Game Center is the online gaming basis for many games in iOS and OS X, letting users play online, track scores, play against friends, it’s also generally required to use for almost every game played on an iPhone or iPad. When signing up for Game Center for the first time, plenty of us chose a nickname or username that was either our real names, an online nickname, or perhaps some oddball nickname, not really thinking much of the naming choice.

Well, it turns out the Game Center nickname is entirely public, and it shows in games and in leaderboards, so once you realize that your fellow gamer friends, family, and coworkers can see that nickname too, you may decide “DrunkGuy69” or “IHateMyBoss420” wasn’t the best choice of usernames after all. But don’t freak out too bad, you can switch it out with something else!
Read more »

Considering that so much of the functionality of iOS is dependent on the internet, it’s pretty frustrating if you can’t join a wireless network because of a mystery “Unable to join the network [name]” error popping up on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. You may encounter this alert trying to join a wifi network as usual, or by trying to manually join a network:

With such a nondescript error message, it’s hard to know exactly what the problem with the wi-fi is, but for most cases you can resolve the issue fairly quickly with the multistep process described below:
Read more »

Two hugely important software security updates have been released for many Apple devices recently, and if you haven’t updated your software to the latest versions yet, you really should do it while you have some free time this weekend. Do this for all of your own Apple hardware, do this for your parents Macs, grandparents iPads, aunts iPhone, uncles iPod, cousins SE/30 (just kidding), everyone who owns an Apple device needs to update all of their operating systems to a patched iOS or OS X version as soon as possible.
Read more »

The latest versions of Chrome for iOS offer an optional data compression feature that uses Google servers to further compress web pages visited before accessing them from your iPhone or iPad. Put simply, toggling this setting can help to reduce your cellular data consumption when browsing the web within the Chrome app for iOS, and for some users it may even offer a bit of a speed improvement to their mobile web browsing experience too.
Read more »

Provisioning profiles are typically installed onto iPhones and iPads for development and testing purposes, but non developers may wind up with them on their iOS devices too, whether from testing an app or installing something like GBA4iOS from the web.

For non-developers, this usually goes unnoticed until they get one of the “Provisioning Profile Expiration” alerts on their device, informing them that a profile will expire in however many days.

As many users have discovered, simply deleting the related app does not remove the provisioning profile, which is often why they see the expiration alert. So, here is how you can remove the profiles from any iOS device.

Read more »

The systemstats process is used to retrieve information about system statistics and power usage, and though it usually runs unnoticed in the background, the systemstatsd and systemstats processes have been known to randomly go haywire in OS X, eating up 100%-300% or more CPU while slowing down a Mac.
Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.
Read more »

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.
Read more »

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.
Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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…
Read more »

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).
Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.
Read more »

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.
Read more »

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?
Read more »