Troubleshooting

All Macs with OS X Mavericks, Yosemite, Lion, Mountain Lion, have a bootable Recovery partition that can be accessed in case of system problems, allowing you to troubleshoot, restore from Time Machine backups, and even reinstall Mac OS X. There are two ways to reach Recovery mode on a Mac: Hold down the OPTION key … Read More

The problems updating to Mac OS X 10.7.3 aren’t the only issues with Apple’s recently released Mac OS X updates, as MacRumors reports that SecurityUpdate 2012-001 aimed at Mac OS X 10.6.8 has caused significant problems with Rosetta apps in Snow Leopard. Applications effected seem to be anything that relies on Rosetta PowerPC support to … Read More

Mac OS X 10.7.3 update was just released, and for the vast majority of users the update installed trouble free. But not everyone was so lucky, and a series of problems have cropped up for some users, ranging from being stuck on an endless spinning loop progress indicator, to apps crashing nonstop, to a very … Read More

We’ve been made aware of some ongoing issues with apps crashing constantly on iPads running iOS, and all iPads are potentially impacted with Safari being particularly sensitive and seemingly crashing anytime javascript or a video loads and sometimes with just general web browsing. At worst, Safari won’t even launch and crashes immediately, and often the … Read More

iPhone serial numbers aren’t just randomly generated, they actually contain some interesting information about the device and it’s history, including what factory it was made in and when, the color of the iPhone, and it’s storage capacity.

Some users with the new Greenpois0n Absinthe jailbreak for A5 hardware are encountering a database error when they are at the end of their jailbreak and trying to launch Absinthe on the device itself. If you see the “Error establishing a database connection” at this stage in the process, it’s easy to fix: Launch “Settings” … Read More

SOPA and PIPA are two terrible internet censorship bills that are dangerously close to passage in the USA, and Wikipedia has blacked out their web site in protest. …but what if you really need to use Wikipedia today? What if you’re a student and your paper was due yesterday and you need to do research? … Read More

If you want an iPhone to appear as brand new from a software standpoint, you need to reset the device to it’s factory settings. This is ideal if you plan on selling an iPhone or are going to transfer ownership of the device to another individual, and it can also be a very helpful troubleshooting … Read More

Occasionally through the standard iOS upgrade process, but most commonly when jailbreaking, the iPhone can reboot and get stuck on the Apple logo at boot. This basically looks like the “” against a white or black screen. Turning the phone on and off generally doesn’t help, as you’ll be continuously stopped at the white Apple … Read More

Kext files are kernel extensions for Mac OS X, typically these are device drivers for hardware like the graphics card, wireless card, printers, etc. Most Mac users have no need to directly interact with .kext files, but for those who do, installing them can be annoying. Sure you can install .kext files manually by digging … Read More

The Apple Support Profile page provides an excellent dashboard to check technical support history, status, and warranty information for all registered Apple products under ownership. Assuming you have used the same Apple ID (email address) for all purchases and registrations, you’ll find every Apple item you’ve bought and registered here, including Macs old and new, … Read More

Wi-Fi Diagnostics is an incredibly useful utility to troubleshoot and optimize any wireless network and the signal strength of computers that are connecting to it. This utility first came bundled in Mac OS X Lion and works with all wireless routers and not only the Apple branded ones, meaning you can improve the performance of … Read More

From time to time, the iPhone Home button can become less responsive to clicks, and pressing the button will either result in a delay, lag, or sometimes complete unresponsiveness requiring multiple clicks. While this could be symptomatic of a hardware issue caused by moisture damage or dropping the phone, sometimes you can fix the response … Read More

The recently released iPhone 4S specific build of iOS 5.0.1 resolves an ongoing SIM card issue that was effecting some users. The issue would cause some iPhone 4S’s to not recognize a SIM card, with the iPhone reporting a “No SIM Card Installed” or “Invalid SIM” error message, in addition to the phone not connecting … Read More

If your iPhone Wi-Fi connection seems inexplicably slow, particularly when having moved from one wireless network to another, try manually setting custom DNS servers. This speeds up the response time and your wireless connectivity in general.

Completely disabling and reenabling Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mavericks can be done with the help of the Terminal. The following command unloads the Spotlight mds agent from launchd, thereby preventing the daemon from running or indexing any drives entirely. Open up the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) … Read More

The user caches folder sits in ~/Library/ and contains cache files from nearly all applications that are actively used in Mac OS X. While most apps maintain their caches reasonably well and don’t let things get out of control, some aren’t so good at it, and some apps leave behind rather large folders that serve … Read More

I’ve gotten in the habit of immediately putting my MacBook Air to sleep by shutting the lid, by far the easiest method if you’re on the go. Typically this works without a hitch, but today the Air didn’t sleep when shut. Because the MacBook Air has no moving hard drive or sleep light, I didn’t … Read More