Many Mac users like to keep a watchful eye on their system stats, including processor utilization, memory usage, disk activity, network usage, CPU temperature, fan speed, and perhaps battery stats. The Activity Monitor Dock icon offers one way to do this, but it’s on a limited basis, so if you’d rather see all kinds of system resource activity in a single control panel you may appreciate these two Notification Center widgets for Mac OS X.

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Though most iPhone and iPad users likely don’t closely follow Android news, a new beta version of the next Android OS release came out recently, and long with it arrived a pretty nice default wallpaper too.

The Android N default wallpaper image is of some distant hills or a mountain range silhouetted against a pink dusk sky, the type of scene you’d see if you were out past suppertime in an area without light pollution. So why not appreciate the imagery and set it on your iOS device or Mac as the background picture?

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Having used a relatives computers recently I discovered their Google Chrome web browser was constantly throwing a “Your connection is not private” error message on many web pages, thereby preventing the page from loading unless they chose to ignore and reload the ‘not private’ page. The “not private” message can be a little disconcerting, so it’s no wonder it can alarm some users. Interestingly, this error was turning up both on their Mac OS X Chrome browser, as well as a separate Windows computer that was also using the Chrome web browser, and they were convinced they had been the victim of some elaborate hack.

Well, rest assured there was no hack. It turns out this is a remarkably simple error message to fix in Google Chrome, and so if you experience the “your connection not private” error message on any computer, you can quickly resolve it regardless of the error being encountered on a Mac or Windows PC.

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The zipping zooming flying around animations strewn throughout iOS are activated when opening and closing apps, switching app screens, tapping settings, and doing just about anything else on an iPhone or iPad. This motion eye candy causes some users to experience nausea, but aside from that they also make the device feel a bit slower since performing just about anything on an iPhone or iPad has to render and draw the eye candy animations on screen. One common trick is to enable the faster fading transitions in iOS instead by turning on Reduce Motion, but if you want to completely disable animations for a while, you can rely on a bug in iOS instead.

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iPhone and iPad users have long been able to zoom into still photos and pictures on their devices, and now with the latest versions of iOS, you can zoom into and out of videos and movies that are playing as well.

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The Pangu group has released a new jailbreak for 64-bit iPad and iPhone devices running iOS 9.1, including iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.

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Plist files contain preference specifics and properties relevant to a particular application or portion of Mac OS X system software. Depending on where the plist file is located and what function they serve, they can either be in XML format, binary format, and sometimes even json. For users who need to modify a plist file or convert the file format to or from XML and binary, you can do so easily in the OS X Terminal with the help of the plutil command.

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Apple is holding an event on Monday, March 21, at their Cupertino campus location, according to invites sent to selected media members (us not included). The invitation email reads “Let us loop you in” and features the top of an Apple logo with space grey, silver, gold, and rose gold pastel shapes.

Several new products are expected to debut at the Apple event, including a revised 4″ iPhone, a revised iPad 9.7″, and a variety of new Apple Watch bands. System software updates are also presumed to arrive as well.

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iOS includes a helpful feature which allows users to zoom into anything on an iPhone or iPad screen to make it easier to read text and view elements. While this feature is undeniably useful for many users, it can also be a source of frustration for others who wind up enabling the feature accidentally, only to discover their iPhone screen is stuck in zoom mode.

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Launchpad is the quick application launcher available from the Mac OS X Dock and a keystroke that looks quite a bit like the Homescreen of iOS. By default, the Launchpad app grid usually displays icons in 7 rows and 5 columns of apps, but with a little adjustment from the command line of OS X you can switch and customize the Launchpad icon grid to any number of apps you’d like to see on the Mac.

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One of the more useful 3D Touch tricks is the ability to preview a link before opening it, allowing iPhone users a way to quickly see a preview of a webpage link before loading the entire thing in Safari. This can be activated from an email, from messages, or Safari itself, and it helps to determine if a link is what you’re looking for or worth opening. It’s use case is quite similar to previewing links with multitouch on the Mac, and it works much the same as well.

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The Mac Messages app allows users to delete portions of a conversation and specific messages contained within a thread, without clearing out the entire chat transcript. This targeted message removal feature is helpful if you want to delete a part of a chat that is best left private, or perhaps because it contains sensitive data, a secret, or maybe it’s just outright embarrassing. Whatever the reason to remove just a segment of a conversation in Messages for Mac OS X, it’s easy to do, if not completely obvious.

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FaceTime is the lovely video chat service that is available for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac OS X, and while it’s a lot of fun to use and helps keep people in touch, something to keep in mind is that FaceTime can use quite a bit of data as it’s essentially streaming and uploading video simultaneously. If you just use FaceTime on a wi-fi connection then this likely won’t matter much, but for cellular users it can be good to keep track of that sort of thing.

You may also just be curious how much data gets used during a FaceTime video call or audio chat, and fortunately iOS makes that really easy to find out on a per call basis.
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Apple has released a bevy of beta software updates for users participating in the public beta and developer beta testing programs, including iOS 9.3 beta 6, OS X 10.11.4 beta 6, watchOS 2.2 beta 6, and tvOS 9.2 beta 6. Each new build continues to emphasize bug fixes and refinements to the beta releases as the final version approaches.

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An images color saturation is expressed by the intensity of the color of a picture, thus a picture modified with higher saturation will appear with vivid colors, and a picture with the lowest saturation winds up turning a picture to black and white. Adjusting saturation is a common photo editing technique to both enhance or decrease the vividness of a pictures color, and for the purposes here we will show you how to increase (or lower) the color saturation of any image in Mac OS X using the built in Preview app.

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Many of us like scenery and abstractions as a desktop background, but sometimes simple desktop wallpapers are best if you’re trying to stay focused. And of course, others may just prefer a more minimalistic look to their wallpaper.

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Some Mac users have discovered the sidebar to be missing in the Open and Save dialog windows that appear throughout Mac OS X. Since the sidebar contains quick access links to various points in the file system, including user directory pictures, documents, the desktop, Macintosh HD, and tags, this can be frustrating and lead to a more difficult file opening and saving process.

Fortunately the missing sidebar in dialog windows is easy to fix, so follow along and you’ll have it back in no time at all.

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For those of us with larger storage size iPhone and iPad models, backing up the device locally can be a burden on limited disk space. A simple solution to this storage dilemma is to backup an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to an external hard drive instead, where disk space is often more abundant. We’ll walk you through how to get this setup in Mac OS X, so that any locally made backup from iTunes goes to an external disk rather than the internal drive, thereby helping to preserve local disk space and offload storage requirements.

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