The Messages app is the native instant messaging client for Mac OS X which supports everything from iMessage, Facebook chat, to other instant messaging services. You can block specific contacts from sending your Mac any iMessages too, though you’d be forgiven for missing the addition of the feature or for simply overlooking it when scouring around in the Messages app preferences.

This article will show you how to block people in Messages for Mac.

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Some iPhone and iPad users, myself included, have experienced an unusual level of battery drain after updating devices to iOS 7.0.6. This is typically accompanied by an iPhone (or other device) feeling abnormally warm to the touch.
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Apple has released OS X 10.9.2, a fairly major update to OS X Mavericks that includes resolutions to many problems and bugs encountered by Mac users. Critically, the OS X 10.9.2 update patches the SSL / TSL vulnerability for Macs that was fixed earlier for mobile devices with the iOS 7.0.6 update. The SSL fix alone makes the 10.9.2 update a particularly important release that all Mac users running Mavericks should install as soon as possible.

The OS X Update 10.9.2 also resolves remaining issues with OS X Mail, including resolutions to new email retrieval from services like Gmail and Outlook, fixes the Mail Archive problems, and the bundled SMB fixes should solve some of the issues encountered within the Finder. Separately, some additional features have been added to OS X, including native FaceTime Audio support, FaceTime call waiting support, iMessage blocking, and a variety of other stability and performance improvements.
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Though it is generally recommended for users to keep their Macs up to date with the latest system software, not everyone wants to run OS X Mavericks on all of their Macs, and in some situations older Macs may not support the latest version of OS X anyway. Additionally, there are circumstances where users looking to update from Snow Leopard or OS X Lion may want to go to OS X Mountain Lion instead of Mavericks for compatibility reasons, or to avoid some of the potential issues discussed here by readers with Mail app and iCloud syncing that have frustrated some using current versions of 10.9.1 (those are since resolved with 10.9.2, update to avoid those issues). With OS X Mountain Lion officially off the App Store though, you can’t just search for it and choose to re-download, but that doesn’t necessarily mean users can’t retrieve the installer again.
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Many advanced Mac users have noticed that Activity Monitor appears slower these days when the app is updating CPU, Memory, Disk, Energy, and Network data, with the monitoring app apparently no longer offering real-time system resource statistics.

Instead, Activity Monitor now defaults to offering a general aggregate of system use that feels relatively delayed. Well it’s not in your head and it doesn’t just feel delayed, it actually is delayed, as the new standard setting for Activity Monitor no longer updates system stats and usage every second or two, it waits a full five second before updating the app. While this provides a broader average of performance and resource usage, it may be inadequate for many advanced users who are accustomed to a more responsive task manager.

For those who prefer to have more real-time resource data on their Macs, you can adjust the change interval back to the more aggressive reporting speed that existed prior to the change that arrived with newer Mac OS releases.

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The popular Evasi0n utility has been updated to support jailbreaking iOS 7.0.6. Though iOS 7.0.6 is a minor version change to iOS, it includes an important security fix that prevents potential man-in-the-middle attacks and/or data interception from occurring, thus it is highly recommended for all users to install as soon as possible, including those who jailbreak their iPhones and iPads.

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It’s time for another featured Mac setup! We’ve got the sweet triple-screened desk setup of Java developer Ben S. to share this time, let’s jump right in and learn a bit more…
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Apple recently released iOS 7.0.6 with an important security update for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch users – if you have an iOS device, you should install that update right away. Though the 7.0.6 bug fix description was initially vague, further information we’ll detail below points to just how potentially serious the security issue is (or was) – basically, someone could intercept your data given the proper circumstances – and while the problem has been patched on the iOS side, the same security flaw exists for OS X for the time being (the bug has been fixed with OS X 10.9.2).
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Apple has released a small but critical update for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, versioned as iOS 7.0.6 with a build number of 11b651. The security update notably includes an important fix for SSL connection verification, and weighs in between 13MB and 36MB, depending on the iOS device being installed upon. This update should be installed on all compatible devices as soon as possible.

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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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