Dictation on the iPad and iPhone converts your words into text, it can make typing in iOS easier but it’s also easy to accidentally activate with an inadvertent touch. For a variety of reasons you may want to either turn it on or off, and if you don’t use Dictation it’s simple to disable which also hides the little microphone button from appearing on the keyboard.
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If you’ve ever wished you could check up on your house while you’re away, wish no more because we have a simple solution. We are going to configure a Mac as a home security camera that will open a live video stream on demand which can be watched remotely from anywhere via an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or another Mac. If this sounds potentially complicated, it’s actually not at all, and everything is achieved through a little FaceTime hackery. Read along to get the Mac security cam configured in no time at all with just about any version of Mac OS X and iOS!

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Ever noticed that when you copy an email address from OS X Mail app and paste it elsewhere that you get the addressees full name as well as their email address? Try it yourself by right-clicking on someones email address like someonesname@domain.com and copy it, then paste it elsewhere and it will show up as “Someones Name “, which can be fairly annoying if you just want an address.

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The next time you’re in desperate need to crack open a beer bottle, reach for your iPad power adapter. Say what? Well, apparently it can double as a bottle opener, not that we’d recommend that.

This may be the ultimate Apple-geek party trick and I’m sure college students the world over are rejoicing in their dorms right now at this exciting new discovery, but that doesn’t mean anyone endorses this practice or that we’d recommend you trying.

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Many people equate productivity with screen size and assume it’s difficult to get much work done on a small screen. That simply isn’t true, I use a MacBook Air with the 11″ display and use the following tips to stay focused and maximize productivity with the small screen.

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We’ve shown you how to generate MAC addresses randomly and then how to go about changing a MAC address in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, but why have those be two separate actions? Using the command line, you can combine the two events into a single action to generate a valid MAC and then set it immediately.

Launch the Terminal and paste the following onto a single line:

openssl rand -hex 1 | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' | xargs echo "obase=2;ibase=16;" | bc | cut -c1-6 | sed 's/$/00/' | xargs echo "obase=16;ibase=2;" | bc | sed "s/$/:$(openssl rand -hex 5 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]')/" | xargs sudo ifconfig en0 ether

There is no confirmation or output, the MAC address is set immediately which you can verify with the following command:

ifconfig en0 |grep ether

You will probably need to reconnect to the wireless router after issuing the command, and in some cases turn wi-fi on and off again.

If you intend on using this often, setting up an alias in .bash_profile would be a good idea to avoid having to cut and paste the massive block of text.

Thanks to osmium for the great tip

Apple has issued an update to OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3. The new build comes as 12A193i and is available through Software Update, which in turn downloads through the Mac App Store, making the update available to all developers with OS X Mountain Lion DP3 currently installed.

Noticeable changes in the new OS X 10.8 build are to Mission Control, Messages, System Preferences, Notifications Center, iCloud integration, and Preview app, but otherwise there do not appear to be significant differences in the Developer Preview 3.1 update. Of course, many bug fixes and resolutions to issues identified in the previous build have also been included, and an update to XCode 4.4 Developer Preview 4 was released alongside the update to build applications for the latest developer release.

OS X Mountain Lion is scheduled to be released to the public in late summer of 2012 and is expected to have more stringent system requirements than OS X Lion.

Full Screen apps in Mac OS X are managed by Mission Control, this means that if switch beween or gesture swipe from one full screen app to a desktop or another app, it follows the order of desktops and apps shown at the top of Mission Control. This also means that you can rearrange the placement of fullscreened apps easily just by clicking on one of the app windows and dragging and dropping it beyond another Desktop or full screen app. Now anytime you swipe between desktops or apps, you’ll find the app in its new placement.

We’ve covered a similar tip showing how to move Desktops around to rearrange their order within Mission Control as well.

If you’ve ever tried to do web research with concurrent browser windows from the iPad, you’ve probably found yourself either opening tons of Safari tabs, emailing yourself lots of links, dumping things into Pocket or a similar app, or just giving up and getting on a Mac laptop. A better solution is an iOS app called Dual Browser, which as you may have guessed splits the browser window so you can view two web pages at the same time, side by side.

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Each time you connect an iPhone, iPad, or iPod to a computer, iTunes launches and immediately begins to automatically sync all content between the iOS device and the connected computer.

If you’re annoyed with the auto-syncing aspect of iTunes, or you just want to disable it on an auxiliary Mac or Windows computer, here is how to do so.

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Did you take a great picture with your iPhone, but your iPhone camera orientation was upside-down or sideways? This happens pretty often, and if you ever need to correct the orientation of an image by rotating or flipping a photo, you can easily do so right on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

The image rotation and flipping tools are built directly into iOS, there is no need to download additional software for this purpose. Here is how to easily correct and rotate an photo directly on the device:

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Do you want to join a group of songs together in iTunes to play together as a compilation, even when iTunes (or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod) is set to shuffle through a music collection? It’s easy, here is how to set this up:

• Open iTunes and select the songs you want to join together as a group with gapless playback
• Right-click on a song and choose “Get Info” to modify the group of songs
• Click on the “Options” tab, then set “Part of a compilation” to “Yes” and “Gapless album” to “Yes”
• Click “OK” to modify the track group

The selected songs are now linked together as a compilation and with gapless playback, meaning there won’t be any delays between one track ending and another starting. This also means if the song comes up in Shuffle, it will play as a gapless compilation rather than a single song.

Compiled songs will play together as groups even when synced to an iPod, iPad, or iPhone, and also when played through iTunes Home Sharing, though the individual tracks are not actually joined together into a single file.

This is a great setting to enable for albums or song groups that are meant to be played continuously where one song flows directly into the next, like Dark Side of the Moon.

Update: some users are having problems with this setting for whatever reason, apparently unchecking the “Part of a compilation” option fixes the gapless playback issue for many. This may depend on iTunes version, let us know what works for you in the comments!