Once a wi-fi network has been joined in OS X, the Mac will default to joining that network if it’s within range and available again. This is undeniably convenient for joining our home, work, and regular wireless networks, but it can be a nuisance when the Mac rejoins a network that you no longer want to connect to. While setting the wi-fi network priority is one option, another option is to have the Mac “forget” the network, preventing it from automatically rejoining again. This is particularly helpful if you live or work within an area that has open networks available that you do not accidentally want to join.

Forgetting a wi-fi network in Mac OS X is very easy, though the option is a bit more hidden than some users may expect. Fortunately, like the iOS counterpart, learn to drop a network once and you won’t have to wonder how to do it again in the future.
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This weeks featured Mac setup is the desk of Stephen G., a web programmer with a genuinely awesome quad display configuration. If you’re wondering how this great setup gets used, or if you’re just curious how on earth to drive three additional screens off of a MacBook Pro in a similarly sweet four-panel layout like this, read on to learn much more…

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The Macs default boot login screen is fairly boring by default, and though it can be spruced up with custom wallpaper, another option is to set a screen saver to run at the login window of OS X. This requires using a defaults command string entered at the command line, which then makes the screen saver visible at the boot login window of OS X, as well as the general login screen if all users have logged out of the Mac.

There are some limitations as to what types of screen savers you can use, but overall it’s fairly flexible, and is supported in virtually all semi-modern versions of OS X, from Snow Leopard to Mavericks. Any of the image slideshow screen savers work, and a few of the Quartz Composer screen savers too, but third party screensavers are not supported, and neither are RSS feeds, iPhoto based slideshows, or iTunes artwork. That may sound a bit limited, but you’ll still have some good options available, including Floating, Flip-up, Reflections, Origami, Shifting Tiles, Arabesque, Shell, Flurry, and Message.

Launch the Terminal, found in /Applications/Utilities/ to get started.

1: Define the Idle Time for the Login Screen Saver

First you’ll need to define an idle time before the login screen saver appears, the syntax for this is as follows:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.screensaver loginWindowIdleTime 60

The number at the end is the idle time in seconds, thus in the example above, 60 means the screen saver will start after one minute of being idle. You can set it to be more or less aggressive according to your preferences.

2: Choose What Screen Saver to Display at the Mac Login Window

Now you’ll want to set the actual screen saver itself. Remember there are some limitations about which are allowed, but we’ll make it simple with four examples that work without incident. Copy and paste any of these commands into the terminal to set it, the sudo prefix means you’ll need to enter an administrator password for the command to work.

Set the floating Message as the login screen saver in OS X

This is likely the most useful screen saver option setting for large deployments of Macs and public machines in general:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.screensaver loginWindowModulePath "/System/Library/Screen Savers/FloatingMessage.saver"

If you’re going to use the Message screen saver, be sure to set a custom message in the Screen Saver preference panel, otherwise it will default to showing the Mac’s computer name.

Set Arabesque as the login screensaver

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.screensaver loginWindowModulePath "/System/Library/Screen Savers/Arabesque.qtz"

Set Shell as the login window screensaver

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.screensaver loginWindowModulePath "/System/Library/Screen Savers/Shell.qtz"

Set Flurry as the login screensaver

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.screensaver loginWindowModulePath "/System/Library/Screen Savers/Flurry.saver"

You’ll want to log out and back in for the change to take effect, you can then test it out by logging out or rebooting and letting the Mac sit idle for the allotted time. If the screen saver doesn’t trigger automatically, you may have entered the wrong syntax, so double-check that the path is correct, and that the command syntax is proper and entered on a single line within the Terminal.

Thanks to Nor Eddine for the passing along this trick from Apple on the OSXDaily Facebook wall.

Most smartphone owners are pretty set on their preference towards the iPhone or Android, but that doesn’t mean you can’t cross-pollinate a bit… at least with your device wallpaper. With the general bright-color trend, many of the Android wallpapers look absolutely fantastic on the iPhone and iPad too, and some of the KitKat wallpapers are even large enough to work on the desktop.

