Tips & Tricks

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

Apple Watch is generally very stable and rarely needs to be rebooted or restarted, but sometimes it can become stuck, frozen, unresponsive, or a feature of Apple Watch may stop working as intended. Typically if those situations arise, you can get Apple Watch back to working order again by issuing a forced restart of the … Read More

Mac users who are searching for specific file type and file format matches on their computer can make the job dramatically easier by issuing proper search operators to the Find functions in Mac OS X. File type search operators can be used directly in Spotlight and also in the Finder based search function, and they … Read More

You almost certainly know that Siri can make phone calls from the iPhone with voice commands, but with new versions of iOS you have another great option; you can make calls that are automatically set to be on speaker mode. This Siri speakerphone call trick is particularly useful with “Hey Siri” voice activation, since you … Read More

If you’re not using Apple Music or listening to the subscription service, with no plans to pay for it after the free trial period, you can choose to hide Apple Music from iTunes on a Mac and from the Music app on an iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Hiding Apple Music is perhaps most useful … Read More

If you need to release and renew DHCP from the command line on a Mac, the helpful ipconfig utility is able to do so quickly. Do keep in mind that for most Mac OS X users, renewing a DHCP lease from the Mac System Preferences is the best approach because it’s user friendly and just … Read More

Apple Music offers a three month free trial to experience and explore the service, but at the end of that Music trial you will be automatically renewed into a $9.99 per month subscription service. For many users, they’ll appreciate leading into a subscription after their 90 day trial period is up, but for some other … Read More

At the command line, environmental variables are defined for the current shell and become inherited by any running command or process. They can determine anything from the default shell, the PATH, the users home directory, to the terminal emulation type, current working directory, where a history file is located, language and localization settings, and going … Read More

If you use Time Machine to backup a Mac to an external drive, you may decide to manually delete old backups that are no longer needed. Yes, Time Machine does it’s own housekeeping, but sometimes users need to manually intervene. This can be for a variety of reasons, whether for simple removal of old backups, … Read More

The popular messaging app WhatsApp has a default media saving setting which will automatically download and save every received picture and video to the iPhone Photos apps Camera Roll. While some users may like this feature, others may wish to change the auto-saving media behavior so that images and movies sent and received in WhatsApp … Read More

The new Force Touch trackpads available for some Macs are really quite impressive. By using a haptic feedback mechanism and a tiny little speaker, the pressure-sensitive trackpad mimics a click with multiple layers of depth by pushing feedback into your finger – the trackpad itself does not move or click down like the prior generation … Read More

Obviously nobody wants to be in an emergency situation, but if the need ever arises, Siri can come to your aid with a quick ability to dial the local emergency service line, and it works practically wherever you are in the world with the iPhone so long as it has a cellular connection. There’s not … Read More