Tips & Tricks

Some Mac users have discovered the Safari web browser has become significantly less stable after updating to some versions of Mac OS X system software including OS X El Capitan, OS X Yosemite, and MacOS Sierra. This can range from periodic crashes of Safari that never happened before, to Safari freezing up entirely, to Safari … Read More

The Mac has long had currency conversion tools available through Calculator app and Dashboard with the Converter widget, but the latest versions of OS X have an even faster option available with Spotlight, which can provide current exchange rates and conversions on the fly. You will need to be running at least OS X 10.10 … Read More

Many Mac users check the About This Mac Storage tab to get a quick overview of their disk space usage, and many will see a rather large “Other” storage space taking up disk capacity on their drives. If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because iOS often has a rather large Other storage space, but that’s … Read More

The iOS Photo Stream feature is a really great way to share photos between friends and family who also have an iPad or iPhone. Each shared Photo Stream and the associated images are kept in iCloud, viewable through the “Shared” tab in the Photos app, where they are cached temporarily as you look at them. … Read More

If you have an Android phone or tablet that is no longer in use and gathering dust, selling it or giving it to a new owner is often a good idea. Before you do that though, you’ll almost certainly want to erase all personal data on the phone by resetting the Android to the factory … Read More

Repairing Disk Permissions is a simple procedure that Mac users can run with the Disk Utility app or through the command line, and, as the name suggests, it repairs the permissions of various files on the target drive. Repairing permissions can be helpful when troubleshooting some fairly specific issues, or after installing or uninstalling a … Read More

While you can turn a song into a ringtone using iTunes, another option to make custom ringtones is to create one yourself, directly on your iPhone using the Garageband app. This is a nice solution since it does not involve a computer or iTunes, and the entire ringtone or text tone creation process can be … Read More

The default text size used by Terminal app in OS X can be quite small if you’re using a large resolution display. While you can change the font to be better suit your preferences, and increasing the line spacing helps reading too, another simple solution to boost readability is to simply increase the text size … Read More

Need to reset the entire printing system on a Mac? You can do that if you need to. Printer problems are notoriously frustrating for any computer user, and while Macs get off a bit easier than the alternatives out there, there can still be some pretty annoying issues that pop up with printing in Mac … Read More

In some unusual and admittedly rare situations, fonts in OS X and various Mac apps may display erroneously, or outright fail to display. Typically this happens after a font has been modified or a font has been installed outside of the standard ~/Library/Fonts directory, but it can happen out of the blue in some situations … Read More

All new iPhone models can capture and record high quality slow-motion video by flipping to the ‘slo-mo’ setting in Camera app. Perhaps lesser known is that you can change the Frames Per Second (FPS) capture speed for slow motion video, which basically determines just how smooth and slow the video playback is, but also has … Read More

Many Mac users probably don’t think twice about the color that shows up when they select and highlight text or some app elements in Mac OS X, which defaults to being blue. But if you’re the type of user who likes to customize things a bit, you may appreciate knowing that you can choose nearly … Read More

If you’re fed up with auto-correct on the iPhone erroneously changing words to things you did not intend to type, you can opt to disable the auto-correction feature completely in iOS. Doing away with this feature is not recommended for most users, but choosing to turn off autocorrect can be a reasonable solution for some … Read More

When you hit the green maximize button to resize windows on a Mac or send things into full screen mode, a fancy visual animation shows the redrawing of the window size as the active window expands outwards. While this looks great and many users will be happy with the default resizing animation time in OS … Read More

If you’re a Mac user who finds the text output shown within Terminal app to be a bit too confined and tightly spaced, you’ll be pleased to discover that you can adjust the line spacing to accommodate your preferences. You can boost line spacing within Terminal dramatically or just a little bit (or if you … Read More

Raise To Listen is a handy feature in modern versions of iOS that allow you to literally raise your iPhone to listen to a received audio message and to respond by sending a new voice text. But the feature is not entirely reliable for all users (particularly those who use an iPhone case, more on … Read More

Have a few favorite Instagram filters that you want easy access to? Never use some of the other filters and you want to hide them? You can now do both, rearrange your photo filters so that your preferred choices are in whatever order you’d like, and you can hide the filters you don’t like or … Read More

Many of us use the iPhone as our primary alarm clocks, but if you’re a heavy sleeper then the volume of the alarm may not be sufficient to pull you out of a deep slumber, and you can easily dismiss the alarm in a half-awake state which doesn’t help much either.