The Mac file system received tabbed window support in OS X Mavericks, which also caused opening new Finder windows into launching new tabs rather than an actual new Finder window. While this helps to cut down on window clutter when browsing the file system, it can also be kind of frustrating if you want to … Read More

Many Mac users rely on iPhoto for their image management and to pull pictures from a digital camera, an iPhone, or Android, a generally flawless experience that makes handling tons of digital pictures easy. But once in a blue moon iPhoto goes awry and you may experience a variety of peculiarities with the image database, … Read More

Creating a series of nested directories within one another can be done instantly through the command line. This makes it very easy to immediately and recursively create a complex directory structure of folders within subfolders of subfolders, without having to navigate manually into each directory to create a new directory, then navigate again to that … Read More

Have you ever wanted to just copy a song or two over to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad from iTunes, only to have iTunes try to sync a whole barrage of unwanted music to the iOS device? That happens due to iTunes AutoFill, a feature that some users may enjoy as it will fill … Read More

Bored with your current wallpaper? Why not spruce up your home screen or desktop picture background with one of these four seven nine (added a few more per request) galactic-ish crazy colored abstract spacey-themed images?

Both the actively applied Camera filters and the later added Photos apps based color filtering in iOS can add some nice stylizing effects to pictures, helping to give them a unique look, but if you decide you’re no longer wanting an image to be filtered through a crazy color lens, you can actually easily remove … Read More

Graphics and large stylized text blocks constructed entirely out of the ASCII keyboard characters is called ASCII art. You may have seen it with the goofy ASCII Star Wars thing, but once upon a time it was very popular to stylize messages and images on BBS’s, IRC, MUDs, message boards, and across the early days … Read More

The next time you’re at the command line and need to eject every single mounted volume, hard drive, disk, disk image, and/or external drive attached to a Mac, you can instantly eject them all in one fell swoop with a handy osascript command string. This is great if you work frequently in the Terminal and … Read More

iMessage sends text messages, pictures, and movies over cellular data rather than through the traditional SMS and MMS protocols, but have you ever wondered just how much of an iPhone data plan all your iMessage use is consuming? It turns out that you can find this information through a somewhat buried location in iOS Settings, … Read More

Many iPhone users rely entirely on the iPhone as their camera of choice, so why not take the best pictures possible? That’s what these Camera app tips are for, helping you snap better photos and making you a better photographer by taking advantage of some of the wonderful features that are built into the camera … Read More

Mac OS X comes with a bundled port scanner tool, just one of a variety of features tucked into the ever useful Network Utility app. That means you don’t need to bother with the command line or install more advanced tools like nmap to quickly scan for open ports on a given IP or domain, … Read More

The iPhone and iPad Calendar app defaults to starting a week on Sunday, which is the generally accepted standard of most US calendars. Meanwhile, some other nations start the calendar week on Monday, and some users just prefer to start the week on the first weekday of Monday rather than the weekend of Sunday anyway. … Read More

Many iPhone and iPad users know that Siri has a huge range of capabilities surrounding specific actions, but fewer know that Siri can also serve more obscure functions, like generating a random number for you. This is handled through Siri’s data connection through Wolfram Alpha, and it’s effective at truly randomizing integers similar to the … Read More

Those of us who have been using an iPhone or iPad for a while have likely acquired a sizable amount of iOS apps through purchases, downloads, promos for temporarily free apps, and general promo code redemptions, many of which end up deleted or removed after the initial install. If you ever want to quickly see … Read More

Ever needed to remotely check the battery level of a Bluetooth keyboard connected to a Mac? Or maybe you’re just a heavy Terminal user and wanted to see the current battery life of a wireless keyboard without having to leave the command line? You can do that easily through the Terminal of either a remote … Read More

Mac users who primarily browse the web with Safari will eventually notice the “Flash out-of-date” message appearing somewhere in the browser. This happens because the Mac will intentionally disable the Flash player plugin when it has become outdated, preventing any potential security breaches from occurring. As you probably guessed, this just means you need to … Read More

Apple has released iTunes 11.2.1, an update that, curiously, resolves the issue where some users encountered their /Users folder gone missing along with changed permissions to the same directory. Initially thought to be a bug with the OS X 10.9.3 update, apparently the problem was actually related to the accompanying update to iTunes.

Update: iTunes 11.2.1 resolves this problem, making the Users folder visible again while also turning the directory permissions back to normal. All Mac users should install iTunes 11.2.1, even if they only updated to iTunes 11.2 and did not update to OS X 10.9.3 yet.