Tips & Tricks

Dictation on the iPad and iPhone converts your words into text, it can make typing in iOS easier but it’s also easy to accidentally activate with an inadvertent touch. It works quite well, you just press the microphone button on the iOS keyboard and it listens to what you say, and then converts your speech … Read More

If you’ve ever wished you could check up on your house while you’re away, wish no more because we have a simple solution. We are going to configure a Mac as a home security camera that will open a live video stream on demand which can be watched remotely from anywhere via an iPhone, iPad, … Read More

Ever noticed that when you copy an email address from OS X Mail app and paste it elsewhere that you get the addressees full name as well as their email address? Try it yourself by right-clicking on someones email address like someonesname@domain.com and copy it, then paste it elsewhere and it will show up as … Read More

Many people equate productivity with screen size and assume it’s difficult to get much work done on a small screen. That simply isn’t true, I use a MacBook Air with the 11″ display and use the following tips to stay focused and maximize productivity with the small screen.

We’ve shown you how to generate MAC addresses randomly and then how to go about changing a MAC address in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, but why have those be two separate actions? Using the command line, you can combine the two events into a single action to generate a valid MAC … Read More

Full Screen apps in Mac OS X are managed by Mission Control, this means that if switch beween or gesture swipe from one full screen app to a desktop or another app, it follows the order of desktops and apps shown at the top of Mission Control. This also means that you can rearrange the … Read More

Each time you connect an iPhone, iPad, or iPod to a computer, iTunes launches and immediately begins to automatically sync all content between the iOS device and the connected computer. If you’re annoyed with the auto-syncing aspect of iTunes, or you just want to disable it on an auxiliary Mac or Windows computer, here is … Read More

Did you take a great picture with your iPhone, but your iPhone camera orientation was upside-down or sideways? This happens pretty often, and if you ever need to correct the orientation of an image by rotating or flipping a photo, you can easily do so right on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The image … Read More

Do you want to join a group of songs together in iTunes to play together as a compilation even when iTunes on a Mac or Windows PC (or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod) is set to shuffle through a music collection? For example, let’s say you have a large album you want to shuffle between, … Read More

Whenever a new Terminal window is launched, a variety of system logs are read to provide information on the last login. One way to speed up launching a new terminal window is to delete those .asl log files, but you can achieve a substantial speed boost by simply setting Terminal to open a shell rather … Read More

Firefox is a great web browser but it has a few quirks that make it a less than ideal browser for OS X Lion and Mountain Lion users. A major issue is scrolling performance, which can stutter or appear slow and clunky, it’s noticeable enough that certainly anyone who has used Firefox in Mac OS … Read More

Using sysctl we can get extended information on a Macs processor, covering everything from CPU brand and identifier, clock speed, number of cores, thread count, thermal sensor data, cache size, and some significantly more technical information. This is a handy way to get detailed processor specs and info without turning to the system profiler in … Read More

You probably know that tapping once on the screen within the Camera app will cause the iPhone to automatically focus and adjust exposure to that region in the viewfinder, but if you’re trying to take a picture with challenging lighting or depth conditions the auto adjustments are not always ideal. Instead, use the excellent focus … Read More

Login Items are applications and helpers that launch immediately when a user logs in to Mac OS X. These apps and utilities are easily adjusted and managed in system preferences on a user level, but you can also temporarily disable them on a per-boot and per-login basis if need be. To stop the automatic login … Read More

iPhoto for iOS has a great feature that lets you wirelessly beam pictures from one iOS device to another, this means that if you’re editing a photo on an iPad you can immediately send it over to an iPhone and vice versa, without ever leaving the app. Launch iPhoto on both iOS devices Tap the … Read More

If you’ve opened the sim card tray on a newer iPhone, you’ve probably noticed the card is considerably smaller than an average sim, these tiny cards are known as a micro SIM. The smaller SIM format is gaining traction but there are still tons of cell providers and phones that use the regular sized SIM … Read More

Mac OS X Lion introduced the file locking feature, which causes any files to automatically lock themselves after a period of time to prevent accidental edits from occurring. You’ve probably seen the resulting message lock before, informing you a file has been locked because recent changes haven’t been made. The time it takes for that … Read More

Modern versions of OS X allow you to share files securely with another individual without creating a new user account for them. Instead, authentication gets handled by the individuals Apple ID, and a separate password is set to allow that Apple ID to share files and folders on your Mac. This can be preferable to … Read More