You can easily change the login screen wallpaper in OS X El Capitan to any image of your choice. This will impact the appearance of the login window when you boot a Mac, and also when you are using fast user switching to change user accounts. The wallpaper image that is replaced is what sits behind those login locked screens, which by default is a blurry version of the active desktop picture wallpaper. The replaced customized wallpaper will be your picture without any blurred effects.

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One of the most frightening iTunes messages an iPhone, iPad, or iPod user may see when they connect a device to a computer is the “The iPhone (Name) is synced with another iTunes Library on (Computer). Do you want to erase this iPhone and sync with this iTunes Library?” message, which gives you two options, to Cancel, or to “Erase and Sync” – this sounds like you’re about to erase everything on the iPhone or iPod touch completely, right? Well, it doesn’t quite work like that.

Let’s examine this iTunes alert message and understand what it means and what the resulting “Erase and Sync” action actually does.

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This week we’re featuring the workstation of Vlad K., a professional music producer who has a really great pro setup, let’s get to it and learn a bit more:

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The new Apple TV arrives with an incredibly gorgeous array of screen savers, and now you can get those amazing screen savers on the Mac too. There are tons of different screen savers in total, with daytime and evening views of beautiful footage taken from flying over Hawaii, New York City, San Francisco, London, and the Great Wall of China.

From footage of cityscapes to landscapes, these screensaver are truly impressive and terrific quality, and they’ll look great on your Mac screens. Here’s how to get the incredible screen savers from Apple TV in MacOS and Mac OS X right now:

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The Mac Mail app has gained tab support in the latest versions of Mac OS X, making it easier to juggle multiple emails on screen at once.

There’s a catch with using Mail Tabs in MacOS X, however, and that is you must be using full screen mode to gain access to the tab feature. Perhaps because of this, email tabs are particularly useful for laptop users with smaller screens, but this could also appeal to users who like to minimize distraction.

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For Mac users who utilize third party SSD volumes, the new trimforce command allows OS X to forcibly enable the TRIM function on those drives. trimforce is built directly into newer releases of OS X and is really quite easy to enable (or disable), requiring a quick visit to the command line and a reboot of the Mac to complete.

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Mac users who are interested in jailbreaking their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 9, iOS 9.0.1, or iOS 9.0.2 will now find a version of the Pangu tool available for OS X. Previously, the Pangu utility was only available for Windows. Aside from the Windows vs oS X compatibility difference, all else with the jailbreak remains the same, including supported devices and iOS versions.

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The Dictation feature of OS X has let Mac users speak to their computers and have the speech converted accurately into text for quite some time, and now with the newest versions of OS X you can improve Dictation even further by starting the speech to text conversion with a voice command.

You can think of this as a Mac specific speech to text version of “Hey Siri” on the iPhone, except that you issue a voice command to start the Dictation speech translations rather than making requests through a virtual assistant. It works quite well, we’ll show you how to enable the feature, and how to activate it by voice.

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Apple is running a new iPhone 6s advertisement featuring actor Bill Hader with an amusing focus on the “Hey Siri” feature and the type of whacky junkmail you usually find in your email spam folder.

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Apple has released the first beta version of OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 for Mac users participating in the developer and public beta software testing programs. The first pre-release build of OS X 10.11.2 arrives as 15C27e and appears to focus primarily on improvements and bug fixes to OS X El Capitan.

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Apple has released the first beta build of iOS 9.2 to users participating in the developer beta and public beta testing program. iOS 9.2 beta 1 arrives as build number 13C5055d and is available for all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices that are compatible with iOS 9.

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Spotlight is the lightning fast search engine built into the Mac, but some users may have noticed that once Spotlight has been summoned and a file search query is beginning to be typed, OS X freezes up, stalls, and beachballs for anywhere from 10-30 seconds for seemingly no apparent reason. If you’re in a quiet room, you may even hear a little spin up sound as this happens as well.

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New versions of Safari on the Mac allow users to instantly mute any tab or inactive window which is playing sound. This will instantly hush audio coming from a video, an audio file opened in the browser, ads, or any noisy multimedia element, but only for the Safari browser, making it preferable to muting everything on the Mac with the Mute option.

This is a really easy trick but it’s not necessarily the most obvious thing in the world until it’s pointed out to you in Safari for Mac OS X.

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Apple has released the new 4th generation Apple TV, an all new Apple TV that includes more powerful hardware, a touch controller, and Siri voice interaction. Content arrives to the devices from the App Store, iTunes Store, and apps that serve as everything from playable games to channels from Netflix, HBO, ESPN, PBS, YouTube, Hulu, and the like.

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While Apple routinely picks great wallpapers for iOS and OS X, so does Google with Android, and the wallpapers bundled with the Android Marshmallow release look really great on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Windows too.

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Apple is running a new series of iPhone 6s advertisements on TV, each in the same general theme of prior iPhone 6s ads with a handclapping soundtrack. The new spots focus on the devices camera, as well as the Hey Siri feature.

Two of the new ads are a bit different however and focus on actor Jamie Foxx talking to Siri on a pink gold iPhone 6s to demonstrate the Hey Siri feature, the bits seem to extend from a prior iPhone 6s commercial where Jamie Fox made a cameo.

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You can easily connect any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a TV screen or even many projectors with the help of a wired connector adapter and HDMI cable. As long as the recipient TV, display, or projector has an HDMI input port, you can mirror the iPhone or iPad display directly to that screen. This is great for presentations, demonstrations, watching videos or movies, and so much more. The output video can be a maximum of 1080p HDTV resolution, and yes both video and audio are transmitted, mirrored from iOS to the TV screen.

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This week we’re sharing the Mac setup of Brandon R., which is a great standing desk workstation in New York City. Let’s jump in to learn more:

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