By default, all calls on the iPhone will play audio through the standard earpiece at the top of the phone, and if someone wishes to use speakerphone they enable it manually by tapping on the “Speaker” button during an active call. While that may be the desired effect for most users, in various situations some users may wish to receive and make all phone calls with speakerphone activated automatically, without having to manually enable it every time by pressing the Speaker button.

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Two unusual error messages that can occur during the attempted installation of Mac OS X El Capitan or Mac OS X Yosemite are the “This copy of the Install OS X El Capitan application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading” error, or a “This copy of the Install OS X Yosemite application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading” message, or a more vague “An error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running again” error message. Sometimes these can be resolved by simply rebooting and trying to reinstall OS X again (or re-downloading the Mac OS X installer if it was damaged), but if the error messages are persistent, then you may find that modifying the system date of the Mac can be the resolution.

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Some Mac users have discovered the Safari web browser has become significantly less stable after updating to some versions of Mac OS X system software including OS X El Capitan, OS X Yosemite, and MacOS Sierra. This can range from periodic crashes of Safari that never happened before, to Safari freezing up entirely, to Safari outright refusing to open as it crashes immediately upon launch.

Troubleshooting app crashes can be frustrating, but there are some tricks specific to Safari that may help to resolve instability with the Safari browser. If you’re experiencing Safari crashing or freezing on a regular basis under Mac OS X whether in Yosemite or newer and you’ve already reset Safari to no relief, follow each of the steps below. If all fails to resolve the problem, we’ll offer a reasonable workaround too.

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Most problems with iPhone are fairly simple to explain and resolve, but a somewhat rare outlier is the case of the spontaneous continuously vibrating iPhone. You’ll know it if you encounter it, the iPhone will basically seize up and do nothing but vibrate with a black screen, and the vibrations aren’t even pulsed like a message, it just buzzes nonstop.

This is a really peculiar issue that does not happen often, but it’s annoying and puzzling enough when encountered that troubleshooting the endlessly buzzing iPhone issue is worth covering.

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The Mac has long had currency conversion tools available through Calculator app and Dashboard with the Converter widget, but the latest versions of OS X have an even faster option available with Spotlight, which can provide current exchange rates and conversions on the fly.

You will need to be running at least OS X 10.10 or later to have this feature available to you from Spotlight.

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Many Mac users check the About This Mac Storage tab to get a quick overview of their disk space usage, and many will see a rather large “Other” storage space taking up disk capacity on their drives. If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because iOS often has a rather large Other storage space, but that’s largely where the similarities end, and in Mac OS it’s much easier to track down exactly what “Other” is. This is basically because the Mac has a user accessible file system and system directories, where as those corresponding elements in iOS are largely hidden from the user.

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Apple has released the fifth beta version of OS X 10.10.2 for users registered with the Mac Developer program. The new Yosemite build is 14C99D and continues to emphasize a focus on addressing bugs and remaining issues with wireless networking, Mail, and VoiceOver.

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The iOS Photo Stream feature is a really great way to share photos between friends and family who also have an iPad or iPhone. Each shared Photo Stream and the associated images are kept in iCloud, viewable through the “Shared” tab in the Photos app, where they are cached temporarily as you look at them. Yes, that means Photo Stream pictures are not always directly stored on a device. If you want to save one of those images from Photo Stream to your iPhone or iPad and have the full resolution version directly stored on your device, for editing or offline access, it’s quite easy to do.

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If you have an Android phone or tablet that is no longer in use and gathering dust, selling it or giving it to a new owner is often a good idea. Before you do that though, you’ll almost certainly want to erase all personal data on the phone by resetting the Android to the factory default settings. This is frequently encountered by those who use both platforms, but also for those who are moving from Android to an iPhone.

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Repairing Disk Permissions is a simple procedure that Mac users can run with the Disk Utility app or through the command line, and, as the name suggests, it repairs the permissions of various files on the target drive. Repairing permissions can be helpful when troubleshooting some fairly specific issues, or after installing or uninstalling a set of Mac applications that may have erroneously modified permissions somewhere on a drive. This is a largely misunderstood process, so we’re going to shine some light on it, and if you’re unfamiliar, how to resolve permissions issues with the repair procedure.

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While you can turn a song into a ringtone using iTunes, another option to make custom ringtones is to create one yourself, directly on your iPhone using the Garageband app. This is a nice solution since it does not involve a computer or iTunes, and the entire ringtone or text tone creation process can be completed directly on the iPhone in just a few moments.

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Apple has released the fourth beta version of iOS 8.2 to those individuals registered with the iOS Developer program. The release carries build 12D5461b and likely includes bug fixes and feature enhancements.

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The default text size used by Terminal app in OS X can be quite small if you’re using a large resolution display. While you can change the font to be better suit your preferences, and increasing the line spacing helps reading too, another simple solution to boost readability is to simply increase the text size shown on screen while visiting the command line.

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Retro gaming has made a healthy comeback, so what better way to relive the games of yesteryear than through a massive archive of over 2400 retro free-to-play DOS games, and that play in your very own web browser? That’s right, you don’t need an emulator app or to download anything, your web browser will emulate DOS and play thousands of excellent old school games natively thanks to The Internet Archive. That means you can play these classics from just about any device or computer you can imagine, be it a Mac, Windows PC, iOS, Android, or whatever else you want some retro gaming action on.

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Need to reset the entire printing system on a Mac? You can do that if you need to. Printer problems are notoriously frustrating for any computer user, and while Macs get off a bit easier than the alternatives out there, there can still be some pretty annoying issues that pop up with printing in Mac OS X due to flakey third party printing support, bad software, or just a low-grade printer. Whether it’s a broken print queue with a hundred pending jobs that remain unprinted, or a printer outright not responding regardless of how many jobs you send to it, sometimes the best thing to do is just start over from scratch and reset the entire Mac printing system in Mac OS X.

This article will show you how to reset the printing system on a Mac, which can be a helpful troubleshooting trick for some printer issues.

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In some unusual and admittedly rare situations, fonts in OS X and various Mac apps may display erroneously, or outright fail to display. Typically this happens after a font has been modified or a font has been installed outside of the standard ~/Library/Fonts directory, but it can happen out of the blue in some situations as well. While some font issues can be fixed by repairing permissions, more obscure issues may require you to dump the font caches and rebuild them.

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All new iPhone models can capture and record high quality slow-motion video by flipping to the ‘slo-mo’ setting in Camera app. Perhaps lesser known is that you can change the Frames Per Second (FPS) capture speed for slow motion video, which basically determines just how smooth and slow the video playback is, but also has a more practical benefit for casual users that reduces the movies file size, which we’ll discus momentarily.

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Apple has released the fourth beta build of OS X 10.10.2, arriving as build 14C94b, to those registered with the Mac Developer program. The latest release continues to focus on improving bugs, including problems with Wi-Fi, Mail, and VoiceOver, some of which are issues that have persistently bothered a number of Mac users even after updating to OS X 10.10.1.

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