Tips & Tricks

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

We all need as much help as we can get with email, and that’s why we’re offering up a slew of tricks to help master the Mail app on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. With ten tips ranging from having more emails be visible and stored on the device, to bulk management, to replying … Read More

Apple TV makes rearranging the app icons easy enough, but you can also hide channels, services, icons, and apps that you don’t want visible on the screen at all. This is useful as a way of tidying up the Apple TV home screen of apps or services you never use or aren’t interested in watching … Read More

You can switch hard drives that Time Machine backs up to easily, but to properly migrate from one Time Machine backup drive to another and preserve the existing archived backups, you’ll want to take a few additional steps to insure that your existing prior backups are safely moved over as well. This is an easy … Read More

Standby mode is a power saving feature that automatically hibernates a Mac after it has been in sleep mode for a while, which it does to further decrease drain on battery. When a Mac using FileVault encryption is placed into standby mode, a FileVault key (yes, this key is encrypted) is stored in EFI (firmware) … Read More

The default font size for messages and texts on the iPhone is fairly small, and while it may look fine to many users, it’s simply too tiny to be easily readable for others. iOS makes it easy to change the text size though, offering a wide range of options that are suitable for just about … Read More

If you’ve ever wanted to watch all data transfer and bandwidth usage while you browse the web you’ll know it’s not necessarily an easy task. Thankfully, a little-known feature contained within the excellent Google Chrome web browser provides a simple solution, and it allows for easy monitoring of how much data is consumed in a … Read More

Some Mac users overlook a feature in macOS / Mac OS X that allows them to attach an Apple ID to their actual user account, not just to iCloud and the App Store. It only takes a moment to set, and it provides for an incredibly simple password recovery option at the login and boot … Read More

Every once in a while an iOS device or app will get stuck in the wrong orientation, unresponsive to rotating the device and it either stays in portrait or horizontal mode, despite every effort to rotate the device any which direction. Though this seems to happen more often on the iPad than the iPhone or … Read More

Different Mac models use different types of RAM, and each also supports a different maximum level of RAM. Unless you spend a lot of time upgrading and repairing Macs yourself, you probably don’t know these exact details off the top of your head, and that’s just fine because the information can be retrieved directly from … Read More