Tips & Tricks

If you’re buying a used iPhone or repairing an iPhone, you may wonder if you can find out if the iPhone was bought as new, is a refurbished model, or is a replacement device provided by Apple via a service request. Wonder no more, you can use an interesting device model identifier trick to discover … Read More

Siri for iOS can now play short daily news digests by request, allowing you to quickly hear news recaps from some popular mainstream news outlets and media sources. This is a handy feature if you want to get a quick blurb about what’s apparently newsworthy on a given day, and it works the same on … Read More

You probably know the various different methods for how to force quit apps on the Mac by now, but a lesser known capability is that Mac OS allows you to force quit multiple apps at the same time. This can be a great trick when troubleshooting, as well as a just a nice way to … Read More

Type to Siri for iOS allows you to interact with Siri by typing text commands on an iPhone or iPad, using either the onscreen software keyboard or an external keyboard. All of the Siri commands you’re used to using work through Type to Siri, it’s just the command entering process that is different as you … Read More

If you’re tired of the “Upgrade to macOS High Sierra” notifications nagging your Mac to install a system software update that you perhaps have made a conscious decision to avoid, then you will likely appreciate this tip to completely stop the upgrade macOS notifications. As you likely know by now, there is no way to … Read More

Instagram now defaults to showing other peoples accounts when you were last active using the Instagram application. For example, if you’re using Instagram right now then other Instagram users will be able to see that you are using the app at that moment. If you used the app exactly 23 minutes ago, other users can … Read More

Uptime determines how long a computer or iOS device has been turned on for, or at least when the hardware was last booted or rebooted. On a unix machine or any Mac, you can check uptime with the uptime command or system System Information, but the iPhone and iPad has no such mechanism for seeing … Read More

iPhone has the capability to automatically answer inbound phone calls. Much as this sounds, with the auto-answer feature enabled, the iPhone will answer all phone calls automatically that come to the phone. Auto-Answer Calls is an excellent accessibility setting that has many obvious uses and a wide range of applications for nearly all sorts of … Read More

If you have more than one iOS device using the same Apple ID, let’s say an iPhone and an iPhone, you may have noticed that if you download an app on the iPhone, the same app will simultaneously download and appear on the iPad, and vice versa. This is due to an iOS feature called … Read More

Do you enjoy being pestered with annoying “Show Notification” requests from the many websites you visit from Chrome? Maybe you do, or maybe you don’t. You’re likely familiar with the Chrome message that pops up intrusively on so may web pages, reading like “someURL .com wants to Show Notifications – Block / Allow”. Since these … Read More

If you frequently use AirDrop on the Mac to send and receive files between Macs or to and from iOS devices, you may appreciate having ultra-fast access to AirDrop by having it readily available from the Dock of Mac OS. By using a little file system trick, you can gain direct access to AirDrop through … Read More

While Siri is perhaps best known as the voice assistant bundled on modern Macintosh computers and iOS devices, Siri can also be interacted with by typing out good old text commands. By enabling Type to Siri on the Mac, you can use Siri sort of like a text based virtual assistant, where typing out “set … Read More

If you need to burn an .img image file to an SD card from a Mac, you may have discovered that there isn’t a particularly obvious way to do so with a default GUI app like Disk Utility. Not to worry though, an excellent free third party solution exists called Etcher, which makes burning image … Read More

You’re probably aware of Live Photos by now, the interesting iPhone and iPad feature that transforms a regular image capture into a brief movie clip. But the latest versions of iOS support an assortment of exciting Live Photo effects, including an ability to easilyy create beautiful long exposure images. Long Exposure photography is typically left … Read More

If you’re an Android user and you wish you had iMessage on your device, you’ll be happy to hear about there is a solution that effectively brings iMessage onto an Android device. It’s called WeMessage, and it’s a third party effort that uses an interesting workaround to gain iMessage on Android devices.

SF Mono is a really nice monospaced font available to Mac users within Terminal and Xcode, but you may have noticed that SF Mono is not available outside of those two apps. If you’d like to use SF Mono font elsewhere in MacOS and in other Mac apps, follow the instructions below to install the … Read More

One way to increase security in the Google Chrome web browser is to enable strict site isolation, which causes each page renderer process to contain pages from only a single site at a time, effectively placing them in a per-site sandbox. Theoretically this could help to mitigate against certain security risks, like those posed by … Read More

If you want to show the Mac desktop quickly, the fastest way to do so is often with a keyboard shortcut to reveal the desktop. This approach will push aside all on-screen windows, apps, and other information, and show only the Mac desktop – all without closing any apps. These tricks can offer a fast … Read More