Troubleshooting

If you want to completely peg CPU to stress test a Mac, turn no further than the Terminal. Using the command line you can easily max out all CPU cores and induce huge load on a Mac, making it easy to determine things like what temperature the processor reaches under heavy load, if fans are … Read More

Other than the Maps issues, the App Store in iOS 6 is probably the next most talked about change of the latest iOS system software. Though it’s undoubtedly a better user experience in a lot of ways, one area that really suffers is speed, and a lot of users are experiencing very sluggish behavior in … Read More

Some iPhone 5 users are experiencing a variety of issues with wifi on the device, almost always revolving around inconsistently slow wireless connections. If you’re having this problem, you’re not alone, and the good news is you can almost certainly get an immediate improvement by setting manual DNS on the device. Fixing Slow iPhone 5 … Read More

Guided Access, or what we to call “Kid Mode”, is a fantastic addition to iOS that lets you lock an iPhone or iPad into a single app. Well, great when it works as it’s intended, but it appears there’s a pretty frustrating bug that makes the feature work a little too well once it’s enabled … Read More

OS X Mountain Lion has been a fantastic update for Mac users, but some of us on portable Macs discovered an annoying side effect of reduced battery life, often accompanied by a Mac that felt warmer to the touch. Those issues have been largely fixed with the OS X 10.8.2 update, making it a must-have … Read More

Rebooting a Mac from the command line is fairly simple, though it should be pointed out that most Mac OS X users are best served just using the standard  Apple menu method to issue a system restart. Nonetheless, for advanced Mac users, using the terminal reboot command can be an invaluable trick for troubleshooting … Read More

When you’re stuck staring at the grey lens shutter graphic for 5 to 10 seconds before you can even take a picture, you’ve likely already missed the shot you were hoping to get. Obviously the quickest way to access the iPhone camera is using the lock screen camera swipe instead of manually launching the Camera … Read More

A new potentially dangerous Java security vulnerability has been discovered that could allow malicious code to run on a Java-enabled computer, be it a Mac or Windows PC. Most Mac users will be safe from the vulnerability because OS X Mountain Lion does not include Java by default, and OS X Lion includes an older … Read More

One of the best ways to kid-proof (and generally fool proof) an iPhone or iPad is to turn off in-app purchases. That’s great for the iOS world, but for the desktop you can do something similar by disabling access to the iTunes Store completely, this will prevent unintended purchases of apps, music, movies, books, or … Read More

Battery life on portable Macs running Mountain Lion improved slightly with the OS X 10.8.1 update, but still generally underperforms the same Macs running Lion. Since updating to OS X 10.8.1 from 10.8, we have conducted several unscientific tests on a variety of different Macs and found there is a minor improvement to battery life … Read More

You’ll often hear Mac users reference their machines by a model and the build year (for example, Mac Mini 2010, or MacBook Pro 2016), or by a timeline within the year it was released (iMac mid-2011 model). Sure some Mac users just have an amazing memory for this stuff, but everyone else can retrieve the … Read More

Did you know you can quit multiple running apps at the same time on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? Thanks to multitouch support, you can actually quit as many apps as you can get your fingers on (literally). Here’s what to do on any iOS device running versions 6 or prior:

Whether you’re troubleshooting app crashes, beta testing an app, or you just want to help an iOS developer out after you’ve discovered a particular bug, you can retrieve crash reports from any app on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch device once it has been synced to a computer. Finding crash report data for iOS … Read More

Safari 6 changed the longstanding behavior of the Delete key, which used to navigate back a page when pressed but now does nothing. Instead, navigating web pages forward and backward is done through Command [ and Command ]. If you’d like to return the back-a-page navigation behavior to the Delete key within Safari, you can … Read More

OS X Mountain Lion has been a painless upgrade for most users, but there are a fair amount of people experiencing some unusual wireless connectivity problems and issues. Mainly, the wi-fi connection seems to drop at random, or the Mac simply won’t stay connected to a wireless network for long. Sometimes it automatically reconnects and … Read More

Autocorrect in iOS is pretty smart and usually gets things right, it also learns your habits and frequently typed words and will start autocorrecting what you type to the words you have used in the past. This can be a blessing and a curse, because if you accidentally corrected a word to a wrong one … Read More

Mac OS X defaults to preventing applications from unidentified developers or sources from being launched. You’ll discover the message in Mac OS when you try to launch a Mac app that didn’t come from a verified source or from the Mac App Store, and you’ll get an alert dialog that says “[App name] can’t be … Read More

After you’ve upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion on the primary Mac you bought it from, the installer app deletes itself from your /Applications/ folder. This makes sense for those who only own a single Mac, but if you plan on installing OS X Mountain Lion on multiple Macs or just want to create an … Read More