“How do you change the picture on the background?” is one of the more common questions heard from newcomers to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This is all the more true when you took a great picture with the devices camera and you want to set that picture as the wallpaper on the iOS device, or when someone sends you a nice photo that saved to the device from Mail or found with Safari, and now want to set as the background image of your iPhone or iPad.

We’ll show you how to quickly set the background wallpaper on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can choose any picture on your device to use as the wallpaper picture this way.

Read more »

Most command line users know that the “rm” command for removing and deleting files is quite powerful, able to delete just about any file imaginable within the file system – whether it should be removed or not. Once you add in wildcards and sudo, rm and srm because exponentially more potent and potentially dangerous, so for advanced users who wish to add in a layer of security to the rm feature they can enable a confirmation dialog with the rm and srm commands. This also offers a helpful protective mechanism for those who are learning the command line and want to place a a layer of verification between the instantaneous deletion of files and their command execution.

Read more »

Apple has been running an Earth Day Lessons campaign aimed at students to raise awareness of various environmental issues surrounding conservation, ecosystems, and ecology. Like many other microsites on Apple.com, these web pages are filled with beautiful high resolution images, this time themed around Earth, featuring subjects from zebras, shorelines, kelp forests, to tree farms and sea otters. Well it turns out if you spend a little bit of time with the Web Inspector tool, you can uncover some pretty great wallpapers on the Apple environmental focus site.

Read more »

Apple has released the second beta versions of OS X 10.11.5, iOS 9.3.2, WatchOS 2.2.1, and tvOS 9.2.1. The updated beta releases are available now to individuals running the prior beta builds.

Read more »

Many Mac Mail users who send and receive emails with their Windows counterparts using a mail client like Outlook or Microsoft Exchange will discover a “winmail.dat” file attached to those emails. If you try to open a winmail.dat file on Mac OS X, you’ll usually find there is nothing available to open the attachment, or it often contains gibberish and is illegible.

We’ll show you several ways Mac users can open winmail.dat files attached to emails. We’ll also explain what a winmail.dat file is and where they come from.

Read more »

Apple has quietly released an update to their 12″ MacBook lineup, with newer processors, improved graphics, faster memory, faster PCIe flash storage, longer battery life, and the addition of an all new Rose Gold model.

Read more »

Do you put tape over your computers camera? If you have ever been to an IT event or security conference you have undoubtedly seen many laptops with tape covering over their built-in cameras. The practice is becoming so common within some groups of people that you’ll occasionally even see the taped webcams in coffee shops and the workplace too.

Interestingly enough, it’s not just your techy coworker or survivalist uncle who is taping over their webcams, it turns out the Director of the FBI does the exact same thing. And so does Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Read more »

The Live Photos feature on new iPhone cameras is fun and interesting as it turns a still photo into a short live action clip automatically. While you can turn the Live Photos feature off and on easily with a quick toggle, another approach is to not think about it by leaving the feature on, then simply converting the Live Photo to a Still Photo if you no longer want it to be an animated live action shot.

Read more »

It’s well known that all Mac users should set up Time Machine to automate backups of their computer, and while most Mac users let OS X go about backing up to Time Machine at it’s own pace, which sometimes borderlines on glacial, some users may wish to speed the backup process up a bit. With the help of the command line you can do just that and dramatically speed up the Time Machine backup process, but there are some major caveats to this trick because it applies beyond Time Machine, making it appropriate for advanced Mac users only, and used on a limited basis.

Read more »

Mac users with Retina displays may have noticed that gaming performance is sometimes reduced on these machines. The reason is quite simple; if you’re running the game at native resolution, then the Mac has to drive the game at full resolution of the display at 2880 x 1440 or greater. A common solution to this is to go into a games individual Display settings and manually adjust them so the games resolution is lower, but another approach to this is available for Retina Macs like the iMac and MacBook Pro.

Read more »

Mac users may encounter DOCX files from time to time, often sent from a Windows user as an email attachment or otherwise, as the .docx file types are standard document files created in newer versions of Microsoft Office. But what if you don’t have Office on the Mac? That’s ok too, even if you don’t have Office installed in Mac OS X, you can still open, read, and edit docx files on modern versions of Mac OS X, most often without any added software.

Read more »

Most major cellular carrier networks support a feature known as Wi-Fi Calling, and now you can enable wi-fi calling on the iPhone as well.

For the unfamiliar, Wi-Fi calling essentially uses an available wireless network for phone calls to improve the connection quality, rather than relying entirely on the cellular network. The result is generally cleaner and crisper sounding call quality, similar to the difference audibly observed through other Voice Over IP services like Skype and FaceTime Audio.
Read more »

Apple has released a hoard of new Apple Watch commercials, with eight different ads running to demonstrate various features of the device. Additionally, Apple has released a couple of new Apple TV ads as well.

Read more »

All Mac users should have regular automatic backups setup with Time Machine, it’s easy to use and ensures that your personal data and entire Mac is recoverable in the event something goes wrong with the computer. Some people go even further and setup redundant Time Machine backups with multiple disks for added data protection. But sometimes you may decide a particular disk drive is no longer needed by Time Machine, and thus you’d like to remove that particular drive from the backup process without disabling all other Time Machine backups. This can be easily done, and all it does is stop backing up to the particular drive in question, it does not turn off Time Machine to other volumes, and it does not delete any of the backups on the removed drive.

Read more »

Many Mac users will download package files of combo updates or other software in order to install them on multiple computers, thereby avoiding updating with the Mac App Store. This is particularly common with Mac systems administrators, where it makes more sense to download a single package update or installer once and distribute it over a network or perhaps install manually through a USB drive. There is nothing wrong with this approach at all, and in fact it’s much more efficient for multi-Mac management, but one potential hiccup arrives when a package installer or update file has an expired certificate, which will prevent the package from installing entirely, a situation that becomes obvious when you get an “(application installer) was signed with a certificate that has expired” error message.

To avoid this situation, you can check package signatures yourself to see if they are valid, if they have expired, or even if they have no signature at all.

Read more »

The Apple Watch has the same “Hey Siri” voice based activation feature available to it that iOS does, but it works a bit different and doesn’t activate exactly the same. In fact, there are two ways to activate Hey Siri on the Apple Watch, neither of which is quite like the iPhone based summoning method.

Read more »

It’s easy to fall behind on email and let unread messages build up over time, but the iOS Mail app offers an excellent solution to this problem by allowing users to enable a hidden optional “Unread” only email message inbox on their device.

Just as it sounds, the Unread message mailbox will display only the unread email messages that are within the Mail app of an iPhone or iPad, letting users greatly improve their email workflow and productivity. This can be in invaluable solution for those of us who are routinely overburdened with tons of emails, as it puts the requiring action unread message right in front of you, ready to be marked as read, responded to, forwarded, trashed, or triaged in another manner.

Read more »

Mail app in iOS allows users to easily add any type of file attachment to an email, as long as the attachment in question is coming from an associated iCloud Drive. This means you can add files from Pages, Microsoft Office documents, PDF, PSD, text and rtf files, or just about anything else, directly to an email on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The selected file(s) will behave just like a regular email attachment sent from a desktop email client too. Let’s walk through the steps for how to add attachments to emails in iOS.

Read more »