Local networking usually works flawlessly on Macs, which is why some of the most aggravating issues that a select group of users may experience with Mac OS with OS X Yosemite (and sometimes with later releases) pertain to network connections. Some of these may relate to broader connection and wi-fi functionality problems, and others which can effect general LAN networking functions and the ability to discover and connect to another local Mac, or transfer files on a local network of other AFP Macs or even broader SMB machines. The latter LAN discovery and connectivity issues are what we’re going to focus on addressing here.

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Losing an iPhone is a terrible feeling, so if you ever happen to be in the position of finding a random iPhone somewhere, maybe in a coffee shop or on the street, you should always do the right thing and try to return it to the proper owner. Of course that’s sometimes easier said than done, but everyones favorite virtual assistant Siri can make the job significantly easier by helping to locate the devices owner.

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When you click into the URL bar of Safari in MacOS and Mac OS X, a panel menu of website bookmark icons appears directly under the address bar. This can offer a quick way to access web bookmarks in Safari from a Mac, but it’s fairly likely you’ll discover a few bookmarks in the icon view that you don’t really want showing in the bookmark list.

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Have you ever needed to mark an email as unread after opening it on your iOS device? Of course you have, whether to serve as a reminder to yourself later, or to undo an accidental mark as read. Typically on the iPhone and iPad iOS Mail apps, most people use the Flag menu method to manually select “Mark as Unread” on a message, but the newest versions of Mail app support an ultra-fast gesture that will quickly mark any email as unread without having to even open the mail message. This works remarkably well on the iPhone Mail app in particular.

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The Google Chrome web browser has updated with a multiple-user profile menu visible in the window titlebar, a feature that makes juggling multiple Google and Gmail accounts extremely easy. It’s also helpful for computers with multiple people using them without multiple accounts too, since anyone can switch logins through the menu. Of course, the user menu switching option is not necessarily useful if you don’t have or regularly use multiple Google profiles, so changing the user menu from enabled by default to being hidden by default is a desirable choice for some users.

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Apple has released a sixth beta version of OS X 10.10.2 to those registered with the Mac Developer program. The new build arrives as 14C106a and continues to emphasize a focus on resolving wi-fi problems, Mail, and VoiceOver.

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Now that Siri can identify songs that are playing, similar to the Shazam app service, you’ll probably appreciate knowing that you can easily go back and see a list of songs that Siri has found and detected. This is great since it basically keeps a running tab of what music you asked your iPhone to identify, making it easy to view that list of songs so that you can either listen to them again or buy them through the iTunes music store.

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The Xbox One is a great gaming console with an excellent controller, and if you have a Mac with a few games you’d like to use a controller for, you can use a third party tool to gain Xbox One controller support for gaming in OS X.

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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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