The Recovery partition in Mac OS X is an important component of a system install in that it allows you to troubleshoot a computer, repair drives, restore from backups, and even reinstall Mac OS if need be. Nonetheless, in some specific situations you may find that a Mac does not have a Recovery partition, usually because it has either been unintentionally removed or because a drive was cloned and the Recovery partition wasn’t brought along in that duplication process.

If you find yourself in a situation where a Mac is missing the bootable recovery drive partition, you can recreate the Recovery Partition in two different ways, as we’ll show you here.

Read more »

If you’re a Chrome web browser user, you may find yourself wanting to delete a specific website cookie (or cookies) from the browser. The benefit to removing a site specific cookie is that you don’t have to clear all web data and caches, you can target a specific cookie as needed to remove and clear. This can be very helpful for troubleshooting websites, removing traces of a visit, clearing out stubborn site settings, and many web developers in particular use this technique often.

We’re going to show you how to target site specific cookies to delete in Chrome, this is demonstrated in Chrome for Mac OS X but it works the same in other versions of Chrome for Windows and Linux too.

Read more »

iOS 10 is probably going to include 72 new emoji characters as part of the Unicode 9.0 standard, but you don’t have to wait for the next generation operating system if you want to start having fun with the new emojis right now.

Read more »

An iPhone contains huge amounts of detailed personal information about the owner, including emails, contact lists, banking information, personal notes, pictures, and much more, all of which most users want to keep private and secure. Fortunately the iPhone makes having a secured device pretty user friendly, and even novice users can take a few fairly simple precautions to make sure their devices are secure and locked down.

The approaches we’ll cover here will help keep prying eyes away from your personal data, even if someone was to gain access to your iPhone by theft or otherwise.

Read more »

Procreate is easily one of the best painting, drawing, and illustration apps available for iOS, with an amazing array of brushes, features, layers support, and so much more. If you’re even slightly artistically minded or just like to sketch a bit, it blows the iOS Notes drawing tools out of the water by a bazillion orders of magnitude. It’s well worth buying, but right now it’s available free from Apple for a limited time, so iPhone users can grab Procreate Pocket right now.

Read more »

Polyglots, learners, and the bilingual often want to change their Mac system language for obvious reasons, but another less obvious situation can occur if you’re troubleshooting a Mac that either originates in another country, had the language changed at some point, or is just set to a different language.

Since it can be pretty challenging to navigate around in a language you don’t know at all or barely understand, it may be difficult to add and change the language in Mac OS X through System Preferences, and sometimes that easy approach is just downright impossible or inaccessible, perhaps because you’re reinstalling system software, or booted into Single User Mode for troubleshooting purposes.

But not to panic, you can also change the system language used on a Mac from the command line, handled entirely from the Terminal. This means you can either change the language directly from an active Terminal app, or even through ssh remotely if need be.
Read more »

The fourth beta versions of iOS 9.3.3, OS X El Capitan 10.11.6, and tvOS 9.2.2 have been released to users participating in both the developer beta program and the public beta testing programs.

Read more »

Mac Safari users may occasionally experience an issue where the web browser becomes unresponsive for an extended period of time, usually accompanied by the appearance of the spinning multi-color beach ball cursor. With a little digging under the hood, this almost always corresponds with the appearance of “Safari Web Process (Not Responding)” showing up in Activity Monitor in MacOS and Mac OS X.

Read more »

Many Apple users don’t know this, but you can access your iCloud.com email address from anywhere. That means you can read, write, forward, and save drafts of any iCloud emails, and it’s all done through the web. The great thing about this approach is that allows a user to check and use iCloud.com email without requiring a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, since the web based client is accessible from any device on any operating system, a Windows PC or Android device included.

Read more »

Mac users who have explored the Display Accessibility preference panels, perhaps to disable transparency or to increase visual contrast, have likely seen another setting called “Differentiate without color.” If you have wondered what that setting does or means, you’re certainly not alone, and you may have even toggled it on or off trying to see any difference through Mac OS X.

Read more »

One of the definitive ways for an average user to determine if their Mac has a hardware problem is to run Apple Hardware Test or Apple Diagnostics, which is what we’re going to show you how to do in this tutorial. Yes, most Mac users will experience plenty of years of trouble-free computing, but sometimes hardware problems can surface. Perhaps it’s a failing disk drive, bad memory, a GPU issue, a motherboard problem, or a different hardware issue, there are a myriad of potential hardware troubles that can surface, even if they are rare.

The good news is that Apple Hardware Test can check to see if there are indeed hardware issues to look into, and you can run it yourself with just a little effort.

Read more »

Feel like taking another trip down memory lane? With the assistance of an excellent fun free retro terminal emulator fittingly called Cool Retro Term, you can experience the golden yesteryears of cathode display computing and pretend your shiny new Mac is an ancient Apple II or IBM workstation.

Read more »

Though Slide Over sidebar multitasking on iPad is one of the more convenient features for iPad power users, there are times when the slide over sidebar feature is accessed unintentionally. This is particularly true with any app where you are swiping from right to left often, whether it’s to perform a particular gesture, drawing, turning a page, or during a game.

If you find yourself accidentally entering into the Slide Over sidebar multitasking mode on the iPad often, or perhaps you just don’t like Slide Over for some other reason, you can turn the feature off completely and prevent it from showing up.

Read more »

You can remove a device from the devices list on an iCloud account by using the Settings app in iOS. This can be helpful if you have gifted or sold an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or Apple Watch, already removed iCloud from that device, and now you no longer want to have that device listed in association with your Apple ID, or showing up in your list of devices.

Read more »

All Mac users should setup Time Machine backups with an external hard drive, Time Capsule, or network drive to insure they have regular automatic backups made of their stuff and MacOS X installation. But once you have a backup drive established with Time Machine, or if you use a different backup approach entirely, you may no longer want to be asked if you’d like to setup a new hard disk as a Time Machine backup volume each time you connect a hard drive to the Mac.

To be clear, we’re talking about what happens when you connect a new blank hard drive to a Mac, which will trigger a dialog box that asks “Do you want to use (drive name) to back up with Time Machine?” with a “Use as backup disk” or “Don’t Use” option. This is the dialog request we are aiming to disable here for connecting new drives to the Mac. What we’re going to cover will not disable Time Machine, it only disables that pop-up backup disk request dialog box in Mac OS X.

Read more »

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the next iPhone model to debut this year will largely resemble existing iPhone 6 and iPhone 6S in appearance. Instead, Apple will opt for a more dramatic design overhaul with the 2017 model year iPhone.

Read more »

Users who participate in the beta programs for iOS, Mac OS X, tvOS, and watchOS will find new beta builds available for their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and Apple TV hardware.

Read more »

Creating a dual boot environment is an ideal solution for Mac users who want to install and try macOS Sierra but without interfering with their primary stable Mac OS X El Capitan installation. This tutorial will walk through the entire process of setting up such an environment, including partition a disk, and installing macOS Sierra 10.12 beta onto that partition to allow for a dual boot.

Read more »