Knowing what network an iPhone uses can be important for trying to repurpose an old device, buying a used iPhone, or simply to determine if a particular iPhone will work on a network of choice. While the iPhones top status bar will show the carrier name of an active cellular network, if the device isn’t activated or doesn’t have a SIM card, it won’t display anything other than “No Service” in the status bar. That doesn’t mean you can’t find out what network the device is locked to or last used though.

Read more »

This week we’re featuring the great Apple setup of Theatrical Producer Toby S., who humorously shares some of the challenges faced by expats while working and living abroad in a nation filled with counterfeit gadgets and fake everything. But the Macs are all real, so let’s dive right in an learn a bit more in this amusing overview:

Read more »

The Mac Notification Center gained widgets in OS X Yosemite, which are revealed when the Notification Center is opened and the “Today” view is chosen. This looks and functions a bit like Widgets in iOS, and these widgets range from World Clock, Calculator, Weather, Reminders, Calendar, Stocks, Social, and an to an iTunes widget, but they can include third party widgets that came bundled with other Mac apps too. To get the most out of Widgets in Notification Center, you’ll probably want to customize which widgets are shown or hidden to better suit your needs and preferences.

Read more »

The Instant iPhone Wi-Fi Hotspot feature in Mac OS X is incredibly useful if your Mac is on the go or you need an alternate internet connection, but even if you’re not aiming to use the cellular internet sharing capability of iPhone there are some other handy uses for the feature, like checking two of your iPhone vital stats without having to pull the device out of a pocket or purse.

As long as Instant Hotspot has been set up and the compatible Mac and compatible iPhone are nearby one another, you can remotely check on the battery life and cellular signal strength of that iPhone right from the Mac with a quick glance, even if the iPhone and Mac are in different rooms.

Read more »

If you’re not happy with the usage of Helvetica Neue as a system font in OS X Yosemite, why not go completely ridiculous and replace the Mac system font with Comic Sans? Yes Comic Sans, somewhere high on the list of worst fonts ever, can now be the universal system font on Mac OS X. Even if you don’t find it particularly amusing, at the very least it should give you a newfound appreciation for Helvetica Neue.

Read more »

Apple has released the first pre-release seed version of OS X 10.10.3 to developers. This particular beta version of Mac system software arrives as build 14D72i and seems to focus primarily on a new Photos app, which aims to replace iPhoto in OS X.

Read more »

Sometimes you need to enter a password into the terminal, usually for sudo or su commands, which lets users execute a command with super user privileges. This is fairly typical for allowing access to read or modify something that would otherwise not be possible with a standard user account. You’ll commonly see sudo prefixing another command, looking something like “sudo nano /etc/hosts“. Though most of the command line and sudo is generally only appropriate for advanced users, occasionally more casual computer users may need to turn to the Terminal, perhaps to enable a feature, modify a system file, or even for troubleshooting purposes. For novice users who wind up at the command line, a very common question occurs with entering passwords into the Terminal, almost always related to sudo and the apparent inability to type a password into the command line of Mac OS X (or Linux for that matter).

Read more »

TextEdit is a surprisingly handy Mac app that is mostly underutilized and under appreciated, and while it’s certainly not going to compete with the abilities of pro text editors like BBEdit and TextWrangler, it can function as a simple code editor in a pinch. One of the quintessential features of any good text editor is the ability to jump to a specific line number, and TextEdit can do that.

Read more »

Mac users can adjust the idle time to sleep their computers easily through the Energy Saver preference panel, but many advanced Mac OS X users may wish to turn to the command line to perform such a task. This allows for scripting, remote checking and changing idle sleep behavior through SSH, and you can also use it to set the idle time requirements beyond what is allowed through the standard System Preference approach.

Read more »

If you have ever switched from an iPhone to an Android or Windows phone, either temporarily, out of necessity, or for testing purposes, you may have noticed that a new phone will sometimes not receive inbound messages that have been sent from other iPhone users. Well, you probably didn’t notice it because you didn’t get any of the messages, but someone probably told you that they sent you a text and you never received it. These disappeared messages are almost always due to a quirk of iMessage, which seems to strongly couple itself to a phone number that belongs to an iPhone, and if not disabled or deregistered, that iMessage attachment can end up hoarding the messages in some sort of ethereal messaging purgatory, which then prevents them from being delivered to the new non-Apple phone. Fear not though, because you can get a phone number out of iMessage Purgatory by using one of two different methods outlined below.

Read more »

Those registered with the iOS Developer program will find a new beta of iOS 8.2 available. The fifth beta version build arrives as 12D5480A and continues to focus on general bug fixes and improvements.

The upcoming iOS release will also include support for iPhone and iPad communicating with the Apple Watch, the Watch is set to be released sometime in April, perhaps indicating a rough timeline for when public users can expect the iOS 8.2 final version as well.

Read more »

Mac users who have multiple user accounts on a single machine may sometimes wish to hide a specific user account from appearing on the login screens of OS X. This is fairly common for systems administrators who want to hide an admin account that can be used for direct or remote troubleshooting, but it can also be applicable to other users for a variety of reasons. By hiding an account this way, the account login still exists if it’s known and it can still be accessed from remote login and screen shares, but does not appear at the boot screens as a login option.

Read more »

Super Bowl XLIX is here, and if you don’t want to miss any of the Seahawks vs Patriots action, you can stream the game live in any web browser, on any iPad, and even on some iPhones, all for free if you’re in the USA.

Read more »

Some Mac users who have been experiencing longstanding wi-fi issues with OS X Yosemite have discovered that updating to OS X 10.10.2 does not resolve their networking difficulties. Perhaps more troubling, some Mac users who had functioning wi-fi previously have discovered that new wireless difficulties have appeared on their Macs after updating to the OS X 10.10.2 release of Yosemite.

Read more »

Mac users who are running the newest version of iTunes in OS X Yosemite can choose to enable an optional iTunes widget in Notification Center. Despite being the primary change to iTunes 12.1, the widget is not enabled or shown by default on any of the Macs I’ve updated, which is likely to be the case for many other OS X users as well.

If you’d like to see and use the iTunes Notification Center widget in OS X, you can enable it manually in just a moment.

Read more »

Mac users can find iTunes 12.1 available if they are running OS X Yosemite or OS X Mavericks. The update is said to include some performance improvements for syncing an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to iTunes, and may include bug fixes as well. Perhaps the most notable change to iTunes 12.1 is the addition of an optional widget for Notification Center in OS X Yosemite, though prior versions of OS X will not include the widget feature.

Read more »

Adware is generally something most Mac users won’t have to worry about, but that doesn’t mean that OS X is entirely immune to the potential nuisance, and nobody likes it when their browser has been hijacked by that type of junk. If you’re at all concerned about adware impacting your Mac and web browsing, you can easily scan, detect, and remove some of the most frequently encountered (although still rare) adware found in OS X using an excellent free utility called AdwareMedic.

Read more »

Users who require higher than usual security measures often set a firmware password on a Mac, which requires that a password be entered before the typical OS X boot sequence begins. While these low level passwords are quite secure, but that higher security also means a forgotten firmware password can be a significant problem. Nonetheless, if you wind up in a situation where you or another user has forgotten a low level firmware password on a Mac, don’t panic, because you may be able to recover the password or bypass it using one of the methods outlined below. If all else fails, Apple can possibly help you too.

Read more »