Checking Your Storage on your Device

Posted on by stonean

A lack of space on your computer can cause a number of problems. Because of this, one of the first things I check when attempting to find the source of an issue is the storage space available.

How to check storage for Mac:

Open the apple symbol in the top left corner of your screen. Select “About This Mac”.

(Picture shows the Apple symbol drop down menu with “About This Mac” highlighted).

Once “About this Mac” is opened, navigate to the “Storage” tab. The amount of storage you still have available is shown above the bar that color codes the percentages of storage being used by specific categories.

(Picture shows annotated screenshot of the Storage tab in the About This Mac window).

If you are out of storage, the best solution would be to back up your device and then to remove unnecessary files from your device. A short term solution would be to select “Manage…” which will open up a new window.

From there, select “Review Files” and you will be presented with the option to sort through your documents and permanently erase those files which are unnecessary.

For Windows 10, there are two ways to check the storage space availability:

First, open file explorer. This can be done by opening any folders or by tapping the file folder icon.

From there, click “This PC” in the navigation column on the left side of the window.

In “This PC”, you should see a section dedicated to Folders and one to Devices and Drives. Select one of the disks or drives in the Devices and Drives section will show you how much storage you have.

Alternatively, you can find the amount of storage on your device through the system settings. To begin, click the Start button and then the Settings icon.

In the settings window, navigate to “System” and then “Storage”. This will show you information about your primary hard drive and more details about how your storage is being used. Similar to the “Review Files” option in macs, this is where you will be given options for sorting through and managing the files and other uses of your storage.

Free Photo Resources!

Posted on by sherbul

When creating content often times it’s helpful to use photos and videos. However, many of the quality photos online are copyrighted – i.e. it’s illegal for you to use them without permission!

In order to avoid legal trouble, check out these resources for open-domain photos you can use for all of your creative projects.

  1. Flickr: great community-sourced photos, search by name, photographer, or subject
  2. Creative Commons: search by domain laws or subject
  3. Library of Congress: great for archival photos and videos
  4. Adobe Stock: available to Comm students through Adobe suite, good for basic photos

How to Screen Grab/Record on Macs

Posted on by sherbul

Follow these simple steps to screen record on your MacBook.

  1. Press and hold down the Shift, Command, and 5 buttons at the same time

2. The screen recording bar will pop up on the bottom of your screen with 5 options to choose from (left to right)

  • Capture entire screen
  • Capture selected window
  • Capture selected portion
  • Record entire screen
  • Record selected portion

3. Taking a photo

  • To take a screen grab, simply click your mouse pad. You can adjust the size of the screen grab by clicking on capture selected portion before taking the photo.

4. To take a screen recording

  • Simply hit the record button. Your laptop will automatically start recording your screen.

5. To stop recording

  • Press the stop button on the info bar at the top of your screen.

The screen grabs and recordings will appear on your desktop after you’re done.

Showing Hidden Files on Mac

Posted on by stonean

Everyone with a mac is at the very least mildly familiar with the general setup of Mac computers and their filing system. However it’s lesser known that Mac computers have hidden files.

This is to prevent the user from accidentally destroying their operating system. But what if you need to access these hidden folders? This tutorial will give you a couple of ways to unhide your hidden files, but be very careful. It can be very easy to mess up your operating system while altering these files.

There are a number of ways that one can go about finding hidden files, but the easiest is to use the keyboard shortcut. To do this, you have to open up Finder and navigate to Macintosh HD (Locations => name of your computer => Macintosh HD) and press command+shift+period. You should now be able to see your hidden files.

The hidden files will appear transparent or washed out in comparison to your normal files.

To hide them once more, simply press command+shift+period again.

If you know that the file you’re looking for is in the hidden ~/Library folder (which is not the same as the Library folder you see in the screenshot above) you can go directly to it using the Go tab at the top of your screen. While there, hold down the alt/option key.

