There’s a rather amusing Easter Egg built into the Speakable Items function of Mac OS X Accessibility options that lets your Mac tell you bad jokes. Yes, seriously. Sounds goofy, maybe even pointless? Well that’s why it’s an Easter Egg, so if that isn’t compelling I don’t know what is. Let’s dig in and learn how to access this rather silly joke routine ability hidden away on your Mac.

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iOS 8 will be released to the public very soon with its myriad of new features and enhancements, and that makes now a great time to prepare your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch for the major system update. We’ll break it down into several easy steps so that you’ll have your iOS device ready to install the latest version when it arrives in the near future.

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A device claiming to be a functioning and activated white iPhone 6 model with 4.7″ display has been shown in a series of videos and photographs coming out of China. In the images and video, you see what appears to be the standard iOS home screen, elements of iOS running in Chinese language, and what looks like a very refined and well built iPhone-like device. The big question of course; is this really an iPhone, or is it a fake?

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This weeks featured Mac setup comes to us from Gerard F., the Managing Director of a creative services company. Let’s jump right in and learn a bit more:

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We’re just a few days away from getting a look at the Apple wearable device, dubbed the iWatch by fans and the tech press. And while a new report from the New York Times provides some juicy details about features like a flexible curved glass display, nobody has any idea what the iWatch will actually look like… and neither do we. But one things for certain, the iWatch definitely won’t look like these wrist-born wearable devices.

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Quitting apps gracefully is typically done through the appropriate application menu by choosing “Quit”, but the Mac GUI is obviously inaccessible from the command line of Mac OS X. So when most command line users are confronted with the need to exit an application, they wind up using the ‘kill’ command to terminate the process and forcibly quit the app, rather than issuing a ‘soft’ kill. The obvious problem with terminating an app is that while it does exit the application, you may lose data in that process, and even session restoration caches may not be adequate to restore the data. Thus, whenever possible, it’s usually best for users to gracefully quit an application instead.

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The wearable device that Apple is set to debut on September 9th will feature a flexible curved glass display, support mobile payments, and be charged wirelessly, according to the most detailed report yet from the New York Times. Additionally, the device will perform a combination of tasks related to health and fitness monitoring, and also offer some mobile computing features.

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Apple has announced a live stream will be available for the planned September 9 event. The event and accompanying video stream will begin at 10AM Pacific Time on the morning of the 9th, and though it’s not specified, will likely last an hour or two.

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Troubleshooting complex issues on a Mac can be challenging as is, and if you’re ever confronted with some complex situations you may find the command line to lend a major hand. In this case, advanced users can boot a Mac into safe mode through the usage of the nvram utility, a tool which allows users to directly manipulate firmware variables. We’ll use nvram to enable safe booting entirely through the command line, preventing a user from needing to use the standard Mac method to boot into safe mode by holding down a Shift key upon system start of Mac OS X, this opens the door for remotely enabling safe mode and improved remote troubleshooting, and for a variety of scripting applications.

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The networksetup utility offers a command line interface to configuring the variety of Mac networking features available in Mac OS X. We’ve discussed networksetup and accompanying features many times here for more advanced purposes, but one of the simpler uses of networksetup is that it can list out every piece of networking hardware attached to a Mac, it’s accompanying device interface, and it’s associated address. This works to list both internal networking components and external connected networking devices as well, so if you’re using an external NIC card, you should find it here.

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Have a favorite song that you want to use to seed a new music station? Maybe you’re looking to find some new tunes to hear based on a particular song or artist? iTunes Radio makes this process simple, and you can instantly create a new iTunes Radio station from any playing song or artist, whether that song is in your music library or playing from an existing iTunes Radio station. The latter situation is fairly well known by Radio users, but creating a new station from songs that already exist in an iTunes playlist is less well known. This works with any iTunes client that supports the Radio feature, whether it’s the desktop iTunes app or the Music app in iOS.

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Red Eye happens sometimes in photography, often if you’re shooting a subject while using the camera flash, or when a bright light is shining in their eyes. The appearance is striking and usually undesirable, with the subjects eyes literally glowing red. You may run into the red eye effect when taking pictures with any camera, but the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad all have a fantastic trick up their sleeve that lets you quickly remove red eye from just about any picture.

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Apple has released the 7th developer preview of OS X Yosemite. The update arrives as build 14A343f, and includes bug fixes and feature enhancements, making it recommended for all Mac developers to install.

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The iOS Dock sits at the bottom of our iPhone, ipod touch, and iPad home screen, intended to hold the most commonly used apps for quicker launching. While it’s well known that you can customize the apps that are contained within the Dock, what’s lesser known is that you can actually reduce the number of apps visible from the 4 default, down to 3, 2, 1, and, if you really want to, 0 apps.

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What if the Edvard Munch expressionist classic The Scream was really a reaction to a broken iPhone screen? What if A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was modernized for the 21st century, what would that Sunday afternoon look like now? What if The Card Players were actually just two guys staring at their iPhone screens? And what if The Last Supper by Da Vinci was filled with the apostles fiddling around on their Apple gear? If all of that sounds ludicrous, we’re in agreement, but that’s exactly what these amusingly updated (some may say ruined) classics show us.

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The iPhone will soon serve as a true mobile wallet, working with Visa, MasterCard, or an American Express card, and able to make secure mobile payments without whipping out your old fashioned plastic credit card, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

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This week we’re featuring the Mac Setup of Csucsu Z., a sound engineer from Hungary who has a portable setup of Apple gear that goes on the road. Let’s jump right in and learn a bit more:

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Typically Mac users will retrieve the screen resolution of connected displays through the Displays system preference panel in OS X. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that approach, it’s easy and quick, but because it uses the graphical interface of OS X it’s not necessary helpful for scripting purposes or remote management through Remote Login and SSH connections. In these situations, and plenty of others, you may wish to retrieve the current screen resolutions of displays from the command line in Mac OS X.

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