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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Most of us have an email account or two, and likewise most of us have an increasingly growing number of unread mail messages accumulating slowly (or quickly) in our inboxes. Features like VIP tagging and inbox can help to tame some of the email clutter, but there’s simply no denying that some of our inboxes are past the point of no return… where hundreds if not thousands of emails are going unread, cluttering up the inbox and making for some astronomical unread mail numbers showing up on our Mail, Gmail, Mailbox, Ymail, and other email app icons in iOS. If your iPhone or iPad mail clients look anything like this due to tons of unread emails, it’s sometimes best to just call it quits and hide that onerously giant number from the mail icons completely.
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Push Notifications sent to Safari in Mac OS X are generally thought of as really great or really annoying, depending on user opinion. If you’re in the latter crowd that finds Safari Push Notifications to be a nuisance, you can now set Safari in Mac OS X to never allow websites to ask for permission to send your Mac Push Notification alerts, effectively disabling the nagging feature that pops up a request on some websites. If you’re unfamiliar with what these Safari requests look like, here’s an example push alert request from NYTimes that pops up when visiting the home page:

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Many of us who bought an iPhone 5 early in the release cycle have since discovered that our power buttons have either stopped working entirely, or no longer register some clicks / taps. While the assumption has been that it’s a result of wear and tear, Apple has now acknowledged that a malfunctioning power button (also known as the sleep / wake button) is a flaw, and they are replacing impacted models for free repair through the officially named “iPhone 5 Sleep/Wake Button Replacement Program”. To be perfectly clear, the iPhone power / sleep button is located at the very top of the device:

It’s very easy to determine if your iPhone 5 is impacted by the faulty power / sleep / wake button, and most users who have the problem are well aware of the issue. Not all iPhone 5 devices have a broken power button, and the the vast majority work as intended. Nonetheless, it’s easy to check to see if you are eligible for the free repair service.

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“Do Not Track” is an effort to increase privacy on the web, when enabled it sends a ‘do not track’ (DNT for short) request along with your web browsing, basically asking the web sites and services to not follow activity across the web. Because it’s entirely optional right now, not every website or service respects the DNT request, but for those who like added privacy on the web you can still opt-in to use the feature with most modern web browsers, which will pass along the DNT request anyway.

While many know that Safari has the feature on the Mac and for iOS too, but fewer people seem to know that modern versions of the popular Chrome web browser also supports Do Not Track request sending, which may interest some users and privacy buffs.
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Some users are reporting major differences to battery life for iPhone and iPad models that have updated to iOS 7.1.1, with some reports of improved battery life and others reporting increased battery drain, sometimes even rapidly like that seen with the 7.1 update (which is easily fixable).

So we ask the readers, did iOS 7.1.1 change your battery life at all?
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Those of us who regularly use AirDrop on the iPhone or iPad and leave the function frequently turned on for share requests may want to take a moment to adjust a simple privacy setting for the feature, allowing your iOS device to be only discoverable by Contacts. This prevents AirDrop requests coming in from random or unknown users, which if you’ve ever been in a busy office or place crowded with many iPhone and iPads, you may have encountered yourself.
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A fair amount of Mac users have encountered an issue where their Mac will immediately disconnect from wi-fi networks after waking from sleep, forcing users to rejoin a wireless network constantly. This is obviously pretty frustrating, but it’s usually easily remedied with a few adjustments to the Network Preferences in OS X.

If your Mac is disconnecting from wireless networks upon waking from sleep, try the following steps to resolve the issue. Before beginning, you’ll probably want to be sure you have the appropriate wifi router passwords handy so that you can reconnect to the networks quickly.
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Twitter integration is pretty deep throughout OS X and iOS with the sharing abilities and various uses of Siri, but another often overlooked Twitter feature is part of Safari and called “Shared Links”. Put simply, Shared Links can be thought of as an extension of the handy Reading List feature of iOS and OS X, except that it offers an easy way to see what links are being shared by who you follow on Twitter. This can be offer a great way to keep on top of the news or whatever other topic interests you, without having to download additional reader apps onto the iPhone or iPad.

To get the most out of the Shared Links feature in Safari, you’ll want to have a fairly well crafted Twitter follow list (starting with @OSXDaily of course) that tweets the type of information you want to read about. That means following accounts that send out tweets about topics of interest, whether it’s comedy, news, economics, tech, astrophysics, sports, you name it.
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