The Mac hosts file is a system level file located at /etc/hosts which maps IP addresses to host names for Mac OS X networking. Many users edit and modify the hosts file so that they can point a domain to a different IP address, whether for the purpose of local development, blocking sites, or simply to access alternate servers from various apps and system level functions. Most advanced users will edit the hosts file from the Mac OS X Terminal using nano or vim, but for those who prefer to stay within the Mac OS GUI, you can also modify the Mac’s hosts file through TextEdit, or even a third party app like BBEdit or TextWrangler. This offers a more user friendly option compared to going through the command line.

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The Mac makes an alert sound when certain dialog boxes, errors, and other user interactions are encountered in OS X. Most Mac users likely know that you can change the alert sound to one of your choice by going to the Sound preference panel in OS X, but did you know you can easily make a custom alert sound for the Mac as well? That’s what we’re going to demonstrate here, it’s a simple way to customize the Mac experience and doesn’t require any additional software downloads.

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If you want to change the wrist in which you wear Apple Watch, you can do so without having a cumbersome button experience by choosing to switch the devices orientation.

This also insures the devices screen will show properly, otherwise if you simply move the Watch from one wrist to the other, the display would be upside down. Also, you may find this helpful if you want to wear the Apple Watch on the same wrist, but simply wish to change the devices digital crown orientation as well.

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Have you ever picked up your iPhone to discover the message “iPhone is disabled” and to “try again in 1 minute” or to try again 5, 15, 60 minutes? In the worst scenarios, the message says “iPhone is disabled. Connect to iTunes”, and the device is unusable until then. So, what is going on here, why is the iPhone disabled? And how do you fix it so that you can use the iPhone again? The answers to these questions are usually straight forward, let’s review the causes of this message, and more importantly, the solutions to this so that you can unlock and re-enable the iPhone again for full use.

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New iPhone models include an interesting feature called 3D Touch, which allows you to press the screen at varying degrees of pressure to get various app shortcuts, as well as various ‘pop’ and ‘peak’ features. While 3D Touch is a useful feature for many and one of the primary selling points of the iPhone, some users may find it to be distracting or annoying, and thus you may wish to disable 3D touch on the iPhone screen.

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Many Mac users may like to adjust the font size of file names, folders, and other text found in the Finder of OS X. This is particularly helpful if you find the default text size of Finder fonts to be small and challenging to read when navigating in the Mac file system, where increasing the font size makes a notable difference in legibility, but it can also be used the other direction to decrease the text size of Finder items as well, thereby fitting more items on screen in list view. Whether you want to change the text to a larger size or smaller size is up to you.

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The iOS Mail app will automatically suggest recently used email addresses in the recipient feel when compiling a new email message or forwarding an email. While this is often accurate and helpful, sometimes an unwanted email address can pop-up in the automatic suggestion list, as can email addresses of people who are no longer in use. With a quick trick, you can clean up the recent email suggestion list on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and rid iOS Mail of any unwanted recommended email addresses and contacts.

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Though just about everyone has our phones glued to us with a dedicated calendar app, for users who spend considerable time in the command line it can be more efficient to stay put rather than stray to another app or pick up a different device to flip around in the calendar and find a given date. With the help of a simple command line calendar utility, you can generate a calendar instantly, which is great for quick reference for dates and occasions. Going further, you can even generate a calendar for any date, in any year, and for any month, whether it’s the current year and month, last year, sometime in the Roman empire, or deep in the distant future of House Atreides.

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Have you ever been reading a webpage where another link is referenced, but you don’t want to click and follow the URL because you’re in the middle of an article? Of course you have, right? That’s practically a regular occurrence on the web. Fortunately for Mac users, web life is a bit easier, because rather than opening those links into new windows or into the background, you have a third option: previewing a web page link using a little known multitouch tap trick built into Safari for OS X.

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Live Photos are a great new feature for the iPhone camera, and while you can easily share them with other iPhone and iPad users or to a Mac, they come across as little movies unless the user has Live Photo compatible iPhone. Mysteriously missing is the ability to convert and save Live Photos as an animated gif directly from the iPhone Photos app, but with the help of a third party application, you can convert any Live Photo into an animated gif with minimal effort.

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Apple has released new beta builds for each of their operating systems, including iOS 9.3 beta 4, OS X 10.11.4 beta 4, tvOS 9.2 beta 4, and watchOS 2.2 beta 4.

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Have you ever wanted to play a YouTube video repeatedly in a loop? Maybe it’s a song, a TV show, a kids video, music video, something funny, whatever it is, you’d like to play it repeatedly on a loop. WhileYouTube is generally designed to play a video once and then either stop playing or move onto another different video in a playlist automatically, a hidden feature allows YouTube users to replay any video in an infinite loop, without having to turn to any tricks, funky third party websites, shady downloads, or anything else. The new YouTube looping playback feature is built right into the browser based player and is easy to use.

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Your iPhone is plugged in, but it’s not charging. Why won’t the iPhone charge? Is the iPhone broken? Is it time to freak out? Probably not, in fact there are some really common reasons an iPhone won’t charge, and most of the time it has nothing to do with the iPhone itself (unless it was damaged, but more on that in a moment).

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Many Apple device owners depend heavily on iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Apple ID, Siri, the App Stores, and the other myriad of Apple online services for their Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Apple TV to work as intended, whether it’s backing up to iCloud or sending messages to friends and families, using iTunes, or logging into the online stores, or authenticating an Apple ID. Thus, it’s not too surprising that potential downtime or issues with these Apple services can lead to user problems, with various error messages and failures to perform otherwise simple tasks. While sometimes issues with such services are user created, other times the problems are on Apple’s end, and so for troubleshooting purposes it can be very helpful to quickly find out if Apple services are online or if they down.

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There’s no shortage of methods to retrieve a weather report, the web is full of weather resources, everyones iPhone, Apple Watch, and smartphone has a weather app, Siri can tell you the weather, and you can even get the current weather in the menu bar of OS X or from Spotlight on the Mac too. But for command line users, none of those options are particularly ideal, since it means leaving the command line and the task at hand. Thanks to an interesting usage of the finger utility, you can quickly retrieve a weather report and weather forecast for virtually any city in the world, right from the command line.

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Apple has released a revisional software update for iOS 9.2.1 for iPhone devices with Touch ID sensors. The new build arrives as 13D20 (as opposed to 13D15 build of iOS 9.2.1 for all other devices) and aims to resolve an “Error 53” software issue where certain iPhone models with a broken or replaced Touch ID sensor would become inoperable, displaying the error 53 message in iTunes.

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You can save many email attachment file types directly from Mail app to iBooks in iOS, this allows for easy offline viewing on an iPhone or iPad, and it offers the benefits of using iBooks for reading and reviewing documents as well.

By saving an email attachment to iBooks, you actually convert and create a PDF file of the attachment in question, and iOS handles it all. For example, if you save a .doc file to iBooks, it will convert that to a PDF. Similarly, if you save a group of multiple images from an email attachment to iBooks, the collection of images will save as a single PDF file within iBooks.

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Handoff is the great feature which, much as it sounds, allows iOS and Mac users to ‘hand off’ activity from an app on one device to another, whether that’s an email composition, web browsing session, chat, or work in Pages.

Assuming you have Handoff enabled on multiple Apple devices using the same Apple ID, you can quickly access Handoff quicker than ever by using the same multitasking screen where you quit apps in iOS 9.

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