected]." For the past 10 days, all email that this person received was being forwarded to the hacker. The hacker could've in theory impersonated her and done whatever they wanted.

I'm familiar with Gmail's account settings, so I know that email can be forwarded to another address as well as all replies forwarded to it. This seems to be what the hacker had done, in addition to adding that address as a recovery address to the account. After removing the account, I also turned off email forwarding and removed the reply-to address. Here's a quick rundown from Yahoo of things to look for after someone has hacked your account.

After that, we were pretty much back to how we were. Unfortunately, the 10 days worth of unreceived email was likely out of my reach. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole over at outlook.com trying to find out or gain access to the account, to no avail. I've contacted Yahoo customer support to see if I can get those forwarded messages, we'll see what they have to say.

I told my client she should probably just send out a quick email to those that she communicates with regularly explaining the situation, that she did not see any communication in the past 10 days and to please re-send any important email.

I've been reading Krebs on Security for a bit now, since the Target malware infection. Recently he posted an article about Microsoft using a court order to shut down No-IP.com. The details seem somewhat fuzzy, but basically some of the site's users were cybercriminals who used the service to track malware-infected computers connected to the internet via a dynamic IP address (most computers, including mine) and have access to them at any time. Much like how a basic user would use the service, just minus all the criminal stuff.

Essentially, Microsoft's court order shut the whole service down. Not just the offending users, but all users. I think a few of my clients are users of the service, but they have yet to contact me with any issues. It's frustrating that in Microsoft's malware witch hunt, regular old users of a service have gotten hosed as well. Hopefully it will be back up soon.

I've been doing a fair bit of Filemaker installation and updating work lately. Mostly moving from Filemaker 10 and 11 to 13, both the pro version and the server version. For the most part things have gone off without a hitch, download the installer file, unpack it, then install.

I did the last machine a few days ago remotely via Teamviewer since the machine was outside the city. After downloading the installer, I got the error message in the title: "Some installation files may be corrupt. Please download a fresh copy and retry the installation again." So I downloaded the installer again and got the same thing again. I did it once more for good measure, just to make sure I wasn't crazy. I also tried the trial, but that too, was corrupt.

I did what any sane person would do, got on the phone and called Filemaker. The nice person on the other end of the line told me I was getting a checksum error. Basically part of the file was getting downloaded incorrectly and because of that, Filemaker wouldn't let me unpack the installer. I started to think I was crazy, I had done all the other installs remotely, why would this one be any different?

The only and most important difference was that I was doing this install via Teamviewer and not the built in VNC functionality of OS X. Teamviewer operates over port 80, which possibly could interfere with internet downloads.

I recently found myself in a bit of a pickle. I was helping a migrate apps and settings from his old machine to a new one. From a Mac perspective, this is fairly simple. Mount the old machine in target disk mode, connect it to the new one via Thunderbolt/Firewire, start the process. If you don't have a Thunderbolt or Firewire cable, use ethernet. But what do you do if you let someone borrow your Thunderbolt and Firewire cables and the new machine is a Retina MacBook Pro without an Ethernet port?

Fortunately, Apple makes it easy and allows for Migration assistant via Wi-Fi.

Unfortunately, it's painfully slow. So very slow. Don't even think about it slow. 9 hours slow for something that should take about 30 minutes, max.

After about 10 minutes of letting the migration run and hoping things would be different, it quickly became apparent that they weren't going to finish any time soon.

After a recent experience, I've decided I'm not going to let people borrow mission critical equipment.

Most of the time, I have no idea what I'm doing. There's no way around it. I think I even told that to a client today. The most recent thing I had no idea about was this cryptic error code I got from a Xerox 6180MFP: 016-783.

The client told me that this would happen when they tried to scan something to their FTP server. Sure enough, I also got an "invalid FTP server error" along with that cryptic code. I pinged the server to make sure it was still there. Then I tried to get into the control panel of the printer, but first I had to print a configuration page to get its IP address.

After getting the IP address, I made sure the scanner destination looked correct. The filepath and everything looked normal, so just for good measure I deleted and re-added the destination folder. Still no luck.

Recently my buddy texted me with a plea for help, saying his iMac was extremely slow to boot, taking an hour or more. I ran him through the basic keyboard shortcuts, Shift for Safe Mode, Command+Option+P+R for NVRAM reset, unplug for SMC reset, etc. Unfortunately nothing worked, so I told him I'd check it out in person. I didn't get around to checking it out until a week later.

There are tons of posts on the internet about this and most of them are quite helpful, but generally no two issues are the same so I thought I'd write up what happened here, just in case it's helpful to anyone.