We’ll focus on my three personal favorites here; the infamously bright pink mountains from KitKat, and the multicolor craziness from the new S5. You can also opt to grab the full pack of 12 wallpapers too, which include seven from Android 4.4 Kitkat, and three wallpapers from the newly released Samsung Galaxy S5.

Click any of the thumbnails below to open the full sized wallpaper:
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Ever launched the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad to discover an “Unsent Message” indicator at the bottom of the screen? An email usually goes unsent if you lose internet access while trying to send the message, a fairly common occurrence for those who live in areas with poor cellular reception or that have flaky internet access in general. While iOS will usually successfully send the message on it’s own once a signal has been found again, it doesn’t always work, which is why you may need to trigger a resend yourself to move it along as intended.

We’ll cover how to see what email message got stuck without sending, and, more importantly, how to re-send that unsent message so that it goes to the recipient as intended. You’ll obviously need an “Unsent Message” message within Mail on an iPhone or iPad for this to work as described here, otherwise you’ll just end up in an empty outbox within the Mail app of iOS.

1. Double-check that the iPhone / iPad / iPod has an active internet connection
2. From the Mail app, tap on the “Mailboxes” text at the top of the Mail window
3. At the Mailboxes panel, choose “Outbox” to see the unsent messages



• To re-send the unsent message, use the pull-to-refresh option by pulling down at the Outbox screen until the spinning indicator shows up
• To delete the unsent message, tap on “Edit”, tap the message, and choose the Trash icon

Assuming you chose to resend the message, a “Sending # of #” indicator will appear at the bottom of the Outbox with a blue progress bar. When the message has finished sending, it’ll disappear from the Outbox to show a “No Mail” screen.

As mentioned before, unsent messages are almost always a result of internet connectivity difficulties. If you continue to have trouble with a cellular network try joining a wi-fi network, or resetting network settings. If the message continues to appear in Mail app, you may want to check outbound Mail server settings, otherwise simply removing the Mail account and re-adding the same account again usually resolves the problem.

Most command line users rely heavily on Terminal keyboard navigation to move about within text files and get around within the Terminal, but OS X has a super simple trick up its sleeve that lets you instantly position the mouse cursor anywhere in the Terminal. Yup, no more tabbing around or repeatedly tapping on the arrow keys, you can just point and click to focus the cursor in the Terminal, just like it was the GUI, and it works the same whether the cursor destination is at the beginning/end of a line or smack dab in the center of a text block.
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Playing YouTube videos and audio in the background of iOS is an easy way to listen to a song or show that you want to stream to your iPhone, but the ability to play that stream in the background has changed a bit with the newest versions of iOS. As many recall, users on the iPhone and iPad with prior versions of iOS used to be able to start playing a video or music from YouTube and then just switch out of the app to keep the audio playing in the background of iOS, but it’s not quite the same anymore. While you can continue to listen to YouTube video and audio streams in the background, you’ll have to rely on a slightly different method.

Forget the official YouTube app for now, because at the moment in order to play a YouTube video with audio in the background of iOS 7, you’ll need to use the Safari web browser instead, then you can trigger the audio stream into the background from Control Center. It sounds more confusing than it is, and after you do it once or twice you’ll get the hang of it rather quickly, so follow along to learn the new backgrounding process.

Backgrounding YouTube Streams on the iPhone / iPad

1. Open Safari app (yes, Safari, not YouTube) and go to the YouTube.com website to find the video to play
2. Start playing the video from the YouTube website as usual by tapping on the (>) play button
3. Once the video has started playing and gone full screen, hit the Home button on the iPhone to go to the Home Screen – this will temporarily stop the audio



4. Swipe up from the bottom of the display to summon Control Center, you’ll see some gibberish URL under the scrub audio tools, now tap the Play button in Control Center to start playing the audio
5. Swipe down to close Control Center, the music/audio will continue to play from YouTube

That’s all there is to it, the YouTube audio will continue to play until the video itself has finished playing.

