Tips & Tricks

A fun little-known feature of Messages for iOS is that it supports animated gifs, meaning you can send and receive those quirky moving web graphics that were so popular in 1996 and are currently enjoying a resurgence on the web. The only requirement for this feature to work is that both you and the recipient … Read More

Gmail recently revised the default inbox to automatically sort inbound emails into several categories that are represented by tabs across the top of the inbox: Primary, Social, Promotions, and Updates. Though this may help to manage some inboxes, it can also be frustrating as some emails are improperly sorted. Additionally, many users prefer to have … Read More

Most iOS users encounter “Other” for the first time when they connect their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a computer, where they’ll find it listed in the little iTunes usage bar graph. With everything else so well labeled, Other can be a bit of a mystery, particularly when it takes up a ton of … Read More

If you’re looking for the public facing external IP address that the outside world sees of an iPhone, iPad, (or any smartphone for that matter) when using a cellular data connection or ISP, you won’t find the external IP alongside the local IP in iOS Settings. Rather than poking around in the devices confusing field … Read More

All modern Macs are pretty fast these days, but sometimes we all need a performance boost to get things done as efficiently as possible. That’s what these simple tricks are aimed at, they will help you speed up any Mac and get the absolute best performance out of the Mac OS X machine by having … Read More

If you plan on giving an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a child, take a moment to set up some very basic parental controls on the device by using the Restrictions feature of iOS. It only takes a minute to configure, and this will prevent the access of inappropriate content, avoid mature themed media, … Read More

The lock screen camera is one of the more handy features of the iPhone, but the iPad does not have that same quick-to-access camera option. That doesn’t mean you can’t take pictures directly from the lock screen on the iPad, you just have to use Siri to launch directly into the camera app from the … Read More

In an unusual and fairly rare situation, the Mac cursor can randomly disappear from OS X. More accurately, the cursor itself becomes invisible, because you can still click around on the screen but without being able to see what the mouse or trackpad is focused on. This seems to happen out of the blue, and … Read More

Tor is a free anonymity network that aims to conceal a users location and browser usage from snoopers, in addition to allowing access to websites that are otherwise blocked or filtered out through firewalls. The official description of the Tor browser and network is described as follows: The Tor software protects you by bouncing your … Read More

Older versions of Google Maps for iOS have native support for the iPad, but perhaps the most useful feature of the new Google Maps app is the ability to cache maps for offline use on the iPhone. It’s really easy to use, so the next time you’re expecting to venture off into an area with … Read More

Need to quickly get your external IP address from the command line for SSH or otherwise? No sweat, you can use either the curl command or dig to extract the information quickly from a variety of sources. We’ll focus on two different options that have proven to be reliable over time, the first is quite … Read More

The iPhone autocorrect feature is fairly aggressive with certain words and phrases. Though you can persistently cancel out the corrections to teach autocorrect what you actually meant to type, you still might find particularly colorful words are continuously autocorrected to much friendlier variations, often involving animals, which if you’re trying to sound a certain way … Read More

Though the iPad Picture Frame feature is nice, having it appear on the lock screen can be a problem. For one, it’s very easy to accidentally tap which is just frustrating, but perhaps more important is the potential privacy issues caused by Picture Frame defaulting to show the entire Photo app Camera Roll. This means … Read More

Moving all contacts from an Android to an iPhone may sound complicated, but it’s actually really easy. What you’ll need to do is sync the entire address book from the Android device to Google’s cloud Contacts service, and then use Google Contacts service to transfer them to the iPhone. The result is that you’ll have … Read More

Lavabit is a secure and encrypted email platform that has been getting a lot of attention lately in light of recent news events. Lavabit aims to prevent reductions of privacy, and so not only does Lavabit have excellent antispam and antivirus features along with your standard email niceties like autoresponders, its most relevant feature at … Read More

Talking calculators are very useful, whether for accessibility reasons or just for entering a lot of numbers that you want to be sure are correct by hearing the auditory response. Thanks to the Mac’s excellent text-to-speech abilities and a simple settings adjustment, you can transform the bundled Calculator app in Mac OS X into a … Read More

Tired of the “Sent from my iPhone / iPad” default signature of Mail app in iOS, and want to replace it with something fancier, like a fully functional HTML signature with clickable URLs and some rich styling? There are a variety of ways to accomplish this, but by far the fastest way to get an … Read More

Shuttle is an excellent little Mac app for those who frequently use SSH to connect to remote or local servers. It’s functionality is very simple: you gain a little SSH menu bar item that pulls down to give you super-quick access to whichever servers you have configured. Selecting one of the servers immediately launches terminal … Read More