Tips & Tricks

Now that Siri can identify songs that are playing, similar to the Shazam app service, you’ll probably appreciate knowing that you can easily go back and see a list of songs that Siri has found and detected. This is great since it basically keeps a running tab of what music you asked your iPhone to … Read More

The Xbox One is a great gaming console with an excellent controller, and if you have a Mac with a few games you’d like to use a controller for, you can use a third party tool to gain Xbox One controller support for gaming in OS X.

By default, all calls on the iPhone will play audio through the standard earpiece at the top of the phone, and if someone wishes to use speakerphone they enable it manually by tapping on the “Speaker” button during an active call. While that may be the desired effect for most users, in various situations some … Read More

Two unusual error messages that can occur during the attempted installation of Mac OS X El Capitan or Mac OS X Yosemite are the “This copy of the Install OS X El Capitan application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading” error, or a “This copy of the Install … Read More

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