If you’re a Mac user who is beta testing OS X El Capitan, either as part of the OS X Public Beta program or as a registered Mac Developer, you may have come across a situation where the latest available update does not appear for you in the Mac App Store as it should. For example, let’s say you’re trying to access OS X 10.11 Public Beta 6 and it won’t show as available, but you know it hasn’t been installed on the Mac yet. Usually this can be resolved by going to the Updates tab and hitting Command+R to refresh the updates, but if that doesn’t work you may need to manually intervene and set the software update download catalog again.

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iCloud Activation Lock is a great feature which allows owners to lock down an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and prevent it from being used in the event that a device has been misplaced, stolen, or lost. This is part of the Find My iPhone feature set, and it’s a very welcome addition for iDevice owners. Of course the other side of iCloud Activation Lock is that it can potentially interfere with the resale market of iOS devices, because a device that has been locked will require the attached Apple ID be entered to remove the lock to make it usable again.

To avoid a situation where you purchase a used iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with Activation Lock enabled, you should take the time to check the devices IMEI or serial number to see what the iCloud Lock status is. This is quite simple to do, and you don’t even need an Apple ID or login to check devices for the activation lock.

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Though iPhone and iPad apps are generally very stable, sometimes you’ll encounter an application that crashes at random. In iOS, a crashing app usually presents as an app that seems to quit itself immediately, returning back to the Home Screen of the device without user intent. An app crash can happen immediately upon launching the app, crash randomly in the middle of using the app, or sometimes a crash can even be triggered predictably by a particular action that is attempted within the application. Regardless of when the iOS app is crashing, we’re going to review a few solutions that nearly always work to remedy the problem and should get you on your way to a trouble-free app usage experience again.

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Messages in Mac OS X has two methods of time-stamping messages; an automatically applied timestamp when a new conversation starts or message is received, and a lesser known ability to view the timestamp of any iMessage or text message sent with the Mac Messages app. We’re going to focus on the latter approach since it will allow a Mac user to reveal the exact date and time that any message was sent or received within the Messages app of Mac OS X.

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Each time you download a file from the web with Safari, it goes into a list of downloaded items contained within the browser. In modern versions of Mac OS X, this downloaded list item deletes itself automatically after a day passes, but if you want to change how often and when Safari clears the download list, you can do so easily through the browsers preferences.

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The standard viewing window of Photos app in Mac OS X shows a series of thumbnails for each image, and if you double-click on any particular image it gets larger and takes over the app. If you wish to view the next picture, most users will click on the back button, then double-click on another picture, and repeat that process. It turns out there’s a quicker and debatably better way to browse through multiple images in Photos app quickly, and it’s by using the Split View option.

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Apple has released two new beta builds of OS X El Capitan, Developer Beta 8 for those registered in the official Mac Developer Program, and Public Beta 6 for Mac users in the Public Beta test program. The new builds arrive as 15A279b and 15A279d, respectively.

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Mac based web developers are probably familiar with manually starting and stopping the Apache web server in OS X through the command line by now, but if you want Apache to start itself automatically upon boot and reboot of a Mac, you’ll want to go a step further and use launchctl. By doing so, webdevs won’t need to run the apache start commands manually to start the Apache httpd daemon, it will start itself automatically each time the Mac boots up. Naturally, we’ll also show how to stop Apache from starting itself up on boot as well.

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Twitter is a really great social service which allows you to curate a feed of nearly anything that interests you, whether it’s news, tech advice, recipes, pictures, jokes, celebrity updates, whatever. But the Twitter app for iPhone and iPad defaults to auto-playing video and animated gifs on both wi-fi and cellular data, this is entirely unwelcome for a variety of reasons we’ll touch on shortly, but it’s also annoying and can quickly lead to notable battery drain and excessive unnecessary cellular data usage. Fortunately, if you don’t want the auto-playing video on your iPhone or iPad, you can disable the automatic start of video and gifs in Twitter for iOS either entirely, or switch it to wi-fi only, either without too much effort.

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Ever wished you could set a Macs wallpaper image from the command line in OS X? As a matter of fact, you can change the desktop background picture from the terminal, which can be useful for a variety of situations ranging from inclusion in a setup script, to remote management, automating, or whatever else you can think of.

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Though it’s generally recommended to use the ‘Default for display’ screen resolution option, Mac users who connect their computer to an external display or TV may find it helpful to be able to see, access, and use all possible display resolutions for a particular screen. This can be particularly useful if a display Mis either showing at an incorrect screen resolution, or if you’d like to use a specific resolution that is not shown in the available ‘Scaled’ resolutions list of Mac OS X.

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Apple has sent invitations to selected media outlets for a September 9 event at the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, California. Presumably this event will be where the iPhone 6S is unveiled, perhaps alongside the rumored new Apple TV.

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When you connect an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a computer, you’ll see a familiar “Trust This Computer?” pop-up on the iOS device screen with two options “Trust” and “Don’t Trust”. If you intend to use the computer with the iOS device users will tap on “Trust”, which gives the computer access to the device.

Now, given how easy it is to accidentally tap on “Don’t Trust” which can be reversed, it’s a little frustrating that there isn’t an obvious simple way to ‘UnTrust’ a computer that you accidentally trusted from the iPhone or iPad too, right? Well it turns out you can undo the ‘Trust’ selection when an iOS device is connected to a computer.

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Mac users who favor the Safari browser as their primary means of web access in Mac OS X may find it helpful to switch the search engine used by default in Safari. This determines which web search tool is used through the URL address bar and elsewhere in Safari.

Safari allows you to choose between the four major web search engine choices to use as the default in search engine in Safari, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. Each of which are great choices that have a variety of benefits. Of course Google is the default, but some users prefer DuckDuckGo or Bing, or even Yahoo. Mac users can change the default search engine in Safari at any time, as this tutorial will demonstrate.

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Need to restore a Mac from a Time Machine backup? This article will show you how to do that.

While Macs have a great reputation for being stable and rarely experiencing major issues, the reality is that sometimes things can go wrong. Typically this happens when either a hard drive fails or a Mac OS X system update goes completely awry, but if you have set up Time Machine backups on the Mac like all users should, then you will discover that restoring an entire systems hard drive from that Time Machine backup is really quite easy.

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Apple makes heavy usage of eye candy zooming and zipping around animation effects on Apple Watch, iOS, and OS X, which can look nice in some situations, but can also cause nausea and vertigo to some users who are particularly sensitive to the unpleasant sensation of motion sickness. If you’ve ever been using the Apple Watch and felt queasy, or perhaps you just aren’t a fan of the endless zooming in and out of applications, resizing, and sliding around animations found throughout WatchOS, you can turn on a feature called Reduce Motion which greatly limits the animations.

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Apple has launched a replacement program for malfunctioning rear cameras on some iPhone 6 Plus models. The affected iPhone 6 Plus devices have a camera component failure which causes photos and video taken with the devices rear camera to appear blurry rather than focused (note Apple calls the rear camera on iPhones the iSight camera, and the front camera a FaceTime camera). Not all iPhone Plus models are impacted, and some iPhone 6 Plus devices with a repair-eligible serial number appear to take normal focused pictures.

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Everyone loves Emoji, right? The playful little icons that can typed on the Mac or iPhone add all sorts of fun and variety to conversation, but why stop at communication? Why not make some incredibly complex mosaic Emoji artwork out of any image or picture you have? It’s easy!

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