Tips & Tricks

For those who read within the iBooks app of iOS, digital bookmarks are a very useful feature that work much like bookmarks do in a real paper book; you set a bookmark on a page, and you then have easy access for future reference, whether to find where you left off reading or to quickly … Read More

With new iPhone models just around the corner, many existing iPhone owners may be thinking about upgrading and selling their existing devices to jump to new models. But before putting your iPhone on the market or trading it in, be sure to prepare it for sale the right way by backing it up, clearing out … Read More

Did you know you can set iPhone photos to automatically backup to Dropbox? You can really never have too many backups of your most important files, and since our iPhone photos and pictures often fall into the ‘very important’ category, having an automatic backup solution directly from your iPhone can be a good idea. Yes, … Read More

If you need to know the disk performance of an external drive, you can easily go about testing the read and write speed of any such drive by using several third party apps. We’ll cover two, the first is aptly named Disk Speed Test, and the second is called Xbench. Either will work to determine … Read More

Wondering how to refresh a Finder window in Mac OS? There is no refresh button or keyboard shortcut for the Mac OS X Finder, something which can become a nuisance when a folder window or directory does not refresh contents after something has changed. That may be a fairly rare occurrence with a Mac built-in … Read More

iOS does not have an Activity Monitor or task manager the way that desktop Macs do within OS X, but if you’d like to see what apps and processes are running in the background of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can do so using a few different methods. For most users, simply showing … Read More

The Mac OS X Firewall provides an optional ability to block all incoming network connections , offering a significant security boost to Macs that are located in untrusted networks or hostile network environments.

You can easily configure Google / Gmail contacts to sync with an iOS device like an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This transfers all Google Contact details onto the iOS device, in addition to keeping all contacts in sync, meaning any changes made in one service will carry over to the other nearly instantaneously. This … Read More

Removing attachments from an email or everything in Mail app can be useful for a variety of reasons, from ditching a file that is no longer relevant to an email thread, to lowering the file transfer size when sending/replying to a message, or for more extreme cases for individuals with smaller hard drives, for reducing … Read More

New email arrivals display a small preview of the message itself on the lock screen of iOS devices, which shows the sender, the subject, and part of the actual email message body. Because emails can contain some very private and/or personal details, you may wish to hide those email message previews from showing up on … Read More

Got a song, podcast, or another audio track that you want to copy directly to your iPhone, but don’t want to add to your computers general iTunes library? You can skip adding the song to the computer iTunes library completely by using a simple but little known trick, letting you directly transfer music and audio … Read More

We’ve covered a handful of the best MKV player apps for the Mac before, but what if you have a Blu-Ray disc, DVD, or ISO that you want to make your own MKV file out of? Creating a watchable MKV file on your computer from a Blu-Ray or DVD is commonly called ‘ripping’, and that’s … Read More

LICEcap is a screen recording app that captures a portion of the Mac OS X (or Windows) desktop and saves it directly as an animated GIF. Incredibly simple to use, the apps functionality should be familiar enough to anyone who has used screen recording with QuickTime before, except that rather than a movie being exported, … Read More

Did you know that you can unlock an iPad or iPhone using an external keyboard, without ever having to touch the screen or hardware buttons on the device itself? This trick is particularly great for unlocking an iPad with an external keyboard, but it works with iPhone and iPod touch too.

With the help of a simple command line function, you can quickly initiate a web search in your GUI web browser of choice right from the Terminal app. We’ll cover a few examples, demonstrating searching the web with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, and using a variety of different web browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and … Read More

The Mac OS X Disk Utility app provides an ability to erase free space on traditional hard drives, which overwrites vacant disk space on the drive to prevent any potential recovery of deleted files (that is, files that have been removed traditionally, rather than through secure methods). For most users this is an unnecessary procedure, … Read More

If you’re comfortable with the command line and ever in a situation where you need to find and replace a word, phrase, URL, or character across a group of multiple text documents, perl does the job quite well. A simple command string will very quickly perform a group batch find and replace on text, whether … Read More

Visiting a new city, or maybe just a part of town you’re unfamiliar with? If you’re concerned you may forget where you parked your car (or bike, mule, horse, chariot, whatever), just pull out your iPhone at that location and use the Maps app to save the location. This simple trick means you’ll never forget … Read More