Using Filevault on a Mac encrypts the entire hard drive and helps protect personal data from theft or unauthorized snooping. It’s a great security feature that many users enable when they’re first setting up their Mac, but some users may enable it or disable it later as well. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but if you enable FileVault at a later date it may take longer to encrypt the disk as more data must be encrypted.

Accordingly, it can be helpful to check the progress of FileVault disk encryption to know how far along the encryption or decryption process is.

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The latest versions of iOS for iPhone include an excellent Magnifier feature which can turn the iPhone camera and screen into a magnifying glass. This has many potential uses, but perhaps the most useful in day-to-day life is as a reading aid to read tiny text without squinting and straining your eyes. Instead, you can quickly access the iPhone camera magnifier to zoom into and clarify what you are looking at, just like a real magnifying glass.

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Apple is running an all new iPhone commercial focusing on the devices camera. The commercial spot is called “One Night” and apparently includes a collection of photos and videos captured with iPhone 7 on a single night around the world, backed by a jazz soundtrack.

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Have you ever wanted to know what every single possible terminal command was on a Mac? You can list every terminal command available by turning to the command line. What you’ll see is a significant list of terminal commands with over 1400 possible commands to investigate and use, many of which are either helpful or powerful as we regularly cover with our command line guides. Of course many of the commands listed will have no relevance to the average user, but it can still be helpful to be able to navigate through the list and investigate each command and its respective purpose.

We’ll show you how to list every single terminal command available on a Mac, as well as how to get an explanation and details on each specific command that is shown.

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Apple has released the second beta versions of iOS 10.3, tvOS 10.2, watchOS 3.2, and macOS 10.12.4.

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Using copy and paste on iPad and iPhone is easy, and much like copying and pasting on a desktop computer or Mac, you can copy just about anything to the iPad clipboard and paste it just about anywhere that will accept input. Whether you want to copy and paste a text clip, a photo or picture, video, drawing, or nearly anything else does not matter, as long as you can select it, it can be copied and then pasted elsewhere into a different app.

We’ll show you how to copy and paste using the iPad contextual menus found in iPadOS and iOS, as well as a few handy tricks unique to iPad that allow you to paste any copied data by using the onscreen keyboard, or using keystrokes to cut, copy, and paste with iPad and Smart Keyboard. All of this applies to copying and pasting on iPhone as well, but we’re focusing primarily on iPad here.

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The New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons face off in Super Bowl 51 tomorrow, and if you’re interested in catching the game live, you can turn to your iPad, Mac, Apple TV, or iPhone to stream the game live and probably for free too.

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Embedded video playing in Messages is one of the more subtly helpful and interesting features available on modern versions of iOS and Mac OS. Essentially what this means is that when you or someone else sends a video link through the Messages app, say a YouTube or Vimeo link, the thumbnail of the video that is shown is actually playable directly within the Messages app – no need to open a web browser, you can just tap and play the video directly.

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The ‘ls’ command lists all files and folders in a directory at the command line, but by default ls returns a list in alphabetical order. With a simple command flag, you can have ls sort by date instead, showing the most recently modified items at the top of the ls command results. This trick applies to the ls command output in Mac OS / Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, as well as Bash in Windows.

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Some Mac users may wish to verify the integrity of their Time Machine backups before using a snapshot or backup to restore a Mac using Time Machine.

This verification offers a simple way to know if the Time Machine backup data stored on an server or Time Capsule has been modified or corrupted, and can be a helpful troubleshooting trick for some situations.

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The latest versions of iOS replaced the longstanding “Videos” app with a new app called “TV” that includes an all new interface to manage movies and videos downloaded to an iPhone or iPad. While the old Videos app made it simple to delete and remove movies from the iPhone or iPad, the new TV app offers a less obvious method of removing video from an iOS device that is unique to deleting things inside the TV app.

We’ll show you two different ways how to delete a downloaded movie from the TV app within iOS.
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Need to reset the password on macOS Sierra? Maybe you forgot your primary admin user account password or maybe you’re working on someone elses Mac and you need to gain access to it. We’ll show you the easiest way to reset the password on a macOS Sierra based computer.

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If you use the Mac Photos app for managing your pictures and you have a modern iPhone, you’ll likely have some (or many) Live Photos stored in your photo library. You can easily change any Live Photo on the Mac from the video picture form back into a still photo, and it’s fairly easy as we’ll demonstrate.

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Curl is the powerful command line utility that allows you to transfer data to or from a server or URL. One common function used by developers is to make a POST request with curl, which is what we’re going to cover here.

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Read Receipts in iMessage allow the sender of a message to know when a recipient has received it, and both the Mac OS and iOS Messages apps support this feature when communicating with other iMessage users. But many Mac users don’t want to send Read Receipts to everyone, and with the latest versions of Mac OS you can now selectively choose who to send read receipts to. In practice, this is basically the same as turning on Read Receipts for specific contacts on iPhone and iPad, except it applies to reading and sending iMessages from the Messages app on the Mac.

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Want to add some music of your own music that is playing on your iPhone to your Instagram story? Using a fancy little trick, you can easily play a song and have that song recorded as a background soundtrack for an Instagram Story video that you post to the social network.

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Mac users with an Apple Watch can unlock their Mac by simply wearing their watch, thereby bypassing the need to enter a password at the boot and login screens. This great feature makes logging onto and unlocking a Mac remarkably easy and quite fast for Apple Watch wearers, but you’ll have to enable it first.

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Wondering how to play Live Photos in the Photos app on Mac? Fortunately it’s quite simple, and there’s no use of 3D Touch or any funky tricks necessary.

In fact, in some ways it’s actually easier to play a Live Photo picture video in Photos for Mac than it is when viewing Live Photos in Messages for Mac, and you just need to hover over the picture in Photos app to get the Live Photo to play.

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