FileVault is a security feature that offers full disk encryption for Macs. Identifying Macs that are using FileVault is fairly easy in person for machines that have a logged in user account, all you have to do is check System Preferences to see if has been enabled or not. But what if you the Mac is either not logged into a user account, or what if you need to identify Filevault usage remotely? Both of these situations can call for using the command line to figure out the status of disk encryption.
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A fair amount of Mac users running OS X Mavericks have discovered a peculiar slow speed issue when attempting to use various actions found in the File menu, including the Open, Save, and Export dialog boxes. The problem manifests as an intensely slow lag when trying to use the Open or Save dialog windows, where the spinning beachball shows up, spins aimlessly for 3-15 seconds, followed by a lengthy slow delay before any files or folders populate the file action windows and allow a user to proceed.

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This weeks featured Mac setup is the amazing office configuration of a cybersecurity professional. As you’ll see it’s an absolute whopper full of awesome hardware, with plenty of Macs, iOS devices, and PC’s too. Due to the sensitive nature of their work they have requested their name be withheld, so instead we’ll refer to the owner of this awesome Mac setup by their alias, “EnigmaFX”. Don’t miss the productivity app recommendations for iOS and OS X, and the great SFTP trick too…
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Regular users of the Safari web browser will be pleased to discover a great little trick that has been added to the Activity Monitor app in Mac OS the ability to see what URL is associated with each “Safari Web Content” process ID, thereby providing the ability to quickly find exactly which web pages are consuming resources or going errant.

This is all done directly from the general Mac task manager, which allows you to immediately kill a task if need be. Using this trick is super easy:
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It’s easy to create a password protected text file by using the command line text editor ‘vi’. This is infinitely useful for privacy purposes, whether the protected file is for containing login details, various passwords, personal information, a private journal, or just about anything else that you want stored securely in a single password protected text file.

Vi is considered a bit advanced and has a fairly steep learning curve, but it is very powerful. Fortunately, if you’re looking to just encrypt a text document though, vi can be reasonably simple enough and we’ll cover some basic vi/vim commands to get you started with it for this purpose.
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All portable Macs in the MacBook Pro and Air lineup have backlit keyboards these days, which not only makes it easier to type in dim lighting, but let’s face it, it also looks really fancy too. Because the backlighting uses very low power LED to illuminate, there isn’t much of any hit to battery life if the brightness is set at a reasonable or low level, so many people choose to have the backlit keyboard showing all the time, even if lighting situation doesn’t call for it to be useful.

But sometimes the backlit keyboard on a Mac laptop doesn’t work at all for seemingly no apparent reason… and even attempting to manually control the backlighting with the keyboard shortcuts suggests the feature isn’t working or is disabled.

There are a few possible reasons for the backlighting to stop working on a MacBook Pro, MacBook, or MacBook Air, with most offering simple resolutions. If you discover that the keyboard backlighting is not working on your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro keyboard, then follow the troubleshooting steps detailed below. More often than not you’ll be able to resolve the situation rather quickly and easily.

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Looking for a picture exchanged between friends through Messages app on your iPhone / iPad, but scrolling through a gigantic conversation thread to find it doesn’t sound too appealing? There’s an easier way to see your sent and received imagery, and from iOS 7 onward you can quickly view every piece of multimedia sent between you and a recipient through iMessages (or text message), including photos, pictures, audio files, animated GIFs, and even movies. Accessing the multimedia list view in Messages app from a single conversation isn’t particularly obvious, but it sure is convenient once you learn how:
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Don’t want to see Notifications and alerts on the login screens and locked screens of Mac OS X? Me neither, and because Notifications can be fairly personal items from calendars, reminders, messages, or apps, they aren’t necessarily something you want on the lock screen of a Mac that is visible in public, like at an office or school. Thus, disabling them allows for a bit more privacy.

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iOS 7 brought with it a new way to interact with the music app and your music collection, with a gorgeous gesture-based interactive album art cover view. This replaces the old Cover Flow view that used to existed in prior versions of Music app on the iPhone and iPod touch, but accessing it remains the same by rotating the device into the horizontal landscape orientation, so fill in missing album covers and try it out:
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The general appearance of Mac OS X has remained mostly the same for several major OS X releases now, but earlier versions of the operating system had a brighter whiter look for window frames and panels, with some pin striping thrown in there. If you’re tired of the newer darker modern theme that exists throughout OS X from Snow Leopard to Mavericks, you can re-theme the appearance of things and get a retro white theme complete with restyled window elements. The resulting appearance is flatter and whiter, and other than the retro looking pinstripes, it actually looks a bit like something Jony Ive would do to OS X with inspiration from iOS 7, showing generally brighter colors, less shadowing, and a flatter look overall.
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We showed you how easy it is to quickly add tags to Mac files and folders with the simple drag & drop trick, but what if you want to remove a tag from something? That’s equally easy, and we’ll cover two ways to remove a tag or multiple tags from items that currently have them: through a quick right-click action, or through the Finder toolbar.

