Bokeh is a photography effect that uses intentional blurring of pictures for a pleasant abstract appearance. The resulting unfocused images often wind up making fantastic wallpapers for your desktop and device backgrounds, and that’s what we’re focusing on here with six gorgeously abstract bokeh images of various city lights and elements.
This weeks featured Mac setup is… well it’s not a Mac at all actually, it’s an iPad-only setup! That’s right, coming to us from Jurgen V. is a minimalist music studio based entirely around an iPad. Read on to learn what added hardware and specific iOS apps allow for an iPad to become a music producing workstation.
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The bundled Mail app for Mac has taken an odd turn by gaining a collection of odd bugs and incompatibilities with a variety of email providers. Apple has released several updates aiming to resolve the difficulties (particularly with Gmail), but many users continue to report issues with the once reliable Mail app on their Macs, and one of the more frustrating lingering issues is that new emails don’t consistently show up in Mail app for certain providers.
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The iTunes sidebar is now invisible by default, but if you’re one of us who like to show the sidebar all the time you may also want to customize what’s visible in it. This lets you control whether or not to hide or show any of the iTunes library media types that are visible in the sidebar, like Music, Movies, Podcasts, and Apps, as well as the connected iOS devices, playlists, Genius, the iTunes Store, and network shared libraries.
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The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi are under way, and while you can always catch the replayed broadcast on TV, that’s not always as fun as watching the live stream. Fortunately the wonderful world of iOS apps has us covered, and for most localities you can get completely free access to live streams of the Sochi Olympics. All you need is an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, and then grab the app that is appropriate for your locality.
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If you have ever downloaded an M3U file thinking you were going to get a song, audio file, or podcast, you’ve probably noticed the file size is tiny, and the m3u doesn’t really do anything on it’s own. This leads many users to wonder how to play the audio file, or how to convert that m3u into an mp3, m4a, or turn it into another familiar audio format. M3u’s are fairly misunderstood in that sense, they’re actually just a plain text playlist container file that is either a local playlist of audio, or a simple URL (link) to the actual audio content, usually intended to play as an audio stream.
Playing the audio from an m3u is made easy with iTunes, but perhaps more useful is getting the actual audio files out of an m3u container by downloading the source audio to a local hard drive. We’ll cover how to do both.
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Advanced users may need to add a user account to the sudoers file, which allows that user to run certain commands with root privileges.
To greatly simplify what that means, these newly privileged user accounts will then be able to execute commands without getting permission denied errors or having to prefix a terminal command with sudo. This may be helpful (or necessary) for some complex situations, but it poses a security risk for others, thus this is not something that should be casually changed.
Generally speaking, most users are better off using an admin account, using sudo on a per command basis, or enabling the root user. Nonetheless, directly modifying sudoers has plenty of usage situations for advanced individuals with in-depth knowledge of the command line, and it is for those more complex situations that we’ll focus on adjusting the sudoers file as described here.
A new version of the Evasi0n 7 jailbreak tool has been released by the “Evad3rs” developer team, offering untethered jailbreaking support for the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C running iOS 7.0.5.
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Filtering photos has long been a popular obsession of iPhone users, whether through Instagram, Afterlight, Snapseed, or the Facebook Camera app. Apple took that popularity to heart and built a variety of filters directly into the iOS Camera app, though the feature has gone largely overlooked by many users. Unlike some of the more garish third party iOS filtering apps, most of the bundled iOS 7 filters are fairly subtle, making them reasonable to use to enhance a pictures appearance.
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There are plenty of useful Mail plugins out there for Mac OS X, but sometimes their use wears out, or the plugin doesn’t get updated for a new version of the Mac Mail app which renders it unusable. If you’ve ever wanted to uninstall a Mail plugin in Mac OS X you’ve probably discovered that, unlike Safari, there isn’t a plugin manager available through the app preferences. Instead, you’ll need to uninstall Mail app plugins manually by deleting the file(s) in question. This isn’t the most intuitive process in the world, but it’s also not too complicated.
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Apple has released the fifth beta of iOS 7.1 to those registered with the iOS Developer Program. The new beta build arrives as 11D5145e and is compatible with all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices capable of running iOS 7.0.
The MagSafe power adapter is brilliant, using magnets to secure a connection between a MacBook and the AC power charger, it not only breaks away quickly to help prevent mishaps, but it also quickly snaps on to provide power to the Mac. It usually works flawlessly, but on some rare occasions, the MagSafe adapter is seemingly connected just fine but no charge is being passed through to the computer. Fortunately these issues are usually easy to resolve, so proceed through steps 1 through 3 outlined below to get your MagSafe charging the Mac battery again.
Ever installed a new app or two on a Mac and then went to find them, only to be lost in a sea of other applications that are already installed? For those of us with a ton of apps installed this happens often, but OS X offers several ways to sort through the clutter and quickly locate these newly installed apps. We’ll cover two of the quickest, using Launchpad and also the Finder.
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Apple has released a short film celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Mac. The video is titled “1.24.14”, signifying the date on which the 30th Mac anniversary fell, and emphasizes people doing various interesting things with Apple products. The video itself consists of segments filmed around the world on that date using the iPhone 5s.
The video is embedded below, and is accompanied by a website with some behind-the-scenes details of the movie:
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Many websites are using push notifications to send updates and alerts to Mac users. These alerts are signed up for through Safari, and then arrive as banners appearing briefly on the desktop, then fade away to sit in the Notification Center of Mac OS X until they’ve either been cleared out or addressed manually.
If you no longer want to receive push notifications from a website, you can adjust them on a per-site basis not only through Safari, but also through general System Preferences on the Mac.
Want to watch the Super Bowl live stream but don’t have a TV or tuner, or you can’t get the stream in your locality? Maybe you’re just not in an area that has coverage of the big game? No sweat, you can still get your football fix with a free live stream available to iPad users from the FOX Sports app.
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This weeks featured Mac setup is used by audio producer Nathaniel T., this is a killer setup and there’s a lot of awesome hardware to cover, so let’s jump right to it and learn more…
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If you have music actively playing, or a song or iTunes Radio station is paused within the Music app, you can quickly jump to the Music app by going through the Control Center of iOS. In many cases, this lets you adjust songs or radio stations quicker than using the multitasked to switch apps. This is a fairly simple trick, and those who listen to a lot of music on their iPhones and iPads should appreciate the convenience.
