How to Remove Services from the Contextual Menu in Mac OS X
May 14, 2013 - 6 Comments
Services and the service menu appears at the bottom of the contextual menu actions when you right-click (or control+click) any item in the Mac OS X Finder. These typically perform various actions, ranging from launching the selected file or folder in a specific app, to conversions that you’ve created yourself through Automator actions. Here is what the Services menu looks like if you are unfamiliar with the name, again this is visible with an alternate-click in the file system:
By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 6 Comments
The next time you need a new randomly generated strong password, pull out an iPhone and ask Siri. Yes, the voice assistant that lives in iOS. You won’t find this trick in Siri’s 
If you’ve ever run into a .zip file on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you will probably have discovered it’s a bit of a dead-end initially, because by default there isn’t much you can do with zips or any other archive format. That doesn’t mean you can’t open ZIP files though, and in fact these archives can be viewed, unzipped, and opened in iOS with relative ease, but you will need to download a free third party app before you’ll have the function included on your device. This will allow you view all of the contents of any zip file quickly, and also decompress the entire archive, or just extract a single file from a larger archive, providing quick access to the zip contents which can be saved locally or opened in another application of choice.
Nearly every Android smartphone can share it’s cellular data connections and turn itself into an internet hotspot, an infinitely valuable feature that lets you connect Macs, PC’s, iPad, or Nexus tablets get online through the cell connection. Of course the 
Running out of disk space is never fun, and drive space comes at a premium for those of us with smaller SSD drives like the MacBook Air with a 64GB or 128GB drive. These tricks are fairly advanced and thus aimed at the pro segment of SSD users who are comfortable modifying system functions and files through the command line with potentially risky commands like ‘rm -rf’ and wildcards – if that does not describe your skill set, then this article is not for you and you should use 
Emails opened in Mail app for iOS default to loading all images attached to that message. This makes emails format and arrange themselves as the sender intended, often with nice little header graphics and signature files, but it has a potentially serious downside: increased bandwidth usage. On a wi-fi connection that bandwidth usage hardly matters, but on many of the smaller and more limited cellular data plans, each KB and MB of data transfer is precious, and the little cutesy images and styling that comes over with many emails does nothing but eat up a data plan. There’s a simple solution to that problem though, and that means disabling remote images from being loaded into Mail app on the iPhone and iPad. 
Mac OS X defaults to automatically re-opening windows when an application is quit and relaunched later. This feature is borrowed from iOS and it’s incredibly useful, and once you become dependent on it you’ll find that it can really increase your productivity by allowing you to get back to work quickly. This is especially true when you need to quit out of an app or ten to free up resources for another task, or just to help maintain focus 
Desktop clutter happens to the best of us, even if we try our hardest to maintain a remarkably simplified virtual workspace. Whether it’s way too many icons thrown all over the desktop from working with files, or just a million and one windows open for various apps, documents, and browser tabs, there are some simple ways to alleviate all of this, even if you’re right smack in the thick of things. The next time you’re inundated with some virtual clutter, use these tricks to maintain focus and get back to work.
Read Receipts allow others to be notified when you have read their messages on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. From the user perspective it displays as a tiny “Read” indicator below a sent message if the recipient has seen the message. There is some obvious benefit to that, but it can also be a bit annoying and even intrusive from a privacy standpoint. Thankfully the read receipts feature is easy to turn off or on in iOS as your own needs determine, so we’ll show you how to do that.
If you’ve ever connected a Mac to something else 
Though most web pages pick a reasonable text size, some are just too hard to read because the font size is either too big, or more typically, just too small. Sometimes it’s not the web sites fault though, and a web page that is perfectly viewable on one computer may become teeny-tiny on another display that has a much larger resolution, a huge screen, or a smaller screen. Extreme examples of this are reading many web pages on the small MacBook Air 11″ screen, where text on some pages can be so tiny that it’s nearly impossible to read without zooming, and likewise on an iMac with a 27″ display because the resolution is so massive that some page fonts are just minuscule on the large screen.
