The Mac login screen and lock screen displays a prominent large clock, with the date and time visible over the wallpaper or screensaver. While many users appreciate having the time and date right there at the login screen, other users may wish to hide the clock, date, and time, from the MacOS login screen.
If you want to have a more minimalist Mac login screen and hide the lock screen clock, read along and you’ll achieve that result quickly.
With the Find My service, you can quickly see where a person, AirTag, or a device is on a map, and if its your own device, you can lock it down, make it play a sound, or even erase it.
But what if your or your loved one is traveling internationally? What if you’re using an Apple device abroad? Does Find My still work abroad, in other countries? What if the person or device is on a boat in the ocean, or on a cruise, in another country?
These are all reasonable questions to ask, and that’s what we’re here to discuss.
Apple is opening a new store in the Jing’an district of Shanghai, China, this spring, and to celebrate they’ve released a really beautiful wallpaper of unfolding white and yellow flower petals in the shape of an Apple logo.
If you use your iPhone as an alarm clock, as many iPhone owners do, you may have discovered that if the iPhone alarm is sounding and ringing continuously on it’s own, eventually the iPhone alarm turns itself off automatically.
While this may be confusing if you’re used to old analog alarm clocks that will ring endlessly until directly turned off, the iPhone alarm stopping on its own is actually intentional behavior.
You can turn your iPad into a portable HDMI display with the help of a neat app named Orion, plus a USB-C Capture Card.
How this works is really straight forward; you connect the USB-C Capture Card dongle to the iPad Pro USB-C port, then you connect your device to that dongle via HDMI, that you want to use the iPad as a display for, then open Orion, and you’re good to go.
A process named fileproviderd may be discovered by some Mac users, usually seen in Activity Monitor when someone has discovered that their Mac feels like it’s running slower than usual. There, fileproviverd may be using high amounts of CPU, and by using heavy system resources, the Mac slows down.
Universal Control is one of the most useful features available for Mac users who have multiple Macs and iPads that they’d like to control with a single mouse and keyboard, it works really well and offers a great experience once it’s setup and working. But, like so many other recent changes to the Mac that arrived with the redesigned System Settings experience, not every Mac user has been able to find the settings for Universal Control since updating MacOS to Sonoma or Ventura.
Where are Universal Control settings in System Settings on MacOS Sonoma and Ventura? How do you find them now? Reasonable questions, and with such a handy feature you’ll want to know how and where to make adjustments. We’ll show you three different ways to get to these now, since they’re a little harder to find than before.
While there are some command line wizards out there who never need to look at references, search manual pages, defer to command lists, LLM queries, or web searches, the rest of us mere mortal commands line users can be helped by a really great tool called cheat. The cheat command is able to provide a cheatsheet with usages, flags, and options for using varying commands, which should be useful for just about anyone who finds themselves in the Terminal. And the examples provided by cheat are what is commonly used, making it much more helpful and intuitive than a man page.
Like all Terminal and command line tasks, this is aimed at more advanced users, though the utility of the cheat command is obviously beneficial to those who are less familiar with the command line or who are simply learning to use the Terminal as well.
Let’s dive in and learn how you can install cheat on your Mac, and use cheat to generate command line cheatsheets for command reference.
Some Mac users are discovering that USB-C hubs and external monitors are no longer working with their Mac after updating to macOS Sonoma 14.4. This issue can apparently impact anything connected to the USB Hub as well, leaving the USB hub devices undetected by the Mac, including keyboards, mice, external displays, SD card readers, cameras, external hard drives and storage devices, and basically any other USB accessory that connects to the USB-C hub and then to the Mac.
Many Mac users rely on dongles and USB-C hubs (like this) to expand their port options, particularly after Apple started removing ports from their laptop lineup of computers. This includes all modern models of MacBook Air, which only have two USB-C ports, and many MacBook Pro models, many of which also only have two USB-C ports. Many users of the newest MacBook Pro models with more hardware port options continue to require USB-C hubs, as well as many Mac users with iMac, Mac mini, or even Mac Pro.
If you’re a Mac user who relies on a USB-C hub to expand your port options, and you have not yet updated to macOS Sonoma 14.4, you may wish to hold off on the system update until this issue gets resolved.
If you’re already impacted by this USB Hub issue, read on to find a potential fix, as well as a workaround.
