Many Mac users choose to put their computers to sleep when they’re not in use, and unless Macs are scheduled to wake at a specific time, the computer should stay asleep until it has been manually awoken by user input, like a key press or mouse click. Should of course is the operative word here, because some users have discovered that their Macs are waking from sleep seemingly at random, with no obvious reason for this to happen.

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Animated GIFs are little moving images and they can be a lot of fun, particularly since they can be sent and received playing through iMessages to other iPhone, iPad, and Mac users. While the iOS Camera is packed with plenty of features and can take pictures or video, it’s lacking an ability to create animated GIFs natively, so you’ll need to turn to a third party app to do that. GifMill does that job well, plus it’s free, so we’ll focus on creating animated GIFs directly on an iPhone from the app.

GifMill does have a funky looking interface, but it’s a piece of cake to use, is fairly versatile with a variety of customization options, and you can use it to join images together into an animated GIF, or even turn a video into an animated GIF. Then you can export your creation to the Camera Roll, send it through Messages, Email, or share it through the typical social channels.

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Safari Reader mode simplifies the appearance of web pages by attempting to render only a pages primary article text into a minimalistic focused view. This can be helpful when reading much of whats found on the web on any iOS device, but it’s particularly useful on the iPhone since many websites don’t have an optimized mobile reading experience appropriate for small screens.

Not only does Safari Reader mode make reading easier on the eyes by boosting the font size and legibility of text found on the page, but it also can turn a non-mobile version of a website into a completely tolerable mobile version, offering significant improvements to the web reading experience in iOS.

Safari Reader is an excellent feature that is available on iPhone and iPad, this tutorial will show you how to use it.

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Ever noticed that the current time and clock become inexplicably invisible on the iPhone lock screen when you’re on a phone call and using a headset or the earbuds? Yes, the call time is always visible to show you how long you’ve been on the call, but oddly the actual time of day becomes completely invisible, which is obviously annoying if you rely on an iPhone as your primary watch. That’s what this simple easy trick is for though, it lets you see the clock and current time instantly from the lock screen when on an active phone call.

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The Mac file system received tabbed window support in OS X Mavericks, which also caused opening new Finder windows into launching new tabs rather than an actual new Finder window. While this helps to cut down on window clutter when browsing the file system, it can also be kind of frustrating if you want to actually open a specific directory into a separate Finder window. Fortunately, there are a few workarounds to this, and you can open new windows instead of tabs in the OS X Finder by using a specific trick or by changing the default window behavior. We’ll cover both methods, so you can use whichever is most appropriate for your situations.

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Many Mac users rely on iPhoto for their image management and to pull pictures from a digital camera, an iPhone, or Android, a generally flawless experience that makes handling tons of digital pictures easy. But once in a blue moon iPhoto goes awry and you may experience a variety of peculiarities with the image database, the most common of which seems to be the sporadic disappearance of photo thumbnails that typically display in the iPhoto apps browser.

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Creating a series of nested directories within one another can be done instantly through the command line. This makes it very easy to immediately and recursively create a complex directory structure of folders within subfolders of subfolders, without having to navigate manually into each directory to create a new directory, then navigate again to that subdirectory to create yet another directory, and so on. Instead, a command line trick will create the complete intermediate directory path in one fell swoop.

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Have you ever wanted to just copy a song or two over to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad from iTunes, only to have iTunes try to sync a whole barrage of unwanted music to the iOS device? That happens due to iTunes AutoFill, a feature that some users may enjoy as it will fill up an iOS device automatically with music, but it can be very annoying if you just want to manually add a few songs over yourself without having a whole set go along with it.

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Bored with your current wallpaper? Why not spruce up your home screen or desktop picture background with one of these four seven nine (added a few more per request) galactic-ish crazy colored abstract spacey-themed images?

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This weeks featured Mac setup comes to us from Larry H, a Cyber Security pro who a combined Mac and Windows PC setup to make quite a workstation. Let’s jump in and learn a bit more…

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Both the actively applied Camera filters and the later added Photos apps based color filtering in iOS can add some nice stylizing effects to pictures, helping to give them a unique look, but if you decide you’re no longer wanting an image to be filtered through a crazy color lens, you can actually easily remove the filter from the picture and restore it to the original untouched version.

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Graphics and large stylized text blocks constructed entirely out of the ASCII keyboard characters is called ASCII art. You may have seen it with the goofy ASCII Star Wars thing, but once upon a time it was very popular to stylize messages and images on BBS’s, IRC, MUDs, message boards, and across the early days of the internet in general, it has since largely fallen out of favor to, well, actual graphics and images. Nonetheless, the command line in Mac OS X provides a retro-throwback with it’s very own ASCII art banner creator, appropriately called ‘banner’.

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The next time you’re at the command line and need to eject every single mounted volume, hard drive, disk, disk image, and/or external drive attached to a Mac, you can instantly eject them all in one fell swoop with a handy osascript command string. This is great if you work frequently in the Terminal and you’re wanting to quickly pack up a workstation and head out, but it’s also very useful for remotely managing Macs through an ssh connection, or adding to a shell script, amongst other potential uses.

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iMessage sends text messages, pictures, and movies over cellular data rather than through the traditional SMS and MMS protocols, but have you ever wondered just how much of an iPhone data plan all your iMessage use is consuming? It turns out that you can find this information through a somewhat buried location in iOS Settings, and if you’re on a bandwidth capped data plan it may offer some actionable data to work with if you regularly find yourself hitting the limits of your cellular plan.

You’ll be able to find this information on any iPhone or cellular equipped iPad running a modern iOS release, though most of us use iMessage primarily on iPhones, which is why we’re going to focus on that device.

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Many iPhone users rely entirely on the iPhone as their camera of choice, so why not take the best pictures possible? That’s what these Camera app tips are for, helping you snap better photos and making you a better photographer by taking advantage of some of the wonderful features that are built into the camera app.

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Mac OS X comes with a bundled port scanner tool, just one of a variety of features tucked into the ever useful Network Utility app. That means you don’t need to bother with the command line or install more advanced tools like nmap to quickly scan for open ports on a given IP or domain, instead you can do it all through the friendly graphical interface. Despite being a fairly advanced utility, it’s actually very easy to use.

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The iPhone and iPad Calendar app defaults to starting a week on Sunday, which is the generally accepted standard of most US calendars. Meanwhile, some other nations start the calendar week on Monday, and some users just prefer to start the week on the first weekday of Monday rather than the weekend of Sunday anyway. Whatever your choice, you can customize the way the iOS Calendar displays so that the week starts on a day of your choice.

For the purpose of this walkthrough, we’re going to aim to start the calender week on a Monday since that is the most common alternative, but if your personal schedule calls for it, you can choose to start the week on any other day too (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, whatever). This works the same in iOS on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
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Many iPhone and iPad users know that Siri has a huge range of capabilities surrounding specific actions, but fewer know that Siri can also serve more obscure functions, like generating a random number for you. This is handled through Siri’s data connection through Wolfram Alpha, and it’s effective at truly randomizing integers similar to the virtual assistants ability to create a random password. So, the next time you need a random number for any particular purpose, pull out your iOS device and summon Siri to ask for such a thing.

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