The Mac includes a fantastic command line tool called textutil which allows for quick text file format conversions, translating almost any text or word document type into another. We’ve discussed textutil for a variety of uses, but typically it has been for one-off conversions of a specific file into a new file type. This time around we’ll focus on batch converting a group of files that are in the common Microsoft Office “DOCX” format, which is basically a compressed XML version of a classic Office DOC file, into a simple TXT or RTF file format, which has greater compatibility.
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How many times have you been reading an article on the web when you tapped on a link that sent you somewhere you weren’t expecting? Maybe it was to an article that wasn’t anticipated, or maybe it was to another website entirely. Sometimes we just want to know where we’ll be going before going there, right? Pretty normal, and from desktop web browsers on the Mac and PC, users can just use the mouse cursor to hover over a link to see where it will take you. But in the iOS world of tapping and touching, there is no ‘hover’, only a definitive tap onto the screens of our iPads and iPhones, which in this context means off you to the link before you knew what it was.
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If you follow the general tech world through just about any medium, be it Twitter, Pinterest, or blogs, you may have seen a pretty bold battery charging claim gaining popularity lately, usually something along the lines of: “charge your iPhone twice as fast just by switching it into AirPlane Mode!” The theory behind that claim being that toggling AirPlane Mode on disables all communication radios and wireless transmitters in the device to make and receive calls, use cellular and wi-fi data, or have access to the GPS feature. It sounds great, maybe even reasonable since those things can drain the battery, plus switching airplane mode on is super easy, but does it actually work?
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Batteries on the MacBook Pro, MacBook, and MacBook Air are made to offer many hours of work on a single charge. Unfortunately, sometimes apps get in the way of our wonderful Mac battery life, often without a user even noticing until suddenly their battery life has been drained dramatically. The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way, because OS X provides a very easy way to see exactly what’s using battery (well, energy), which you can then take whatever action is necessary to resolve.

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It’s fairly common for computer users to delay updating to major operating system releases, and though Mac owners tend to be a bit better at upgrading than Windows users, many are still running old versions of OS X. For some users there are good reasons for this, maybe lingering on outdated OS X versions like Snow Leopard because of compatibility issues with a specific app, or because they just really like it. But then there are other users who have already made the leap beyond Snow Leopard, and are sitting on OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion, procrastinating and putting off the OS X Mavericks update for no good reason. This article is aimed at the procrastinators (and there’s a surprisingly large amount of them – nearly 17% of Mac users are on Lion and another 20% on Mountain Lion), particularly individuals with Macs still running OS X Lion, in any version from 10.7 through 10.7.5.
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iPhone and iPad users have long wanted Nintendo games to come to the iOS platform, but thus far Nintendo has stayed away from releasing native games for any Apple hardware. That hasn’t stopped enthusiasts from figuring out ways to play Nintendo classics on their iPhones though, which typically that entails jailbreaking a device then installing an emulator from the Cydia store, but WebNES is different. Instead of requiring any downloads, messing with jailbreaks, tweaks, or apps, WebNES runs entirely in the web browser as a full-fledged Nintendo emulator. That means there’s just about no setup required. It works surprisingly well on the iPhone, though it’s slightly laggy sometimes, and should work just as well on the iPad, iPod touch, or any Android too. (Sorry desktop OS X users, but you can use the excellent OpenEMU instead).
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Some Mac users may encounter an apparently random disappearance of Bluetooth functionality, often after rebooting or updating Mac OS X. The first obvious indicator is that no Bluetooth hardware works, be it a keyboard, mouse, headset, or otherwise, and when attempting to visit the Bluetooth menu of Mac OS X a “Bluetooth: Not Available” error is displayed while the menu bar items icon has a squiggly strike through it.
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Every modern iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch has access to a feature called Automatic Downloads, which can be used a bit differently than intended as a means to remotely install apps onto iOS devices from a computer. All you need is iTunes on OS X or Windows logged into the same Apple ID as what’s used on the iOS device, and the rest is easier than you’d probably expect.
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It’s time for another featured Mac setup! This week we’ve got an amazing studio to share from a professional audio mixing engineer and startup founder, let’s get right to it…
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Simple or abstract wallpapers tend to work best with iOS 7’s bright color scheme and generally flat appearance, and this pack of eight colorful abstractions sent to us by a reader are no exception. The images are sized generously at 900×1400, meaning they’ll easily accommodate for the motion parallax wallpaper effect on the iPhone 5/5S/5C and new iPod touch displays, while sizing down to look great on the smaller iPhone screens too.
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Ever wanted to create an iPhone or Android ringtone from an existing audio file, but wanted to complete the process entirely from the command line? You’re in luck, because Mac OS X has a little audio conversion tool that can turn any existing audio track into an Android or iPhone compatible ringtone in seconds. We’ll break the command down for both Android and iPhone users, though whichever method you choose you’ll still need to sync the ringtone over to the device yourself.

