Tips & Tricks

The latest version of iTunes has re-added the sidebar and made some other user interface changes designed to make using the app a bit easier to navigate. Most of the changes are welcome to iTunes, but one of the more unnecessarily difficult tasks remains selecting an iOS device in the iTunes app itself.

One of the most useful features of Mac OS X is the feature called data detectors, which allow users to highlight text and words to then get instant dictionary definitions, details about movies and other media, and, as we’ll show you here, you can even get data about airplane flights that are coming and going.

Connecting to wireless networks is pretty much mandatory these days, particularly now that most Macs only have wi-fi cards and no built-in ethernet, and so it can be incredibly frustrating to be unable to join a wi-fi network. Typically when you can’t connect to a particular wi-fi router on a Mac, you’ll see the error … Read More

When an iPhone user sends a text message to a non-iPhone user like an Android phone, the message is sent through SMS, as is indicated by a green message bubble. Sending text messages by SMS is also the fallback when an iMessage doesn’t send for whatever reason. Typically transmitting an SMS text message is very … Read More

When typing something into the search bar of Safari on the iPhone and iPad, you’ll see a list of suggestions popup underneath the address bar, offering completions, related searches, and something called Safari Suggestions. Sometimes these are really helpful as they can help search and access things on the web quicker, but sometimes the suggestions … Read More

You can easily save any webpage to iBooks as a PDF file for later reading on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch by using a new feature built into the action sheet of iOS. This ability will create a PDF of the active web page and store it in iBooks in iOS, available for quick … Read More

Have you ever restored the Safari browser only to have dozens of tabs and browser windows open, one or several of which are playing audio, and you then need to hunt down which browser tab is playing sound? This scenario happens fairly often to those of us who spend a lot of time in web … Read More

The Notes app for iPhone and iPad is widely used by many users for many purposes, whether for keeping a shopping list, password locked personal notes and data, a diary, sketches and drawings, checklists, or whatever else you may want to keep handy on an iPhone or iPad. Because much of the Notes data is … Read More

While enabling and using FileVault disk encryption is highly recommended for security-conscious Mac users with modern hardware and SSD volumes, some users may decide they do not need to use FileVault for a variety of reasons, or perhaps they just want to disable it for another purpose. That’s what we’re going to demonstrate here, disabling … Read More

Many people record video on the iPhone or iPad and have the device oriented vertically, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with that, a side effect is you end up capturing vertical videos with large black bars on the sides. Fortunately there’s an easy way to rotate movies in iOS with little effort, which … Read More

The excellent battery saving Low Power Mode available to iPhone users in modern versions of iOS typically requires being enabled through battery settings, but there’s an even faster way to toggle the feature on and off again at any time; Siri.

Longtime Mac users likely recall that Mac OS used to log in automatically when a computer was booted up or restarted. For security purposes this has changed over time, and for the most part Macs now request a login and password in order to successfully access a Mac and whatever documents and apps are contained … Read More

Rarely, Mac users may notice their clock is displaying the wrong system time. This typically occurs after a Mac has been shut down for an extended amount of time and hasn’t connected to the internet in a while, but it can also happen with traveling across date lines, between regions with daylight savings time observations, … Read More

Want to delete an Instagram account? Instagram is a wonderful social network for sharing pictures and moments, and now that Instagram supports multiple account switching you can easily change between personal, public, private, and work related Instagram accounts. But perhaps you don’t want to use Instagram anymore and want to remove your account from the … Read More

Getting the IP address of a connected router or default gateway is pretty simple in iOS, so if you find yourself in a situation where you’re using an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and need to get a connected router or gateway address, you won’t have to leave iOS to do so. This is frequently … Read More

Advanced users who spend a fair amount of time in the command line may wish to adjust their sudo password expiration to be more secure (or less secure, by extending the password grace period timeout). Typically this means removing any password timeout so that the default five minute password cache is abandoned, thus requiring the … Read More

If you’re a Safari user on the Mac, you’ve likely noticed that when you click into the address bar and start typing something to search for, you’ll quickly see suggestions of various things based on what you’re typing. These search engine suggestions can be undeniably useful for some cases, but they can also be completely … Read More

The iPhone includes a Voice Memos app that allows anyone to quickly record their voice, a speech, something nearby, or any other ambient audio from the devices built-in microphone. The resulting audio quality is quite good, and going further, you can save and share the recorded sound with another iPhone, Mac, Windows PC, Android user, … Read More