What do you do when you need to restart a Mac you aren't in front of, especially if getting to that Mac requires a car or airplane? Restart it remotely, from the Mac you're in front of -- or even your iPhone. The Mac Observer's Dave Hamilton shows you how.

Creating .zip archive files on our Macs is a handy way to enhance our file organization. Additionally, it's practically required when sharing or distributing one or more files. This article talks about a utility found on every Mac that let's you manage various aspects of file archive creation.

Apple released Java updates for Mountain Lion, Lion and Snow Leopard on Thursday that addressed security issues and also push users to Oracle's own Java plug-in for the Mac.

Through the mists of time comes an ancient feature from the days when our little Mac friend was still a toddler. The feature is still with us, and it's called the Stationery Pad. In this how-to, Sandro Cuccia shows us where it came from, how to use it, and better yet, why you might find it useful today.

Apple released OS X 10.7.5 Wednesday, an update that adds the company's Gatekeeper technology to Lion for the first time. The update also includes a few bug fixes.

After upgrading to Mountain Lion, many users complained of reduced battery life. Many owners of Mac laptops said that a similar reduction in battery life ocurred after the upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion. In repsonse, we took a 2011 MacBook Pro all the way back to Snow Leopard and tested battery life on each version of OS X to date. Read on to see what we found.

Selecting "About This Mac" under the Apple menu leads you to vital information about your machine. All your system information and hardware specifications are displayed. Having these "vitals" handy is important when it comes to obtaining technical support and getting your Mac upgraded or serviced. It will also help you determine if your Mac is eligible for system software upgrades when certain minimum hardware requirements are specified.

The GIMP team released its first ever Mac-native version of the GIMP image editor on Wednesday. Earlier versions of the Photoshop-ish image editor required users to install the X11 windowing system instead of running as a native OS X application.

World travelers, take note—if you want to set a different country format for the address of every contact you have, you can. After you read this tip, you will no longer have to fit the address of your girlfriend from Burkina Faso to the format of your default country. Which is almost as neat as having a girlfriend from Burkina Faso in the first place. Or knowing where Burkina Faso is, for that matter.

Circus Ponies released a new app on Wednesday called iTrash that gives Mac users more control over their OS X Trash. On the light side, the software includes 20 different animated icons for the trash can. On the more serious side, it offers users greater control over trash emptying functions and the desktop placement of your Trash.