If you’re shopping for a loan, let’s say for buying a car, you’ll undoubtedly have a few loan options. Comparing loans can be intimidating and daunting, and it’s hard to know which option is right for you, or which loan may make the most sense for your particular situation, especially when the pressure is on to make a decision. But thanks to the Numbers app on iPhone, Mac, and iPad, you can easily compare loans, directly from your device.
All you have to do is input some data into a free Numbers spreadsheet on your Apple device, and you’ll be able to do a quick loan comparison.
If you are a Mac user, you might be interested in some specific keyboard shortcuts tricks that can make your MacOS computing experience more efficient and maybe even be more productive too.
Here are six useful Mac keyboard shortcut tips that will improve most people’s MacOS experience, usage, and workflow.
Compressing images can be a necessary task for many Mac users, whether they’re getting ready to post an image to the web, share a photo through email or messages, or they’re simply trying to compress and reduce the file size of an image for any other purpose.
There are several ways to compress images on the Mac, thereby reducing the image file size, and we’re going to show you two of the easiest ways to get this done in MacOS. And best of all, these two approaches can be stacked together, providing significant image compression that can dramatically reduce the size of an image file. Let’s check it out.
WeatherWidget is a process you may encounter on a Mac when looking through Activity Monitor or a system stats app, a task that many advanced Mac users find themselves doing if they notice their Mac performance is slowing down. The reason, of course, is that Activity Monitor (or similar) will show you what processes are running on a Mac, and how much system resources those processes are using.
WeatherWidget is related to the desktop weather widget that some Mac users may choose to place on their desktop, and while it typically uses minimal system resources, it can go awry. Like many processes that can go sideways, you may discover a Mac is running abnormally slow, only to discover that WeatherWidget is consuming a lot of CPU cycles on a Mac.
WordPress is fantastic blogging software and an excellent content management system that is prolific on the web (and used by us for this site!), and Jetpack is a great set of tools offered by Automattic to further improve the WordPress experience. But the latest versions of Jetpack default to placing a “Promote with Blaze” option onto every post page in WordPress, and you’ll see it prominently displayed in the Posts overview section of WordPress admin too.
Apple has released macOS Ventura 13.6.5 and macOS Monterey 12.7.4 to Mac users who continue to run the Ventura and Monterey operating systems, and who are not interested or able to run the freshly released MacOS Sonoma 14.4 update.
Additionally, Safari 17.4 is available as an update alongside macOS Ventura 13.6.5 and macOS Monterey 12.7.4.
Both macOS Ventura 13.6.5 and macOS Monterey 12.7.4 focus on security fixes, and do not include any new features.
Many advanced Mac users spend a lot of time working from the command line with the Terminal application. The command line offers ways to interact with various settings in MacOS through defaults commands and other tricks, so it’s a reasonable question to wonder if you can set or change the default web browser on a Mac by using the Terminal. Sure, Mac users can change the default web browser at any time by using System Settings on modern MacOS, or System Preferences on older macOS versions, but what if you wish to change the default web browser through the command line on the Mac?
There are two different ways to set the default web browser on a Mac from the command line, and we’ll cover both.
MacOS Sonoma 14.4 update has been released by Apple for Mac users running the Sonoma operating system.
The macOS Sonoma 14.4 update includes cutting edge new Emoji icons like a mushroom, lime, phoenix, broken chain, and shaking heads, along with new versions of existing Emoji icons that face the opposite direction. Additionally, there’s support for podcasts transcripts, and a handful of bug fixes and security updates.
Additionally, Mac users running MacOS Ventura and Monterey will find small updates available as well, and Apple has released other system software updates including iOS 17.4, ipadOS 17.4, watchOS 10.4, tvOS 17.4, and visionOS 1.1.
If you are working out with Apple Watch, or wearing gloves of any kind with Apple Watch that may cover your wrist or rub against the device, it’s a good idea to lock the screen of your Apple Watch to prevent accidental input and touches.
While the Apple Watch touch screen is pretty good at disregarding some accidental touch or unintentional tapping or swiping, you may find that in certain conditions the screen is being activated and doing things you don’t want it to do. This can happen commonly if you’re engaged in certain workouts or activities that put you and the Apple Watch in contact with water, sweat, gloves, or even some clothing.
To prevent accidental touch activity on Apple Watch, the simplest thing to do is lock the screen while you’re engaging in the activity that is triggering unintentional device input.