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Scrubbing audio is probably the fastest way to skip through and navigate within a playing audio track, and iOS allows you to scrub active tracks directly from the Control Center. There’s not much to it and scrubbing is done through a fairly simple gesture, but because the tap touch target is quite small it can take some practice to get right.

You can scrub through any playing song, music, podcast, or show on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Let’s review this nice feature, available anywhere in iOS via Control Center.
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iOS is usually smart enough to join the last functioning wireless network used within range, but if you’re in an area with many wi-fi networks available sometimes you’ll find an iPhone or iPad is persistently joining and re-joining a network that you don’t want it to, even if you consistently toggle over to join a different router. This can be pretty frustrating, but you can typically resolve that annoyance by simply choosing to forget the wireless network and manually dropping it from the settings.
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The powerful curl command line tool can be used to download files from just about any remote server. Longtime command line users know this can be useful for a wide variety of situations, but to keep things simple, many will find that downloading a file with curl can often be a quicker alternative to using a web browser or FTP client from the GUI side of Mac OS X (or linux). This is is helpful for local situations, but there’s particular value if you’re in a situation where you need to download something to a remote Mac when connected through SSH.

For the purposes of this walkthrough, we’ll focus primarily on downloading files from the two commonly encountered HTTP and SFTP protocols, though it should be noted that cURL supports many more protocols. Though curl is easy to use, having some knowledge of the command line is recommended.
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Mac users who prefer to have a more traditional Unix toolkit accessible to them through the Terminal may wish to install the optional Command Line Tools subsection of the Xcode IDE. From MacOS Monterey, Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, OS X El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks onward, this is now easily possible directly and without installing the entire Xcode package first, no developer account is required either.

The Command Line Tool package gives Mac terminal users many commonly used tools, utilities, and compilers, including make, GCC, clang, perl, svn, git, size, strip, strings, libtool, cpp, what, and many other useful commands that are usually found in default linux installations. We’ve included the full list of new binaries available through the command line toolkit below for those interested, or you can just see for yourself after you have installed the package, which we’ll walk through here.

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iPhone and iPad users have the option to enable a “Do Not Track” setting on their iOS devices for Safari, a feature that is aimed at limiting targeting and tracking of web browsing behavior by various web services. When turned on, this causes Safari to make a DNT request to each page it visits for any services on that page to not track the client, though that doesn’t necessary mean it will he honored, as we’ll explain shortly. Nonetheless, users who favor privacy may want to enable the option anyway, even if the efficacy may be more limited when compared to blocking third party cookies in Safari for iOS.
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If you’ve ever joined a public wi-fi network and noticed the Finder sidebar is suddenly filled with other unfamiliar computers and network shares, and then curiously clicked on one of them, you’ve probably discovered that most of these computers have a user ‘Public Folder’ accessible to you and everyone else. This folder is included with every user account in OS X, and it has very limited access which is designed to facilitate simple file sharing (it does quite well), but such a feature may become undesirable on public networks with many foreign computers. Turning off your own Mac sharing Public Folder is quite simple, and it will prevent other Mac users from having access to the ~/Public directory if they’re on the same network.
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The iOS Photos app includes native image editing features that allow you to add the same filters from the live camera to pictures you have already taken. Additionally, you can apply those photo filters to any image stored on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, so long as it’s accessible from the Photos app, whether it’s a photo or a screen shot.
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