The Apple Pencil is proving to be a very popular accessory for the iPad Pro, and while the Apple Pencil gets great battery life and lasts a long time, there is no obvious hardware means of checking the level of battery life remaining of the Pencil.

Not to worry, it turns out you can quickly get the battery life of the Apple Pencil stylus directly from Notification Center on the iPad Pro, and yes, this is the same battery menu that allows you to check connected Bluetooth devices and Apple Watch battery as well from an iPhone. Of course, since the Apple Pencil currently only works with select model iPads, only compatible iPad models like the iPad Pro will be able to check battery of Apple Pencil using this method.

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Setting your personal info, address, and contact information on an iPhone is important if you want to be able to do things like get directions home or to another location from home, appropriate auto-fill details, the ability to easily share your address and contact details with other people, and much more.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that a common question is “how do I change my personal information on iPhone?“, and that’s what we’re going to demonstrate here. Yes, most iPhone users have “My Info” setup properly on their devices, but many others don’t, or some just may want to change their info or set a different contact card as their details.

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“How do I copy music onto my iPhone from iTunes?” is a fairly common question. Fortunately, copying music onto an iPhone from iTunes is fairly easy once you learn how to do it, though you’d be forgiven if you find the music copy process to be a little confusing at first glance. It turns out there are several ways to get music onto an iPhone from iTunes on Mac and Windows PC, but we’ll show you the easiest way which involves a simple drag and drop music transfer onto the iPhone.

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Longtime Mac users pining to recall the nostalgia of one-bit dithered graphics and Macintosh System 6 will certainly enjoy the astonishingly accurate retro goodness offered by BitCam for iPhone.

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Touch ID is an undeniably convenient feature of the iPhone and iPad, allowing quick access to the device simply by placing a registered finger on the Touch ID sensor, which reads the fingerprint to gain access. While Touch ID is useful, some users may later decide they want to disable the feature on their iPhone or iPad, whether for security or privacy purposes, or for another reason.

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Macs with multiple user accounts sometimes need to delete a user account. Maybe you no longer need a specific user account, or you’re removing an old login, or just cleaning house, whatever the case, it is easy to remove a user from Mac OS X.

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Managing large numbers of emails can be time consuming, but one way to help tackle email on the Mac is by setting up an Unread Emails Only inbox. This allows Mac users to easily view unread mail messages without having to scroll through already read emails, since only the new or unread emails will be visible. The great thing about this approach is that it spans all inboxes and email accounts that are setup within Mail for Mac, though you can certainly specify accounts if you wanted to.

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For anyone making customizations to their command line appearance, prompt, adding aliases, a new PATH, setting environment variables, or otherwise changing their bash_profile, bashrc, zshrc, and related shell profiles, it’s helpful to know how to quickly reload the profile.

Many users simply launch a new shell or open a new terminal window, but there is no need to do that, there’s a way to directly refresh the profile in use thanks to the source command.

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Apple is running eight new “Shot on iPhone” ads, demonstrating the impressive recording capabilities available with the latest iPhone cameras.

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A number of Mac users have discovered that their computers are freezing at random after updating their computers to OS X 10.11.4 and sometimes with OS X 10.11.5 as well. The problem is rather annoying as the Mac becomes entirely unresponsive and requires a forced reboot intervention, though disabling WebGL in Safari seems to help with Safari usage. Apple has now acknowledged the freezing issue with 13″ Retina MacBook Pro models and has offered a support document aimed at addressing the problem.

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Apple has released updated beta versions for their entire operating system lineup, including OS X 10.11.6 beta 2, iOS 9.3.3 beta 2, watchOS 2.2.2 beta 1, and tvOS 9.2.2 beta 2. All beta updates likely aim to resolve bugs and offer minor enhancements, which is typical with point release system software.

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Have you ever wanted to have a web site or web page used as a screen saver on Mac OS X? Well you can do exactly that with the help of a free screensaver called WebViewScreenSaver, which allows Mac users to add URLs to serve as the content of a screen saver whenever it’s activated on the Mac. This is handy for a variety of obvious reasons, and it’s quite easy to setup.

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One of the more helpful features of the Maps apps for iPhone is the ability to get directions to your home or directions to your work, from your current location. This is a great feature for the directionally challenged in particular, but it’s also helpful if you’re exploring a new part of a city or state, or if you just want to go on auto-pilot and don’t want to overthink which turns to make to get home or to the office.

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Safari Reader is a nice feature of the Safari web browser for iOS and Mac OS X that allows users to simplify the look of a webpage or article to just focus on the text and image content. Now with the latest versions of iOS, you can customize the look of Safari Reader too, and choose a background color, a font, and even adjust the font size of onscreen text on any webpage on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This makes Reader particularly great for users who are reading text on webpages and find it too difficult to read, or perhaps they want to implement their own ‘night mode’ and reduce the bright white glare of the text background.

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Have you ever noticed that once a file is in the Trash, you can’t open it or view it? If you try to open or use an item that is within the Trash in Mac OS X, you’ll get a dialog warning that says “The document ‘name’ can’t be opened because it’s in the Trash. To use this item, first drag it out of the Trash.”

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Apple has released an updated version of iOS 9.3.2 for users of iPad Pro 9.7″ models.

The prior iOS 9.3.2 release for that specific model line of iPad Pro suffered from a few problems that could potentially make the device unusable with an “Error 56″ message. While the issue didn’t impact all iPad Pro owners, Apple ended up pulling iOS 9.3.2 for iPad Pro 9.7” as they worked on a resolution, maintaining the iOS 9.3.2 update to be available for all other iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models.

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iPhone users regularly enjoy the Emoji keyboard with all the fun icons, faces, and little pictures, but before Emoji came around there were Emoticons, which are basically little text drawings of faces and actions using regular characters on a keyboard. Emoticons are a little bit more complex to type out than hitting a simple Emoji key, but if you want to use Emoticons there’s a great hidden Emoticon keyboard on the iPhone and iPad waiting to be enabled, with a huge array of complete emoticon faces and strings waiting for use.

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The latest versions of iTunes have a universally visible sidebar with media library, devices, and playlists available to choose from. Some of the library sorting options visible in the sidebar may not be useful to all users however, so with a little effort you can edit and customize the sidebar in the newest iTunes releases.

You can also choose to hide the sidebar in the latest versions of iTunes, or show it again if you accidentally made the sidebar invisible.

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