These two tricks actually work both ways, and you can use them to add new tags as well, but for this specific articles purpose we’ll focus on removing them.

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Lost Mode is an outstanding feature of Find My iPhone that allows you to remotely lock an iPhone with a passcode and an on-screen message, rendering the device unusable while in “Lost Mode” until the passcode is entered correctly. Making this feature even better is the ability to choose a contact phone number for the locked device, and calling that number becomes the only actionable item on the lock screen of the iPhone while in Lost Mode. Theoretically, this could mean the difference of having your iPhone returned to you or not, and it’s all very easy to use.

To use Lost Mode – or have the possibility of using it should you need to in the future – you must have a valid Apple ID with iCloud configured, and Find My iPhone turned on in Settings on the iPhone. Devices running iOS 6 and iOS 7 have full support for Lost Mode with remote locking, messages, the number call back, remote wipe, and mapping, while iOS 5 is limited to just locking. Assuming you meet those relatively basic requirements, here is how to use the Lost Mode feature to remotely lock down an iPhone with a screen message, call back phone number, and a passcode.
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We’re all incredibly reliant on our internet connections these days, but sometimes those connections aren’t so reliable. Whether it’s due to an ISP failure, a router being down, someone tripping over a cord somewhere, or whatever other occurrence, it can be frustrating to wait for a downed internet connection to come alive again. We’ve all known users who simply hit the “refresh” button on a web browser repeatedly to see when things revive, but there is a better way. Users who are comfortable with the command line can use a better solution, which utilizes the ping tool to detect an active internet connection and the text-to-speech say command to verbally announce when things are live again. Be sure to have the volume turned up on the Mac to use this.
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Apple has released the first iOS 7.1 beta to registered developers. The build arrives as 11D5099e, and is available for iPad Air, iPad Mini Retina, iPad 4, iPad 3, iPad 2, iPad mini 1, iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, and iPhone 4. The 5th gen iPod touch is the only supported iPod model. The iOS Dev Center labels the firmware downloads as model numbers, if uncertain, you can find out what model your device is by looking at the identification number located on the back of the device. Separately, the Apple TV also received a new beta build for developer testing.

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Newer versions of Mac OS brought significant improvements to multi-display support for Mac users who have their computer connected to an external screen or two.

One of the more helpful feature changes with multi-display support is the ability to access the Dock on any of the connected screens to a Mac through the use of a simple onscreen motion gesture trick. Learning this trick allows you to quickly show the Dock on any display connected to a Mac.

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File tagging on the Mac is part of Mac OS X, but those who have been using the Labels feature to help manage their files in prior versions of Mac OS X will notice it’s actually quite similar. Basically you ‘tag’ a file, and then it becomes associated with that tag, allowing for easy file sorting, searching, and management. Tagging is easy to use, and what are likely the two simplest ways to tag files are during the file saving process, which we discussed with some other basic Mavericks tips here, and also with the hugely useful drag & drop trick, which we’ll cover next.

Drag & drop tagging may be the single best way to use tags from the Finder, because not only can you tag a single file just by dropping it onto the tag you wish to assign, but it allows for rapid batch tagging of huge groups of files and folders with the same trick.
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This weeks awesome Mac setup comes to us from visual designer and Apple lover Mirko S. With a great looking desk and a very nice Macintosh configuration, here is the Apple gear and a few app recommendations that Mirko is using for his work, and why:
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It seems that an “Unable to Verify Update” error message arrives at random for some users with just about every single iOS software update, perhaps unsurprisingly, the problem has resurfaced for some when trying to download and install the recent 9.3, 7.0.4, and various other iOS updates. The error seems to be exclusive to using OTA (Over-The-Air) updates, and sometimes it reports an improper iOS version as being available, or tell you that an update “failed verification because you are no longer connected to the Internet” – despite having an active entirely functioning wi-fi connection. If you happen to encounter this error when trying to download and install any iOS update, you’ll be able to fix it in a minute or two using one of these tips outlined below.
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