Instagram now defaults to showing other peoples accounts when you were last active using the Instagram application. For example, if you’re using Instagram right now then other Instagram users will be able to see that you are using the app at that moment. If you used the app exactly 23 minutes ago, other users can see that too.

Some Instagram users may enjoy broadcasting to the world when exactly they are using that specific application. On the other hand, privacy advocates and more casual Instagram users may not appreciate the broadcasting of app usage to other Instagram users.

If you want to disable the Activity Status feature on Instagram so that nobody will be able to tell when you were last using the Instagram app, we’ll show you how to do it.

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Uptime determines how long a computer or iOS device has been turned on for, or at least when the hardware was last booted or rebooted. On a unix machine or any Mac, you can check uptime with the uptime command or system System Information, but the iPhone and iPad has no such mechanism for seeing uptime by default. Fortunately there are a few third party apps available which can reveal device uptime in iOS, so if you want to know when an iPhone or iPad was last turned on or rebooted, you can uncover that information with the help of such an application.

We’ll cover two simple options to retrieve uptime information from an iPhone or iPad, so that you can see when the iOS device last went through a boot sequence.

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Imagine strapping an iPhone 7 to the bottom of an airplane, placing the camera into Panorama mode, and then flying around and capturing giant sweeping panorama images of the ground as you fly over it. The images would probably look pretty amazing, right? Well there’s no reason to imagine what they’d look like, because one photographer did exactly that.

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Apple has released macOS 10.13.3 High Sierra beta 7 to users enrolled in the MacOS beta testing programs, along with iOS 11.2.5 beta 7 for iPhone and iPad beta testers.

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iPhone has the capability to automatically answer inbound phone calls. Much as this sounds, with the auto-answer feature enabled, the iPhone will answer all phone calls automatically that come to the phone.

Auto-Answer Calls is an excellent accessibility setting that has many obvious uses and a wide range of applications for nearly all sorts of iPhone users, and there are some less-than-obvious uses for this setting too if you use your imagination a bit. If this sounds like an interesting or valuable feature to you, here’s how to turn automatic call answer on with the latest iOS releases.

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If you have more than one iOS device using the same Apple ID, let’s say an iPhone and an iPhone, you may have noticed that if you download an app on the iPhone, the same app will simultaneously download and appear on the iPad, and vice versa. This is due to an iOS feature called Automatic Downloads.

Automatic Downloads in iOS can be undeniably useful in some situations, but it can also be frustrating and unexpected, and can lead to a reduction in storage capacity on devices as they end up downloading the same apps whether you want the apps on both devices or not.

Like many iOS features, Automatic Downloads can be turned off. Once disabled, you will be able to download an app directly to an iPhone or iPad, and not have it automatically appear on the other iOS devices you own sharing the same Apple ID.

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Apple has released the sixth beta version of iOS 11.2.5 for users enrolled in the iOS beta testing program.

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Do you enjoy being pestered with annoying “Show Notification” requests from the many websites you visit from Chrome? Maybe you do, or maybe you don’t.

You’re likely familiar with the Chrome message that pops up intrusively on so may web pages, reading like “someURL .com wants to Show Notifications – Block / Allow”. Since these Show Notification requests are so pervasive, you’re probably quite skilled at clicking on “Block” by now in Chrome, but perhaps you’re tired of repeatedly doing so.

Fortunately you can completely disable the ability for websites to hassle you to show notifications in Chrome. Once you turn this feature off, you won’t see anymore of the annoying “blahblah wants to show notifications” requests popping up relentlessly across the web when using the Google Chrome web browser.

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Apple has released macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 Beta 5 to users enrolled in the Mac operating system beta testing program.

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If you frequently use AirDrop on the Mac to send and receive files between Macs or to and from iOS devices, you may appreciate having ultra-fast access to AirDrop by having it readily available from the Dock of Mac OS.

By using a little file system trick, you can gain direct access to AirDrop through the Mac Dock, rather than having to use the Finder to navigate to the file sharing feature. This guide will walk through how to set that up on Mac.

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Apple is running a handful of new commercials, one for iPhone X, and two additional commercials for the iPad Pro.

The new iPhone X ad focuses on the devices Portrait Lighting camera feature, which uses software to attempt to mimic various portrait lighting effects that you’d typically associate with studio lighting scenarios.

The new iPad commercials are shorter clips, one demonstrating taking notes with an Apple Pencil, while the other demonstrates so-called augmented reality apps.

The commercials are airing on television and around the web now, and have been embedded below for easy viewing:
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Looking for some nice subtle wallpaper to space up your device background? How about a spin on that classic good old water droplets default wallpaper from way back in iOS 4?

Well that’s exactly what these reader-provided high resolution images of water droplets offer, and at a hefty high definition resolution it looks great as wallpaper on an iPhone X, iPad Pro, iPhone Plus, iPhone, or even as the desktop wallpaper on a Mac or Windows PC.

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While Siri is perhaps best known as the voice assistant bundled on modern Macintosh computers and iOS devices, Siri can also be interacted with by typing out good old text commands.

By enabling Type to Siri on the Mac, you can use Siri sort of like a text based virtual assistant, where typing out “set a timer for 5 minutes” has the same effect as the same verbal pronunciation would.

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If you need to burn an .img image file to an SD card from a Mac, you may have discovered that there isn’t a particularly obvious way to do so with a default GUI app like Disk Utility. Not to worry though, an excellent free third party solution exists called Etcher, which makes burning image files to an SD card remarkably simple.

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Apple has released iOS 11.2.5 beta 5 to iPhone and iPad beta testers, just a few days after releasing beta 4 of the same system software version.

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You’re probably aware of Live Photos by now, the interesting iPhone and iPad feature that transforms a regular image capture into a brief movie clip. But the latest versions of iOS support an assortment of exciting Live Photo effects, including an ability to easilyy create beautiful long exposure images.

Long Exposure photography is typically left to the realm of more advanced digital cameras and a tripod, and by leaving the shutter open longer you get a nice blur effect of any motion. Thanks to the Live Photo effects features in modern iOS however, you can get this Long Exposure capability almost instantly on any Live Photo you have taken with the iPhone or iPad camera.

This tutorial will show you how to take and create long exposure images on an iPhone or iPad by using the Live Photos feature.

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If you’re an Android user and you wish you had iMessage on your device, you’ll be happy to hear about there is a solution that effectively brings iMessage onto an Android device. It’s called WeMessage, and it’s a third party effort that uses an interesting workaround to gain iMessage on Android devices.

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Apple has released the fourth beta version of iOS 11.2.5, macOS 10.13.3 High Sierra, tvOS 11.2.5, and watchOS 4.2.2 for users enrolled in the beta testing programs.

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