Ever wished you could make a dialog alert pop-up on the Mac by way of the Terminal? Well it turns out that you can with the always useful osascript command, which allows execution of AppleScript from the Terminal. For those who spend a lot of time at the command line of MacOS, this can be a great little trick to notify you of when a specific task has completed, or even to be included as part of a script. This is sort of a visual approach to one of my favorite simple Terminal tricks which is to verbally announce when a command line task has completed.

Let’s review how advanced Mac users can trigger alert dialog boxes in the MacOS GUI from the command line. You can choose to specify a specification application to trigger the pop-up alert to appear within, or, perhaps better yet, trigger a alert dialog in whatever the foremost application in Mac OS X is.

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Macs with access to a printer capable of printing double sided can print any document as a two-sided print, meaning that each page of the document will go on the front and back of the piece of paper, kind of like a book. This is a popular printing method for many situations, whether it’s manuscripts, manuals, documentation, books and novellas, and even just for people who want to save paper.

You can print double-sided on a Mac with Microsoft Word, Office, Pages, PDF files from Safari and Preview, and many other apps, and the feature works on all versions of macOS and Mac OS X as well, as this tutorial will detail through the relatively easy process.

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Resizing a picture changes the resolution of the image, either increasing or decreasing it as desired by the user. On the Mac, one of the simplest ways to resize a photo is using the bundled Preview application, which is available in all versions of macOS and Mac OS X.

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Apple Watch includes a feature called Mark As Missing, which is similar to iCloud Lock for iPhones, and intended to be enabled if an Apple Watch is missing or misplaced. Once activated, an Apple Watch goes into an Activation Lock mode, which requires the associated Apple ID and password to be entered before the Watch can be paired and used again – even if the Apple Watch is erased. Enabling activation lock on Apple Watch also disables Apple Pay cards, so if you’ve setup the payment feature for the Apple Watch, you won’t need to worry about someone using it if you lose the device.

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Do you have a great picture on your iPhone or iPad that you want to make a copy of, maybe so that you can apply some edits or color adjustments to the duplicate version without messing with the original copy? With iPhone and iPad, you can easily duplicate any picture, photo, image, Live Photo, or video using a simple iOS copy trick.

Let’s review how to quickly duplicate copies of a picture or video in the iOS Photos app.

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Warcraft 3 was (is?) a popular strategy game which was released in 2002 for Mac and Windows. It’s obviously not exactly a new game, so why bother discussing it now? Well in short, because Mac users can install and play Warcraft 3 for Mac again, without having to use Wine, Boot Camp, emulators, or virtual machines. Yup, a 14 year old video game was actually updated to work on modern MacOS and Mac OS X releases, hooray!

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Have you ever been looking at a web page or reading something in Safari on your iPhone and then accidentally closed it? Or maybe you closed the tab and then realized you weren’t quite finished with it, or you’d like to get that closed tab back for some other reason? You can easily re-open closed tabs in Safari on the iPhone, but you’d be forgiven if you overlooked the feature.

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The Mac Photos app includes a great red-eye removal tool, which makes quick work of getting rid of the glaring red eye effect which can sometimes happen with photos of faces. One of the curiosities of Photos for Mac though is the red eye tool is not always visible as an option, as the app appears to try to detect if red eye is visible in the image and only show the removal tool if needed. This has caused some users to think the feature does not exist in Photos for Mac. With a little effort you can always show the red eye removal tool in Photos for Mac, removing any guesswork about if the feature is there, and if it’s usable for any photo in question.

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Apple has released security updates for Mac users running OS X El Captain 10.11.6 and OS X Yosemite 10.10.5, recommending the updates for all users as they aim to improve the security of the Mac operating system.

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Just about every iPhone I know is perpetually full and constantly battling the various storage error messages, and yes mine is included in that group. Typically the nuisance of having full iPhone storage is limited to not being able to take anymore pictures (you can use a screwy workaround to snap a few more photos if you’re in a pinch, by the way), but with modern versions of iOS things go even further: you’ll get locked out of Mail app on a full iPhone as well, preventing the user from being able to check email or use the email app at all.

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Many Mac applications and downloads arrive as a PKG package file, but have you ever wanted to open a PKG file to view exactly what is being installed and where it’s going from the source .pkg? Assuming you get a .pkg installer from a trusted source like Apple there is generally nothing to be concerned with about running a package installer file, but not all PKG installers are as trustworthy. Additionally, sometimes people are just curious about what exactly is going on behind the scenes, and what is going to be run by the package installer and where it intends to put files on a Mac.

This is where the amusingly named ‘Suspicious Package’ application comes in to play, it’s a free Mac app which allows the opening and inspection of PKG installer files before the installation is actually executed, giving you a look at what is going to happen when the PKG is run.

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Some Mac users may require the ability to erase a disk or erase a hard drive from the command line on Mac OS, a task which is typically performed through the Disk Utility application from the GUI. The command line approach to disk erasure in macOS is a bit different and it requires precise syntax to insure that you are erasing the proper disk, making this method of erasing any disk only appropriate for advanced Mac users.

This guide will walk through how to erase and format an entire target disk using exclusively the command line on any Mac using macOS or Mac OS X. You can choose any common file system format the disk to after it has been erased, including ExFAT, FAT32, HFS+, or JHFS+.

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Apple has released a new beta version of macOS Sierra for public beta and developer beta testers, versioned as Mac OS 10.12 developer beta 8 and Mac OS 10.12 public beta 7.

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Apple will be hosting a media event on September 7, according to invitations sent to select members of the press and a notification posted to apple.com. The event will be held at 10:00 am PST in San Francisco, California, and the event keynote will live streamed through the web.

It is widely assumed the upcoming next generation iPhone will be the primary focus of the event, perhaps labeled as “iPhone 7” though some rumors suggest it will be called “iPhone 6 SE” or some other naming variation. Additionally, rumors speculate that Apple Watch 2 will debut at the event.

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There may come a time when you need to save or convert a Microsoft Word Doc or DOCX file to PDF format from a Mac. The advantages to saving a Word DOC as PDF are notable in that the PDF file becomes universally readable by any operating system with a PDF reader, even without the Microsoft Office suite, and preserved in it’s original formatting.

There are several different methods of saving a Word doc as a PDF, and for converting an existing Word DOC/DOCX file to PDF, both of which use the Microsoft Office Word app on the Mac to get the job done. Let’s review how to perform this action.

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Back by popular demand, Mac setups are here again! Here we are featuring the stellar workstation of a pro audio engineer… let’s dive in and check out the setup.

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Command line users are undoubtedly familiar with man pages, or manual pages, that contain details, help, and documentation to specified commands and functions. Referencing a man page can be essential when trying to learn proper syntax or how a command works, but with how large some manual pages are it can be a real drag to scroll through the entire man page to try and find a relevant portion. Additionally sometimes you just don’t know exactly which manual page you should look for relevant data for. Fortunately there are two search tools to search man pages and quickly find and access exactly what you’re looking for, whether finding and matching a string or search term in a currently active man page or by searching all manual pages for a match.

Searching man pages works the same in just about any unix based command line, whether it’s Mac OS, Linux, BSD, or whatever else. Here’s how it works:

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Photos app for Mac can not only manage your photos, but also any of videos that have been copied into Photos app from an iPhone or camera as well. If you have a movie file in Photos on the Mac that you like but it’s just a bit too long, or perhaps the action scene is in the middle of the movie, you can use the Trim function in Photos to reduce the video and trim it down to the section you want to show in the movie.

Using Trim works with any movie or video that is stored within Photos for Mac, it’s pretty simple too, here’s how it works.

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