When I got there, I booted the machine. Sure enough, it would chime and the Apple logo would show up, but then it would just hang. So I turned it off and held the option key to select the Recovery Disk as the boot disk. Unfortunately the same thing happened, boot just hung at the Apple logo.

Fortunately for me, I thought to bring an external HD with a fresh install of 10.9.3 (actually it was a backup of my MacBook Pro but who cares). I plugged in the drive and then booted holding down option in order to select my external HD. This time the iMac booted into the OS in a reasonable amount of time. Once in the OS, I ran Disk Utility's Repair and Verify disk commands on the internal hard drive, but they both passed. Still nothing conclusive.

At this point, I selected the internal hard drive as the boot disk in System Preferences and let it reboot. Again, same hang on boot. I did a bit of research on the Mac boot process and the boot was hanging on the Kernel. Nothing insanely conclusive, but something to go on.

From there I decided to run the hardware test that I always see Geniuses running but always forget to do. It's fairly undocumented, but on this iMac running 10.7.2, I had to hold Option+D immediately following the boot chime. A globe icon with the "Internet Recovery" label came on for a few minutes, then it dropped into a very OS 9-looking screen that prompted me to run the Apple Hardware Test.

After running it, we got an error that said:

"Alert! Apple Hardware Test has detected an error: 4HDD/11/40000000 SATA(0,0)"

Finally! Something conclusive! The error message seems to be saying that there's an error with the internal hard drive and that it may be on the verge of failing. This would explain the OS's inability to load along with the recovery disk.

For better or worse, the past couple times I've helped people it's because they're "out of space." Hard drives fill up quickly, especially with all those high-res photos and high quality music. Their Mac or iOS device will grind to a halt and start exclaim "No more memory!" I'm guilty of it too, my 64GB iPhone 5 has been telling me I can't take pictures recently because I'm out of room.

When it comes to Macs, I download and install OmniDiskSweeper. The program "sweeps" any drive you choose and gives you a breakdown of the size of all the folders on your machine. It's best to stay out of most of the top level folders and drill down into your user folder.

While photos, videos and music are often the culprit, another thing that takes up space is old iDevice backups. They're located in the somewhat non-intuitive /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ folder and depending on the size of your device, can occupy up to 64GB of disk space. You can also hop into iTunes and click on the "Devices" panel of Preferences to get a list of the devices you've backed up to your computer. Click "Delete Backup" to remove any old, unwanted backups.

Another problematic folder is often the Downloads folder. Most users don't understand that once software has been installed, they can delete the disk image file they downloaded. Office, Filemaker and Adobe apps leave large .dmg files just sitting there. These can always be re-downloaded in the future if needed.

As for iOS devices, you can see what exactly is taking up space in Settings > General  > Usage. If you're like me, it's likely Music and then Photos, but you might be surprised to see what's further down on that list. I apparently have 5GB of messages on my device and then 1.5GB worth of media in VLC. You can swipe left to delete any app and all its data from this screen.

A client at a small business uses Quickbooks server to allow both her and another employee to keep track of the books. After I solved an earlier issue with the server, she told me she noticed that her employee was able to access the server even when her machine was asleep. What was going on? Was there some sort of phantom version of the server that existed somewhere?

One of the tools that I like to recommend to people looking to backup their data is Crashplan by Code42. It constantly works to backup all your data to the cloud for the very low price of around $5/month. There's no limit to what you can backup and no throttling. Drives that were attached to your machine once will be backed up, unlike Backblaze which deletes them after 90 days of being "offline." In short, it's awesome, except for when it crashes.

I hadn't ever seen it crash until last week. It boots as a login item, does its thing and begins to index files. It will index and index, but then just die. Fortunately, there's a very helpful Code42 support doc here. Check each service.log.# file in /Library/Logs/CrashPlan. Search the document for "OutOfMemoryError" and if you find the phrase, you'll want to increase the default amount of RAM Crashplan is provided.

The Code42 doc spells it out quite well, but you'll want to:

Stop Crashplan using sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist in Terminal.

Authenticate with your Admin password

Use the following command to open the .plist file for editing sudo nano /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

Arrow down to the line that says -Xmx1024m and replace it with a larger number, perhaps 2048.

Press Control + X to exit, Y to save changes and enter to write the filename.

Then Start Crashplan again using sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

One of the things I've noticed about the people around me is that they like to freak out about their iPhone battery life.

"I feel like my broken charger was not even charging my phone really? Is that possible? Like the battery drained so much faster."