The iPhone now displays a small contact photo thumbnail alongside contacts in the “Favorites” section of the phone app. This certainly looks nice if you have a lot of custom pictures set for contacts, but having a bunch of goofy contact photos can look unprofessional in some environments, and for users without a contact photo it will make a boring thumbnail based on their initials. Perhaps most problematic is the annoying side effect of truncating longer names, which is shown in the screen shot below.

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Getting comfortable with the command line is often just a matter of learning a few command tricks and finding uses for them, and we’re going to offer six handy tricks that you’re almost certain to find some use out of regardless of your skill level in the Terminal.

Read on, you’ll be downloading files, using a better directory listing, killing processes quicker, re-running prior commands as root, finding past commands, and creating new files on the fly in no time.

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A very welcome change has arrived to the Photos app post iOS 7 that allows you to easily view only videos taken with an iOS device, presenting them in an easy to view and share format. This is a huge improvement to past editions of Photos app, and the new sorting feature prevents you from having to scroll endlessly through a gigantic Camera Roll to see what’s a movie amongst a million pictures.

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Music bought from iTunes and stored in iCloud are part of the iTunes Match service, which basically lets you store all your songs and music in iCloud, and can then be streamed and downloaded to your iOS devices. By default, those songs are shown in the iOS app Music playlist with a little cloud icon next to them.

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Did you remove a file or folder from your Mac drive or an external drive, and now you need it back? Don’t freak out yet because there is some potentially good news; you may be able to recover the deleted files from the Mac with the help of a third party tool called DiskDrill.

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Apple has sent out press invitations confirming the previously rumored October 22 event date. According to AllThingsD, Apple will unveil a new iPad and iPad Mini model, and likely provide a release date for OS X Mavericks and the new Mac Pro.

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Anyone who downloads files from around the web, ftp, torrents, and elsewhere will eventually wind up with a lot of archive clutter sitting around on their Mac in the form of tons of zip, rar, sit, and other compressed file formats. This is because the default behavior is set for archives to maintain their existence even after their contents are extracted, a reasonable but conservative setting that can cause users to forget about the original archive file(s).

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Yes, you can still lock the screen orientation in iOS 10, iOS 9, iOS 8 and iOS 7 to prevent the display from rotating itself when an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch has been physically turned onto its side. The orientation lock is now in a quicker access location contained within Control Center, making it much faster to access from anywhere than it was before. Regardless, if you’re a creature of habit and haven’t found the setting since it has been moved, don’t feel too bad.

Here is how to get to the screen orientation toggle faster than ever with Control Center:
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Spotlight is the wildly useful search feature built into Mac OS X (and iOS) that is accessible by hitting Command+Spacebar. It can seemingly find and do everything, but did you know it also includes basic file system functionality? Using some little known tricks, you can copy and cut files directly from Spotlight, letting you easily make duplicates of buried hard to find files, or even move a file from some deep path location to an easier to access location, like the Desktop. This is done using the handy Finder Cut and Paste abilities, which happen to function directly from Spotlight in MacOS X.

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Personal Hotspot lets you share a devices cellular data connection with other devices or computers by turning a device into a wi-fi router, and it’s easily one of the better features of the iPhone and cellular iPad models (and Android phones for that matter). The iOS Personal Hotspot usually functions without a hitch, but sometimes the connection can appear flakey and connected devices will drop off the network completely, or have intermittent connection drops with significant packet loss.

This is likely a software problem that will be addressed in future iOS updates, but in the meantime there’s a fairly simple fix that seems to resolve the issue completely for clients who are experiencing dropped connections. The trick? Set the network configurations yourself, which prevents Personal Hotspot from assigning DHCP information to clients, and seems to resolve the intermittent connection problems completely.

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One of the most commonly used command line tools is ‘cd’, which stands for change directory, and as you probably know is used to navigate directories and switch between one folder or another within the file system. For those just learning and starting to familiarize themselves with the Terminal and command line, here are five tricks for the otherwise simple ‘cd’ command that are guaranteed to make your life easier at the command prompt.
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The Dock sits at the bottom of the screen on every Mac by default, and it will stay there unless it has been relocated either with a settings adjustment or a key modifier. If you’d like to switch the location of where the Mac OS X Dock resides, you can easily do so with either method outlined below, using System Preferences which is the better known method, or the faster but lesser known trick of using the Shift key and dragging the Dock handle to a different region on screen.

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The iTunes Store updates frequently to display new apps, music, movies, TV shows, and the free app of the week, and typically you can see the new stuff by just clicking around in iTunes to visit the various stores and media content areas. But sometimes the iTunes Store may display stale content, particularly if the iTunes app has been left running for a long time to listen to music or Radio. If you find the Store is not updating itself, the first thing you should do is try refreshing the iTunes Store by hitting Command+R (control+r if you’re on Windows) to force reload. That may resolve the not updating issue for some situations, but in more stubborn cases you may need to perform a full fledged cache dump.

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The iPhone now includes advanced photo and image editing features that allow you to apply various filters to pictures taken on the device. Since iOS 7, this can all be done natively without the need for any third party apps, and one of the better filter sets lets you quickly make any color photo into an artsier and more emotive black and white version. Similar to converting images into greyscale versions on the Mac, it only takes a moment to do but it’s easily overlooked, so let’s cover how to turn a photo into a black and white version directly from iOS.
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Column View is one of the more useful file browsing view settings in the Mac OS X Finder, but it has a usability flaw that’s initially visible to most users; file names and folders often don’t fit, thus they wind up truncated and become unreadable.

Rather than dragging around every single column to accommodate the appropriate file size to make them readable, you can use a super-simple trick instead to instantly resize the columns to fit the names which are visible.

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Have you ever wondered if you can keep your entire iTunes Library on an external drive, freeing up disk space and providing for a portable music and media library? The answer is yes, you can, and it’s actually pretty easy to offload an entire iTunes collection to another drive, whether you’re using a Mac or Windows PC.

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Some users have noticed that certain older iPhone and iPad models feel slower after updating to iOS 7. We’ve offered a variety of tips to speed things up, but one persistent issue that has we’ve been contacted about regards the mysterious keyboard lag and typing delay that seems to only apply to older devices, where there is a sizable delay between tapping a key and the character appearing on screen.

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Apple will unveil new iPad models on Tuesday, October 22, according to a report from the well-connected AllThingsD. Though a new iPad 5 and iPad Mini will be the star attractions of the event, Apple will also spend some time discussing the hotly anticipated new Mac Pro, and OS X Mavericks, suggesting those products release dates are also imminent.

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