This weeks featured Mac desk setup comes from cloud solutions provider and small business owner John H., let’s learn a bit more about the hardware and apps that make up the workstation.
Boot Camp allows you to dual-boot between a Windows partition and Mac OS X on a Mac. Dual booting multiple OS’s is incredibly useful and has plenty of purposes, but if you decide you no longer need to run Windows on a Mac you’ll probably want to remove the Windows Boot Camp partition so that you can recover the drive space. Some users wind up formatting the Mac drive and restoring from a Time Machine backup, but that’s not necessary, instead you can choose to remove only the Windows Boot Camp partition while preserving Mac OS X untouched.
Want a fun way to kill some time on Friday? Get your best “Sorry boss, can’t do it, just too busy right now!” ready and try out Corporate Avoidance, an amusingly named Mac app that draws fake rendering progress bars across fake renditions of popular film, video, and audio production apps, giving the illusion that you and your computer are just oh-so ultra super busy waiting for some app to complete a lengthy task or render.
Spring is well under way, which means it’s high time to do some essential maintenance for your iOS hardware. Yes, we know that cleaning isn’t the most fun thing in the world, but these are all simple tasks, and really it’s the type of regular maintenance that every iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch user should develop into regular habits… but just in case you haven’t gotten there yet, we’re here to help.
So get out that iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and follow along to keep things running smoothly. Let’s get going!
Duplicating the iPhone backup files may be desirable or necessary for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to make a manual backup of your iOS backups, or even if it’s just to move it onto another drive so that you can clear out some disk space. There are a few ways to go about doing this, but we’ll show you the quickest way to quickly make a copy of any locally stored iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch backup file.
You’ll definitely want to do this if you have any plans on editing the backups made through iTunes, particularly if you’re going to manually extract photos, text messages, or other items from the stored SQL databases.
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The iPhone’s bundled Compass app can be both fun and useful, adding to the devices multi-tool and digital swiss army knife functions. For those who want to use the built-in iOS compass for navigation, you’ll be pleased to find that you can lock the needles directional position at a set point, greatly improving the ability to use the app for navigating around.
With the needle locked into a position, straying from the set (locked) direction will cause the compass to turn red, indicating the degree of sway and helping to course correct. Whether you’re directionally challenged or not, this is helpful for navigation for many reasons.
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The default email client in Mac OS X is the simply named “Mail” app, and it’s a pretty good mail application, but what if you’d rather use something else, like ThunderBird, Sparrow, pine, or a browser and web mail client like Gmail? That’s when you’ll want to change the default mail app to something else, and it’s super easy to do on any Mac.
Note that by changing the default mail app you will change what app launches when you try to send emails from anywhere in Mac OS, whether it’s from another Mac app or a link on the web.
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Many users have noticed that turning off autocorrect in the Mac OS X System Preferences does not impact every single app on their Macs. Two cases in point where autocorrect stays on; Pages, the word processor app from Apple, and TextEdit, the default text editing app that comes with all Macs.
If you want to disable autocorrect for TextEdit and the Pages app, rather than relying on the system-wide autocorrect on/off toggle, you’ll need to go a step further and disable the automatic spelling correction engine built separately into these apps. This is often overlooked by users, which leads them to believe there is a problem with autocorrect not listening to their preferences set in Mac OS X, when this is actually an intentional feature. Let’s jump right to it and cover how to disable the autocorrections in the two major text and word apps for Mac:
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You can block callers from contacting you on your iPhone, and not only will it block their inbound phone calls but also any text messages or FaceTime communication attempts. This is obviously useful for so many reasons, whether it’s to avoid a nuisance or a weirdo, and it’s simple to use.
One interesting thing to note about how iOS blocks callers is that it actually just sends the caller / contact to a voicemail box that doesn’t exist, and likewise their attempts at sending texts and FaceTime attempts just go into a void, regardless they don’t get any acknowledgement of being blocked by you the user. It’s as if they’re reaching out to a black hole of /dev/null and they don’t even know it, which for most purposes is perfect. If you’re unfamiliar with the blocking feature built into iOS, here’s how to use it.
The iPhone has quickly become the go-to digital camera for many of us, storing thousands of memories and moments in images. But if you lose an iPhone, it becomes broken, or succumbs to water, you may be left with a situation where all you have is an iPhone backup file and no direct access to the photos. The good news is, as long as you have regular backups made of your iPhone, you can probably recover the photos. The possible bad news is you’ll need to have a recent backup made if you want to get all your pictures back, this is yet another reason why it’s absolutely essential to make regular iPhone backups, preferably both to iCloud and to a computer using iTunes.