If you’re doing this on an iPhone that is not connected to wi-fi, the video will stream using the cellular connection instead. That includes starting the video on wi-fi, but using Control Center to start the stream in the background later when away from wi-fi. Just be aware of that, since streaming video and audio can be heavy on the bandwidth usage.

Unfortunately, YouTube Playlists don’t seem to be supported, so if you want to hear another video you’ll need to go back to Safari and start to play it again, then use the Control Center trick to again start the audio stream.

It’s not entirely clear why the YouTube app doesn’t have native support to play audio in the background of iOS, though it first occurred when the Apple’ provided YouTube app disappeared. Presumably this is a limitation from Apple since most other apps also do not allow background audio either, suggesting this is not a feature that Google intended to leave out of the native iOS YouTube app. At least there’s a workaround, even if it’s not perfect.

This works the same with YouTube in Safari for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, running any version of iOS beyond the 7.0 release. Enjoy.

OS X includes many smaller details that can make digital life much easier, but because they’re fairly minor features, they can often go overlooked by Mac users. An excellent example of such a feature are the transfer progress indicators that are native throughout OS X, these make it extremely easy to keep an eye on the progress of files you’re downloading from anywhere, whether it’s from a website, SFTP, AirDrop, or even file transfers between Macs on the same network. The two most useful places to find these are right in the Dock and the Finder of OS X.

See the Download Progress Indicator in the Dock

Often overlooked, particularly if you’re one to auto-hide the Dock, the simplest place to watch file transfer progress is right in the Dock of OS X. To have access to this download indicator, you’ll need to maintain the users “Downloads” directory as a Dock item, if you pulled it out at some point simply drag it back into the Dock again.

If you’ve never noticed this before, simply start downloading a file to trigger it:

If you have multiple files downloading concurrently, clicking onto the Downloads folder in the Dock will reveal details for each file. Using the mostly unloved “Fan” view for Dock folder expansion shows this best:

Because this watches the ~/Downloads folder and nowhere else, you’ll want to be sure to keep all file downloads, whether from your default web browser to elsewhere, are congregated into that directory (note that most apps default to putting things into the Downloads folder, it’s usually a user made change). That’s good practice anyway, and it makes it much easier to perform necessary cleanup if you’re running low on hard drive space or just want to dump the download contents from time to time.

See the File Transfer Indicator in the Finder of OS X

While the Dock Downloads indicator shows the progress of files being downloaded to that specific location, it turns out all Finder windows offer a file transfer indicator. This means that any file being copied, downloaded, or moved to just about anywhere on the Mac will show you a progress bar.

To get the most use out of this, you’ll want to use the Finder in a List view option, though the indicator will also popup onto icons if you prefer icon view.

Note the file name of the document(s) being transferred is a lighter shade of grey, it will turn black when the file is finished. This offers another simple indicator that a file transfer is active, though it won’t give you an idea of duration as the progress bar does.

Tracking download progress is also possible elsewhere in OS X, including the Mac App Store and iTunes too.

With so many holidays scattered throughout the year, it’s easy to lose track of when is what, and on which day the next falls. Fortunately, the Mac Calendar app makes it simple to toggle the display of all holidays directly in the Calendar app, so you’ll never lose track over what date Palm Sunday, Earth Day, Thanksgiving, or Cinco De Mayo (ok that one’s easy) is, whether it’s this year or the next.
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All iOS users know the familiar “ding” alert sound of a new email landing in the inbox of your iPhone or iPad. For those of us who live attached to technology, these alert sounds have basically trained our brain to stop what we’re doing and check our inbox, often relying only on the mute button or Do Not Disturb function to get a break.
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If you’re a regular reader here, you already know that Siri can be used for directions, and you know there’s plenty of funny commands to ask, but this one is an unexpected combination of both… Grab your iPhone (or iPad) and ask Siri to find you a 7-Eleven (yes the global 24 hour convenience store), you’ll get a rather unexpectedly hilarious response. For whatever reason, whether it’s intentional or Siri is trolling everyone, Siri turns your 7-11 inquiry into a math problem.
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