Tips & Tricks

The latest and greatest release of iOS 10 is here, and with the public release just around the corner it’s a good time to start preparing your iPhone and iPad hardware to install the iOS 10 update. Let’s walk through some important steps to prepare for the iOS 10 update the right way, including checking … Read More

Mac users who come from a unix background may appreciate knowing how to implement the equivalent to the Unix “tree” command in macOS and Mac OS X. There are actually a few different ways to show a folder tree in the Terminal of Mac OS X, we’ll cover an easy tree equivalent achieved through an … Read More

Ever wished you could make a dialog alert pop-up on the Mac by way of the Terminal? Well it turns out that you can with the always useful osascript command, which allows execution of AppleScript from the Terminal. For those who spend a lot of time at the command line of MacOS, this can be … Read More

Macs with access to a printer capable of printing double sided can print any document as a two-sided print, meaning that each page of the document will go on the front and back of the piece of paper, kind of like a book. This is a popular printing method for many situations, whether it’s manuscripts, … Read More

Resizing a picture changes the resolution of the image, either increasing or decreasing it as desired by the user. On the Mac, one of the simplest ways to resize a photo is using the bundled Preview application, which is available in all versions of macOS and Mac OS X.

Apple Watch includes a feature called Mark As Missing, which is similar to iCloud Lock for iPhones, and intended to be enabled if an Apple Watch is missing or misplaced. Once activated, an Apple Watch goes into an Activation Lock mode, which requires the associated Apple ID and password to be entered before the Watch … Read More

Do you have a great picture on your iPhone or iPad that you want to make a copy of, maybe so that you can apply some edits or color adjustments to the duplicate version without messing with the original copy? With iPhone and iPad, you can easily duplicate any picture, photo, image, Live Photo, or … Read More

Have you ever been looking at a web page or reading something in Safari on your iPhone and then accidentally closed it? Or maybe you closed the tab and then realized you weren’t quite finished with it, or you’d like to get that closed tab back for some other reason? You can easily re-open closed … Read More

The Mac Photos app includes a great red-eye removal tool, which makes quick work of getting rid of the glaring red eye effect which can sometimes happen with photos of faces. One of the curiosities of Photos for Mac though is the red eye tool is not always visible as an option, as the app … Read More

Just about every iPhone I know is perpetually full and constantly battling the various storage error messages, and yes mine is included in that group. Typically the nuisance of having full iPhone storage is limited to not being able to take anymore pictures (you can use a screwy workaround to snap a few more photos … Read More

Many Mac applications and downloads arrive as a PKG package file, but have you ever wanted to open a PKG file to view exactly what is being installed and where it’s going from the source .pkg? Assuming you get a .pkg installer from a trusted source like Apple there is generally nothing to be concerned … Read More

Some Mac users may require the ability to erase a disk or erase a hard drive from the command line on Mac OS, a task which is typically performed through the Disk Utility application from the GUI. The command line approach to disk erasure in macOS is a bit different and it requires precise syntax … Read More

There may come a time when you need to save or convert a Microsoft Word Doc or DOCX file to PDF format from a Mac. The advantages to saving a Word DOC as PDF are notable in that the PDF file becomes universally readable by any operating system with a PDF reader, even without the … Read More

Command line users are undoubtedly familiar with man pages, or manual pages, that contain details, help, and documentation to specified commands and functions. Referencing a man page can be essential when trying to learn proper syntax or how a command works, but with how large some manual pages are it can be a real drag … Read More

Photos app for Mac can not only manage your photos, but also any of videos that have been copied into Photos app from an iPhone or camera as well. If you have a movie file in Photos on the Mac that you like but it’s just a bit too long, or perhaps the action scene … Read More

If you’ve ever encountered a lengthy document or webpage that you want the gist of, but don’t have the time to read or scan through, you can use the excellent Summarize Service in Mac OS X to summarize the text for you. Summarize is adjustable as well, meaning you can choose how dense or light … Read More

Safari Tabs let you maintain many different webpages and web sites on the iPhone, switching through them as necessary to review different sites and content. For those of us who open a ton of tabs in iOS Safari, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by huge numbers of tabs as you browse more sites and pages … Read More

As many users know, using Two-Factor authentication for an Apple ID provides an additional layer of security for your Apple and iCloud login by requiring a pin code to be entered from an approved device before the Apple ID can be accessed. But the two factor auth feature is really built for modern iOS versions, … Read More