Tips & Tricks

Mac based web developers are probably familiar with manually starting and stopping the Apache web server in OS X through the command line by now, but if you want Apache to start itself automatically upon boot and reboot of a Mac, you’ll want to go a step further and use launchctl. By doing so, webdevs … Read More

Twitter is a really great social service which allows you to curate a feed of nearly anything that interests you, whether it’s news, tech advice, recipes, pictures, jokes, celebrity updates, whatever. But the Twitter app for iPhone and iPad defaults to auto-playing video and animated gifs on both wi-fi and cellular data, this is entirely … Read More

Ever wished you could set a Macs wallpaper image from the command line in OS X? As a matter of fact, you can change the desktop background picture from the terminal, which can be useful for a variety of situations ranging from inclusion in a setup script, to remote management, automating, or whatever else you … Read More

Though it’s generally recommended to use the ‘Default for display’ screen resolution option, Mac users who connect their computer to an external display or TV may find it helpful to be able to see, access, and use all possible display resolutions for a particular screen. This can be particularly useful if a display Mis either … Read More

When you connect an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a computer, you’ll see a familiar “Trust This Computer?” pop-up on the iOS device screen with two options “Trust” and “Don’t Trust”. If you intend to use the computer with the iOS device users will tap on “Trust”, which gives the computer access to the … Read More

Mac users who favor the Safari browser as their primary means of web access in Mac OS X may find it helpful to switch the search engine used by default in Safari. This determines which web search tool is used through the URL address bar and elsewhere in Safari. Safari allows you to choose between … Read More

Need to restore a Mac from a Time Machine backup? This article will show you how to do that. While Macs have a great reputation for being stable and rarely experiencing major issues, the reality is that sometimes things can go wrong. Typically this happens when either a hard drive fails or a Mac OS … Read More

Apple makes heavy usage of eye candy zooming and zipping around animation effects on Apple Watch, iOS, and OS X, which can look nice in some situations, but can also cause nausea and vertigo to some users who are particularly sensitive to the unpleasant sensation of motion sickness. If you’ve ever been using the Apple … Read More

The Mail app in iOS is one of the most used applications for many iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch owners, and that means it’s likely only a matter of time before you inadvertently delete or accidentally archive an email on the device that you didn’t necessarily intend to. This is fairly easy to do since … Read More

Whether you’re a multilingual iPhone or iPad user or just learning a foreign language, you almost certainly wish to change the language of the onscreen virtual keyboard from time to time. Switching the keyboard language in iOS is really quite simple once you have an alternate keyboard enabled, so let’s walk through the entire process.

The Siri voice assistant has many genuinely useful commands and features and a great sense of humor, but some users may wish to disable Siri on their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch for whatever reason. Of course, by turning off Siri, you won’t be able to access the personal assistant from anywhere in iOS, and … Read More

For Macs who have multiple user accounts on a single computer, sometimes you may log in to multiple user accounts concurrently. This leaves the prior user account logged in while another user account session opens. There’s really nothing wrong with that, aside from reducing available resources, but sometimes you may wish to log out the … Read More

Want to quickly import images into Photos app on the Mac? It’s quite easy to bring new or old pictures into the Mac OS X Photos app, and while there are actually many different ways to accomplish the importation, we’ll cover a few particularly fast methods. Whether you want to add pictures to Photos app … Read More

The Photos app in iOS includes a variety of excellent built-in editing features which many iPhone and iPad users are not aware of. One particularly great Photos feature is the ability to easily adjust color and light levels of any picture on the device within the photo library. The Color and Light adjustment tools allows … Read More

Typically if you’re looking to determine the file type and encoding of an item, you can simply look at the file in the Mac Finder, check the file name extension, Get Info about the file, or even open it to quickly find out what the file is. Of course, that’s limited to the user friendly … Read More

The Mac Finder offers a variety of methods of merging two folders contents together into a single directory. One option allows users to join different directory contents together that contain files with the same names, using the ‘keep both’ function in Mac OS X Finder.

While Macs usually work flawlessly, sometimes peculiar issues pop up. One such unusual case is when the USB ports on a Mac suddenly stop working, seemingly out of the blue. While there may be several reasons (or no reason) for USB ports ceasing to function with no cause, the good news is that it’s typically … Read More

A symbolic link created at the command line allows a linked object in the file system to point to an original object in a different location. In this way, symbolic links behave much like an alias does in the Mac OS X GUI, except that the linking and reference between files or folders is done … Read More