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A missing key in virtual macOS
British and US English are so different they require separate keyboards: ISO in the UK, and ANSI in the US. They’re easy to distinguish as the ISO version, used in Europe and much of the rest of the world, has different left Shift and Return keys. Count the keys, though, and there’s a more ‘sinister’ difference, as the ISO keyboard has an extra key at the left of the numbers.
Apple supplies ISO keyboards and layouts for many languages, but macOS virtualisation for Apple silicon Macs is an exception as it only supports ANSI. In practice, the difference you’ll notice is that missing key: in ISO English layouts, it won’t cause a problem, as that provides § and ± symbols. But in French, the ANSI layout loses @ and #, which are commonplace in computing, and make a virtual machine almost unusable.
If your provider only allows web access to email, set it to forward everything to another account from where you can collect it.
Blocked email accounts
Q MyISP says it’s going to block basic authentication, so I can’t collect my email using an app on my Mac, but have to use its web interface. How can I keep my local mailboxes?
by OLLIE HAWKSWORTH
A SomeISPs are telling those with bundled mail facilities that this authentication block is being done by Microsoft to improve mail service security, and there’s some truth in that. What’s being done is to remove authentication using a username and password.
That has been replaced with modern authentication, typically OAuth2. That requires your mail client to run a one-time setup with the mail server, so it can log in and fetch your mail using either POP or IMAP, and send using SMTP. But those providers aren’t enabling that to let Microsoft’s own Outlook 365 or clients like Postbox collect their mail securely. Instead, the only services they’re supporting are webmail, or Outlook on iOS or iPadOS.
The best workaround is to set up accounts with another mail provider like Gmail, Titan or another, and set your original mailboxes to forward email to that account, from where you collect and read them using your email client. That’s easy to configure in Outlook’s webmail, although you’ll still want to check your original mailbox on the web from time to time.
Quick-fire questions
Why won’t my iPad connect to the App Store?
> Ensure your device has a good Wi-Fi connection. Shut it down, and wait 30 seconds before starting it up again. Then check in Settings > [your name] that it’s signed in correctly with your Apple ID. If those are good, check service availability at bit.ly/ mac395sysstat.
How to tell which apps track my location?
> Tap Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services to see a list of all the apps you’ve allowed to access your location data. To tell which use that the most, those that have accessed location in the last 24 hours are marked with grey arrows; those that have accessed it most recently have purple arrows.