If you select Get Info (Command-I) for a folder in the Finder, and select the Action menu at the bottom, you’ll find a command called “Apply to enclosed items…” If you make any changes to the Sharing & Permissions section, you can use this command to apply the changes to all items within the folder (as opposed to just the selected folder itself). Unfortunately, if you are running Lion (OS X 10.7.3 or older), this can lead to a host of problems. Possible symptoms include a persistent failure to save changes made within System Preferences and/or a loss of changes made to Dock icons. Happily, the fix is fairly simple: Update to the newly released . Next, , select the “Apply to enclosed items…” command for your Home directory folder, click OK when requested and wait for the process to complete.

I use TextEdit so often that I leave it permanently open. This appears to precipitate some odd symptoms. On several occasions, after TextEdit has been open for a long while, TextEdit claims that it is no longer able to Save documents. In one instance, TextEdit also refused to open existing documents, claiming that it had “insufficient permission” to do so (even though it had never had difficulty here before). In all cases, the solution was easy: Quit TextEdit and relaunch it. Everything then works fine again… until the next time that it doesn’t.