While holding alt/option, the Library folder should show up under Home and above Computer in the Go list. (Not shown in screenshot)

This will take you directly to the hidden Library folder.

Another way to find hidden files is through Terminal commands. You can find the Terminal in several ways, but the simplest is to use Spotlight Search. To find the terminal, first open Spotlight Search with command+space bar and then type in Terminal.

Once you have Terminal open, write the following:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE (then Press Enter for a new line) killall Finder

To hide files again, write the same thing as above, but instead of “TRUE” use “FALSE”.

And there you have it. Those are the two and a half easiest ways to find hidden files on your mac computer. (I count the Go shortcut as the half).

The Importance of Clearing the Trash

Posted on by stonean

Need to clear up some space? Let’s just throw some files in the bin then! But the problem is, that still hasn’t cleared up the space. So long as the trash has yet to be emptied, those files are still sitting on your computer, taking up space.

So how do you fix that? It’s fairly simple. If you have a mac, start with opening your trash bin.

On macs, when you open your trash, it’ll look something like this.

Click on the empty button in the top right corner.

It should ask for conformation before deleting your files. This can be changed in finder preferences.

Click the Empty Bin button and voila! You have emptied your trash and have gained all that space.

But what about for a Windows computer? (specifically windows 10 but I’m sure it can be applied to other iterations too) When you open the trash it doesn’t have a fancy empty button.

Well to start, you won’t open the trash, you will instead right click on it and find “Empty Recycle Bin”.

Click on that and a confirmation message should pop up.

Confirm that Yes you do in fact want to permanently delete these files.

And once again, voila, your problem is solved. You have permanently deleted the pesky files that were taking up space. Rather like the physical trash bin, the digital one should be emptied periodically in order to keep the clutter from taking up too much of your valuable space.

Reformatting A USB Drive

Posted on by stonean

No matter what project you’re working on, most everyone has had to use some sort of external drive to store and transfer data before. Due to the versatility of the computers available to people today and their various operating systems, it should come as no surprise that there is no one “perfect” filing system to be found. Thus, external drives all have different default filing systems and you may need to reformat them to be more compatible with the device you’re using.

Reformatting:

For Apple devices, follow these steps:

Connect your UBS drive to your computer. Then open the Disk Utility app. This can be done either by finding it on the Launchpad or through Spotlight Search (command+space then type in “Disk Utility”).

Select your USB drive from the panel on the left. (It should be under “External”).

At the bar on the top of the window, select the “Erase” tab. In the “Volume Format” selection box, select the file system you want your drive to be.

Confirm you want to Erase (Note: This will permanently erase all the data on the device).

Close the Disk Utility window and feel free to use that newly reformatted USB drive.

For Windows 10 devices: 

Open File explorer and navigate to “This PC”.

Under This PC you will find a “Devices and drives” section. Once there, find the icon for the USB drive you wish to reformat. Right-click on it and from the drop down menu select the “Format” option.

As it does with the Apple devices, reformatting your USB drive will erase any content still on it.

Use the “File system” drop-down menu and select the storage type that you need. Then, click “Start”. A warning message will pop up. Click “Ok”. Another popup will inform you that the format is complete.

Close out of the formatting window and the USB has been reformatted.

(suggested reading: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-format-usb-flash-drive-windows-10 for more Windows options.)

File Systems:

File systems are used to control how data is stored and retrieved. The most likely to be used options that are available are FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS. FAT32 is compatible with Windows XP, 7, 8, and 10 as well as Linux and MacOS. exFAT is compatible with all except the MacOS 10.6.4 and earlier. NTFS is fully compatible with Windows XP, 7, 8, and 10 as well as Linux. It’s read only with Macs.

FAT32: high compatibility, small file size only (4GB max).

exFAT: high compatibility, large file size available (Recommended choice).

NTFS: not recommended for flash drives despite the ability to hold large files. Best for Windows system drives.