In some rare situations, reinstalling OS X on a Mac may be required. This is made fairly easy as all modern Macs include the OS X Internet Recovery feature, which lets you reinstall OS X through a netboot type of mode that is accessed from the internet rather than a local drive. This is helpful in the event you need to reinstall Mac OS X whether for fun, because something has gone truly haywire, or because you need to replace the system software for whatever other reason.

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Apple has released their annual holiday commercial, titled “The Song”. The advertisement plays out like a short film, following a girl who discovers an old record of her grandmother singing, and then proceeds to use a Mac and iPad to create and share a duet with herself and her grandmothers old recording.

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The Holiday shopping season is here, and let’s face it, the techies and geeks in our lives can be some of the toughest people to shop for. With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of some of the more useful, fun, and interesting potential gifts you can get for the gadgeteers in your lives (or anyone, really). Just don’t be surprised if you see an item or three and think “that looks great, I kind of want that for myself too”, and hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Whoever you’re shopping for (yourself included), check out the list below for some great gift ideas for anyone with an iPhone, iPad, MacBook, or whatever other combination of Apple products. And if you have any interesting ideas or great gift finds that you have come across yourself this holiday season (and that would be appropriate), do share your finds with us and let us know in the comments!

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Apple has released a third beta version of OS X 10.10.2 to Mac users who are registered with the Macintosh Developer program. The new beta build of 14C81f apparently focuses on several issues where some OS X Yosemite users have experienced ongoing problems with the new Mac operating system, including Wi-Fi, Mail, and VoiceOver.

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Mac users will find a new Safari update available to them, with the precise version offered depending on the OS X release they are running.

The small software update appears to resolve several bugs, in addition to whatever issues may have appeared in another recent Safari update that was later pulled by Apple.

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The iOS Health app can keep track of your movement, steps, and fitness throughout the day, and it works really great with the new iPhones… most of the time, at least. But sometimes you can open Health app and rather than seeing a chart of your fitness activity for that day, week, or month, you’ll see a blank dashboard, as if all of your prior activity, steps, and mileage has been erased.

Not to worry, your activity logs are not missing, and all of your health data is still on the iPhone*.

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Users who are interested in jailbreaking their iPhones and iPads will find that iOS 8.1.2 can be jailbroken using an updated version of the TaIG tool. The new version of TaiG came almost immediately after the release of iOS 8.1.2, which apparently does not patch the method utilized by the jailbreaking utility.

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A second beta of iOS 8.2 has been released to users participating in the iOS Developer program. The newest beta version arrives as build 12D445d and is said to focus primarily on bug fixes that remain with the mobile operating system.

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Many longtime Windows users have grown to rely on the Notepad app for it’s plain text editing simplicity, for everything from writing little code blocks to just serving as a easy way to strip formatting and styling from anything copied into an open Notepad document. As a result, many Windows switchers to the Mac platform look for something that behaves similar to Notepad, but it turns out that such an app already exists in OS X and thus there is no need to download a third party app for most basic Notepad-like needs. Instead, just make a quick settings change to the TextEdit app that ships with every version of Mac OS X to turn it into a plain text editor.

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Apple has released iOS 8.1.2 update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users. The small update weighs in around 35MB and focuses primarily on bug fixes, most of which are unspecified, though a specific issue for iPhone users where ringtones and text tones would disappear is mentioned in the download notes.

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OS X Yosemite has a rather peculiar bug with Open and Save dialog windows, where the file selector or saver dialog window shows up as inappropriately large. Sometimes the Open / Save window gets so big that it goes underneath the users Dock or even off screen, effectively preventing the dialog window from being resized.

This bug has been around in OS X 10.10 and has yet to be fixed, so while Mac users wait for another bug fix and system update to OS X Yosemite, we’ll cover a few workarounds that you can use in the meantime if and when you encounter the jumbo Open / Save dialog window.

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Apple has unveiled their picks for the best iPhone and iPad apps and games of 2014. The list includes some apps that you’re probably familiar with, and likely a notable amount of games or apps that you’ve never heard of, which can make these Apple provided “best of” lists a good way of discovering new apps and games.

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A side effect of iOS including an extraordinarily convenient way to easily recover deleted photos is that pictures are not completely removed from an iPhone or iPad immediately, at least unless the user takes specific action to delete a picture permanently. That’s what we’re going to cover here, so that if you have a photo or many, or a video, that you want to permanently delete instantly, you won’t have to wait for the automatic removal process to complete itself over the course of 30 days (which is how deleting videos / photos works in iOS now, thus allowing for the recovery feature).

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Apple is running new TV commercials for the iPad Air 2, the spots are called “Change is in the Air” and it appears there are at least two variations of the same commercial, one of which is embedded below.

Each ad features a wide variety of people using the iPad Air for many different purposes, ranging from creating stop-motion animations, to recording skateboarding, using the iPad to help model and craft a surfboard, to helping to play music and much more.

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Apple Pay is an undoubtedly convenient and easy way to pay for purchases using just your iPhone, and Apple Pay securely holds a credit card or debit card that has been added. But all cards expire, card rewards programs change to be better or worse, and personal shopping habits and card preferences change too, so equally as important to knowing how to go about setting up and adding a card to Apple Pay is knowing how to remove a credit card or debit card from your Apple Pay list too.

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It has been a little while since we’ve posted a featured Mac setup, but we’re back at it again with this weeks featured workstation. This time we’re going to share the desk setup of Richard R., who uses OS X, iOS, and Ubuntu Linux to run and operate his own IT consulting company out of Dallas Texas. Let’s jump right in and learn a bit more:

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Some time ago, many Mac users signed up to participate in the OS X Public Beta program to try out and beta test OS X Yosemite before it was released to the wider public. Since then, being included in that public beta program makes those Macs also receive beta software builds for other updates to OS X as well, including smaller software point release beta builds and beta system software. If you’re not interested in seeing and receiving those beta software builds on your Mac any longer, you can opt out of receiving the pre-release software updates.

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A notable number of iPhone users have experienced a truly peculiar happening with their iPhone and Siri after updating to the latest versions of iOS; the iPhone may start talking seemingly out of the blue.

If you’ve experienced this yourself, you know how jarring, weird, funny, and sometimes outright creepy it can be to have our favorite digital assistant start chiming in with various comments or commands apparently activating entirely on their own and unprovoked.

Naturally, the first thought is that Professor Stephen Hawking was prophetically right and that robots are taking over the world starting with our iPhones, right??! Ahhhhhh!

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