The next time you’re using the Maps app in Mac OS X to plot a road trip, a walkabout, get driving directions, or just to map out a route, you may want to skip the printer and opt to send the directions directly over to your iPhone instead.

In order for this handy direct feature to work, be sure the iPhone and Mac are either on the same network with wi-fi syncing enabled, or have a USB connection established between the two devices. Though that shouldn’t always be a requirement, experience suggests it’s necessary for this feature to reliably function. Once you’ve got that squared away, sending the directions from Mac to iOS is extremely simple:
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If you need to record some simple sound or audio on a Mac, you can do so easily using a bundled app that comes with Mac OS X, without having to download any third party utilities. That app is QuickTime, which may come as a surprise to some users as it’s typically thought of as a movie viewing application, but believe it or not it has video, screen, and audio recording capabilities as well, making it surprisingly powerful if you look beyond the initially obvious functionalities.

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If you need to find out just how fast your wi-fi link speed is, or rather, the speed of which your Mac is connected to a particular wireless router, you can find this data through the Network Utility app that is bundled in every version of Mac OS X.

This is really the fastest way to determine the link speed of any interface, whether Wi-Fi, ethernet, or otherwise, despite the always handy Network Utility app having been relocated to the depths of a system folder.
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If you have multiple email accounts setup with Mail app on your iPhone or iPad, you’ve probably noticed that each email account name defaults to the provider, like “iCloud”, “Gmail”, “Outlook”, and “Yahoo”. Those names aren’t the most explanatory, and it can become even more confusing when you have two mail accounts from the same service provider setup with Mail app, where you may end up with “Gmail” and “Gmail” or “Outlook” and “Outlook”, one of which may be the default address while the other is a miscellaneous inbox, with no obvious differentiator between the two. This is what it may look like in the Settings and Mail app Mailboxes view, a bit confusing until you go deeper:

Instead of putting up with those nondescript and sometimes confusingly repetitive email account names, you can rename the account to something much more meaningful, like the email address, or the function of that account. This is handled through the iOS Mail app settings, and it simply changes the user side and view of things, it has no impact on how the email sends or presents to the outside world.
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Apple will launch an iPhone 6 with a 4.7″ display sometime this fall, according to a new report from
Reuters. Additionally, a separate iPhone 6 model with a larger 5.5″ display may be delayed due to production issues.
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It’s April Fools Day, that means the internet is full of useless stuff and just about everything should be doubted. But rather than feed you BS, we’ll show you how you can contribute to some general tomfoolery by pranking your friends, family, and coworkers with some fun and harmless little Mac pranks. Ready to goof off? Give these a go:
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Time Machine is by far the simplest way to keep regular and reliable backups of a Mac, and usually the automatic backups start and finish without any incident. On some rare occasions though, Time Machine may get stuck* on the “Preparing Backup” stage for an inordinately long amount of time, causing a backup to never start, let alone finish. It’s these failed backup attempts that we’re looking to remedy here.

We should point out that if you haven’t backed up a Mac in a while, say a few months, it’s normal for the “Preparing Backup” stage of Time Machine to take a while to gather data before beginning, particularly if you have a large drive to backup. What’s not normal is for the Preparing Backup stage to take 12-24 hours, getting stuck in that stage overnight or all day long, for example (unless perhaps you have some truly absurd amount of disk space, then it may take that long and be normal).

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Typically when an external display is connected to a Mac, it will automatically be detected and start working instantly, with the Mac either extending the desktop or mirroring the screen over to the newly attached display output. Sometimes that doesn’t happen however, and when a secondary screen is not detected automatically by the Mac, you’ll want to trigger the “Detect Display” function in Mac OS.

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In appreciation of Cosmos Day (also known as the Sunday that airs the Cosmos TV show), we’re bringing you six space-themed Cosmos inspired wallpapers to send your desktop and mobile backgrounds into another world. Each of these was crafted in the good old photoshop alternative of Pixelmator using NASA imagery as a starting point.

Each image is a high resolution 2500×2500 and fairly large to preserve maximum quality, weighing in around 2.5MB each on average, so you’ll be able to use it on most resolution displays, whether you’re putting these on a 24″ display, iPhone, a retina iPad, or a retina MacBook Pro. Go ahead, bring some Cosmos to your wallpaper*.

Click on any thumbnail image below to open the larger full size version:

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This weeks featured Mac setup is the desk of systems engineer Dave B., let’s get right to it and learn a bit more!
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Longtime users of the Google Chrome web browser may be puzzled to discover the appearance of a mysterious Chrome Notifications menu bar icon, appearing as a little bell icon along with the other Mac menu bar items. Unlike removing some of the other OS X menu bar icons though, you can’t simply drag it out of the menu bar to remove the icon, and even more strangely, you can’t disable the possibly superfluous menu bar icon from it’s own drop down menu.
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If you’re a fan of using gestures for navigation, you’ll be pleased to know that you can navigate browser history in Safari for iOS (versions 7+) by simply swiping back and forth. This basically functions as an alternative to the traditional Back and Forward buttons in Safari, allowing for quick swipes to go forward or backwards a page as needed while you’re browsing.
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Microsoft has brought the popular Office suite to the iPad, including full featured versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Each app is offered as a free download through the App Store for iOS, but there are some functionality differences between the free and paid subscription plans. To put it simply, the free plans of the Office apps can only view, copy, and share contents, while the paid plans are necessary to gain complete editing and new document creation across the Office suite.
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Netcat is a powerful command line tool that can read and write data across a network connection using TCP/IP, it’s commonly used for relays, file transfer, port scanning, amongst other things. Though netcat origins are from the unix and linux worlds, netcat is also built into Mac OS X, and we’re going to use the nc utility as an easy way to send data and other text across two networked computers.
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You can quickly get the Sunrise and Sunset times on a given day for any location, right from your iPhone or iPad. So whether you’re planning a romantic rendezvous for sunset, just want to see the sun peak over the horizon, gearing up for some dramatic lighting photography, or you’re aiming for dawn patrol waves or untracked powder at sunrise, you can quickly determine when you’ll need to be heading to your preferred spot to have the best experience.
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While Safari usually works just fine for browsing the web, there are times you may encounter a persistent error message about verifying the identity of a particular website. The precise error message may read something like this, and appear on almost any site, where “URL” is a variety of domains:

“Safari can’t verify the identity of the website “URL”

The certificate for this website is invalid. You might be connecting to a website that is pretending to be “URL”, which could put your confidential information at risk. Would you like to connect to the website anyway?”

First, this may be a completely valid security warning, and you’ll want to click on the “Show Certificate” button to attempt to verify everything looks as it should yourself (the domain you are trying to visit is trusted, matches, etc). On the other hand, this may appear as an erroneous message from Safari too, and that’s what we’re looking to troubleshoot here.
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If you share your Mac on a network you may be interested to know who is connected to the Mac at any given time. This may include listing currently logged in users through a variety of network protocols, even locally, or perhaps just a history of users logins over a period of time. While Mac OS X Client doesn’t offer the same level of information as Mac OS X Server, you can still find user connection details by using a variety of tools built into all versions of Mac OS X.

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Have you ever needed to know what type of security and encryption method a wireless network is using? While the Mac will figure this out itself when joining most networks, you may need to relay the information to others, or specify it yourself when joining other networks. You can get the encryption protocol in use by a router without ever having to log into the router, or even connect to the wi-fi network at all, just by using a simple trick in Mac OS X.
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