By Glenn Fleishman

May 5, 2025 9:00 AM PT

Tell me all your troubles

Ahoy, Hexachromes! It’s your best friend and best nemesis, Glenn! I’m joining the Six Colors stable as a nice shade of beige to answer both your least and most troubling problems across the Apple ecosystem. You may know me from such books as Take Control of Your Apple Account, How Comics Are Made (in bookstores on June 3), and Why Johnny Can’t Restart His Mac (publication banned in most countries).

I started in computing in the late 1970s, tapping away on an Apple ][ at a local computer store that tolerated me for far too long. Eventually, saving my pennies, I bought an off-brand 6502-based computer from Ohio Scientific, Inc. My first Mac exposure was in high school, where our forward-thinking journalism teacher bought one and had me, the paper’s typesetter, take it home over winter break to learn how to use PageMaker 1.0. We switched over from phototypesetting to LaserWriter page output in January 1986. For a while, I tracked my computer ownership history; click the OSI screen for a throwback surprise. I’ve worked as a graphic designer, catalog manager, and journalist, and most recently started diving deeply into printing history, including the history of newspaper comics told through reproduction.

I’m just off a 10-year stint writing the Mac 911 column at Macworld and eager to forge a more personal relationship with all of you. I was the third person to write under that nameplate, used for 21 years, with Ted Landau and Chris Breen preceding me. Mac 911’s flourishing lifetime wasn’t brought to an end for any reason but the modern reality of how people discover what they need (and Macworld handled it beautifully with me). Macworld will continue publishing the how-to articles and clever tips that have been a leg of the publication for decades.

We could look at Mac 911 as being a “wholesale” distributor of answers, while “Help Me, Glenn!” is retail. Macworld’s parent companies (we’re on number three now) took user questions and posted the answers for all to see, which generated lots of different kinds of traffic and produced many kinds of revenue as a result: print magazine subscription sales, ad views on a page, affiliate revenue, and so forth. Without speaking to their current business model or strategy over at Foundry, one that has kept them afloat while many others have gone away, a lot of the revenue side of things has dwindled or narrowed. The print edition disappeared over a decade ago—leading to the founding of this site—although a digital magazine continues to be produced for subscribers and via Apple News+.

Search isn’t dead, but it might as well be. The biggest engine, Google, has become riddled with slop and crud, particularly when it comes to finding answers to technology questions. Ask a question about how to add a password to an item in Note, and you get an AI summary that often combines fragments from people posting in forums in which they have no answer yet with advice that’s derived from several different releases of Apple’s operating system producing a hotch-potch of garbage. Nonetheless, reports show many people read that nonsense and don’t proceed to search results links below it. Yet those results are often no better. The links largely, but not always, take you to poorly written or AI-spewed text using templates with few or no accurate bits of advice in them.

The way around this is forging what I’d call the “retail” approach, which is what Jason and Dan and the rest of the crew have built as a community of general readers and subscribers at Six Colors. The site’s editors and writers know many of you through social media, email, in-person events, and (for subscribers) the Six Colors Discord server. We sit on stools and throw peanut shells on the sawdust-covered floor and talk about technology together.

So, instead of sweeping a wide net to answer your Apple-related questions—and maybe some that are tangentially connected to Apple—I’m turning to you (points at you) to ask what’s not working? What’s your current conundrum or what’s a persistent itch you can’t scratch? As befits a subscriber-underwritten publication, members can ask questions in the Discord server by typing /glenn and then entering your question. That text gets fed into a spreadsheet I check. Any reader can email me at glenn@sixcolors.com, and those questions will go into my queue, too.

My columns also come with a bonus! I’ve just started an expanded role at Take Control Books, an Apple-focused ebook publisher that’s now 22 years old. Founded by Adam and Tonya Engst of TidBITS, their most prolific author, Joe Kissell (a former Macworld writer), bought the company eight years ago. I’ve written a couple dozen books and well over a hundred revisions, starting from day one. I’ve accepted a contract position as executive editor, where I’ll be continuing to write and update my nine active books, take over updating books where an author has retired from them, serve as editor for many of Joe’s titles, and provide consulting on expansion, crowdfunding, and more.

Some of the “more” is right here! Along with drawing on excerpts from Take Control titles to answer some questions, I’ll also be able to direct you to books that might provide more extensive details for more complicated issues. Six Colors and Take Control Books represent a significant hunk of the best remaining independent Apple news, troubleshooting, and education.

Let me close with the single best tip I’ve heard in the last decade, although it’s a little obscure. Reading social media four years ago, someone mentioned that you could reveal hidden files in the macOS Finder by pressing Command-Shift-period. Hidden files include many used by the system and any you’ve used a command-line process to mark as hidden. It’s a great way to find preferences folders, among other things. This shortcut has apparently been present for years and years—no one knows how long. When I ran a poll to ask people if they had encountered it, most had not.

I look forward to your questions, comments, and light ridicule.

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]

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