Assuming you have an iPhone backup handy, you can recover the photos from that backup. We’ll cover two ways to do this, one is a manual method of using the backup from iTunes or iCloud to restore to an iPhone, and the other approach uses a third party app that can extract photos directly from an iPhone backup file left on your computer as made through iTunes. So long as you have backups handy, either approach will work, but you’ll need to use whichever approach is most appropriate for your situation. For example, if you have another iPhone handy or just got a new iPhone to replace a missing one, use the traditional restore method, whereas if you only have a backup file with no phone, you’ll need to use the third party app solution.
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Miss the good old days of rebooting your Apple IIgs, Macintosh SE/30, or Performa 720? Maybe you’re a glutton for punishment and you’d like to remember with fondness what it was like to boot into DOS, Windows 1.0, or Windows 3.11? Or maybe an Amiga? Or a NeXT computer? The Restart Page has all that and more, flush with the computer boot sequence nostalgia you’re looking for with it’s microsite of boot emulations.
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This weeks featured Mac setup comes from Andrew T., a student and programmer. As for the setup itself, it’s a bit unorthodox… because it’s a Hackintosh! For those who are less familiar with the concept of a Hackintosh, it’s an unofficial and unsupported Mac built using traditional PC components that runs OS X. Aside from the primary Mac being not an official Macintosh, there’s a handful of Apple devices to go along with the mix. Let’s jump in and learn a bit more this setup!
Some Mac users have recently stumbled upon a “Thunderbolt Bridge” alert dialog that shows up when they visit the Mac OS X Network preference panel, the full text of the message box says:
“New Interface Detected
A new network has been detected:
Thunderbolt Bridge
Please verify that it is configured correctly, then press Apply to activate it.”
Because this is showing up out of the blue for most Mac users, it’s causing a fair amount of confusion as to what it is, why it’s showing up, and what to do about it… and that’s what we’re going to explain here.
The Finder smiling face Dock icon has been with Mac OS X since the very beginning, and the Finder face itself has been in Mac OS from it’s earliest origins as well. Some users may want to change the Dock Finder icon to something else for customization purposes, but the process is a bit more complex than simply changing an icon elsewhere on a Mac through the traditional Get Info approach.
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While the concept behind AMBER Alerts is fantastic, being startled by the iPhone belting out an extremely loud and terrifyingly blaring alarm sound in the middle of the night is not exactly a pleasant experience. This can be made even more frustrating for users who don’t know what the alert is for, and exacerbated by the very generous coverage region for an AMBER alert, where you may be hundreds of miles away from the event epicenter and still get the alarm sent to your iPhone anyway. It’s not recommended, but as with other weather and government alerts, iOS offers an option to disable all AMBER Alerts coming to your iPhone.
Many advanced Mac users spend a lot of time at the command line of OS X, accessed through the Terminal app. While generally the Terminal is fast and efficient, sometimes it can slow down over time, or suffer from some performance degradation due to user preference settings. If you feel that Terminal app is being sluggish and could use a speed boost in OS X, use these handful of tricks to speed up the performance of Terminal app and your command line experience.
Anyone who works with the web likely knows that it can be a challenge to take a full web page screenshot. While the traditional go-to options for many web designers and developers is to print a page as a PDF or use the Mac standard screen shot keyboard shortcuts in OS X, for longer pages users have to scroll through a web page and take pictures repeatedly, then use a third party app like Pixelmator or Photoshop to join them together, a time consuming and tedious process. There’s a better way though, thanks to a free Mac app called Paparazzi, which offers a much easier approach to take complete screen shots of entire web pages regardless of how long or wide the website is.
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FaceTime makes video chat and audio calls easier than ever, or at least, it does when FaceTime works. While FaceTime used to be one of the most reliable ways to initiate a video conversation between any Macs, iPhones, or iPads, sometimes it just doesn’t work. More recently, a bug has been identified that has completely broken FaceTime for many users, which may cause FaceTime to get stuck on “Connecting…” either staying there indefinitely without a connection, or failing and dropping a FaceTime chat instantly. This problem can impact both FaceTime Video and FaceTime Audio calls for either Mac OS X or iOS, but there are means of troubleshooting the issue if you happen to run into persistently failing connections.
Because FaceTime is a two-way service, some of these troubleshooting tricks will need to be performed on both sides of the connection; meaning both on the caller and recipients device. Failing to do so may cause FaceTime to continue to report connection failures.
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