Despite Time Machine being a remarkable solution for easy backups, a peculiar issue can arise for some Time Machine users that causes the Mac OS X Trash to not be able to empty when the backup drive is connected to the Mac. This will usually manifest itself as the following; a user attempts to empty the Trash, the Trash either refuses to empty, or gets stuck on “Preparing to empty the Trash…” which then counts up to several hundred thousand (or more) files. Left alone, the Trash will sometimes start deleting after a few hours of counting the files, but it goes so slow that you can literally wait a day or more for the Trash to delete – hardly practical.
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Apple will unveil the latest iPhone model on Tuesday, September 10, according to a new report from the always reliable AllThingsD. The report confirms only the launch date, but seems to suggest that Apple may actually release two distinct iPhone models; the expected update to the iPhone 5 (iPhone 5S?), and possibly a lower-cost color iPhone model that has floated about in rumors for quite some time.
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No longer want an email account on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod? Entire email accounts are very easy to remove from an iPhone or iPad, so whether you changed jobs, email addresses, an email provider was shut down, or perhaps you just don’t want to get emails for a particular account on your device any more, you can easily delete the entire account from the device rather quickly and in one fell swoop.

It’s important to point out that deleting an email account removes all of its data from the iOS or iPadOS device, including any account specific mail settings, login details, drafts, mail messages, mailbox content, and of course, notifications and alerts for that account will no longer come through either. Be sure that is what you are looking to do before proceeding, otherwise you may unintentionally delete something you’d rather keep around on your iPhone or iPad.
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Having reliable and regular backups of your Mac should be considered a mandatory part of maintenance, and for most users Time Machine provides that with easy and peace of mind. But what if you want multiple backups stored in different places, like a backup at home, and another at the office, or perhaps a backup at home and a portable backup drive for the road? Or what if you just want to have a backup of your backup drive for data redundancy?

Time Machine can address any of these situations by allowing you to set a secondary backup drive, which provides an additional duplicate backup to another hard drive. Setting this is up is quite simple.
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Chrome is an excellent web browser alternative to Safari on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and if you use the Chrome app you’ll probably want to know how to clear out the common browser data that gets stored locally in iOS. This includes data like web caches, cookies, site browsing history, and possibly saved login details and passwords.

Unlike clearing cache and browsing data from iOS Safari though, you won’t find Chrome’s options in the wider Settings app, and instead they are contained within the iOS Chrome app itself. That difference is fairly common with default Apple apps vs third party apps, but by no means does it indicate complexity, as clearing out browser data in Chrome for iOS is simple.

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Each file type has a default application that is associated with it on the Mac. This means that when you double-click a file from the Finder it will open a specific application, for example on a fresh Mac OS installation, all image files (png, jpg, gif, pdf, etc) will default to opening in Preview, and all text documents (txt, rtf, etc) will open in TextEdit.

Over time, the default applications and file associations can change as you install more applications, which sometimes set themselves as the new default app to open a file format with.

If you want to change these default file format associations and have files open in other applications of your choosing, you’ll find there are two simple ways to do this: the first method defines the default application to launch for a specific single file, and the second method will change the application associated with all files of a given format type.
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Apple has released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 5 for registered Mac devs. The release includes bug fixes and feature enhancements, and all users who are running Developer Preview 4 are recommended to update to the newest version.
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Using Disk Utility through Recovery Mode is the preferred and primary tool for repairing disks on the Mac platform, but if Disk Utility is either unavailable or not able to repair a drive, then Single User Mode and the command line tool fsck should be your next choice.

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Time Machine is the simplest way to keep a reliable backup of everything on your Mac, but sometimes we don’t want every file or folder saved, or maybe you just no longer need a given directory to be preserved by external backups.

In these situations, removing backups of any specific file or folders, or even entire elaborate directories, is easily done from within Time Machine in Mac OS X.
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Apple has released the fifth beta version of iOS 7 for developers. The new beta includes many bug fixes and several feature enhancements, and arrives as build is 11A4449a.

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Calendar is one of the most useful features of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and many of us wind up managing our schedules entirely through the app. But even if you’re just a casual Calendar user, you’ll still get some great use out of these five tips aimed at improving the speed of your interactions with Calendar app. You’ll learn to quickly move appointment and event times, change the calendar associated with a specific event, create new events and appointments faster, quickly check for schedule conflicts, and to navigate around all of your Calendars faster than you thought possible.
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If you have multiple Gmail accounts that you juggle between, rather than adding them all to the default iOS Mail app, do yourself a favor and grab Google’s official Gmail app for the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Not only is Gmail for iOS an excellent full-featured mobile email client, it also makes managing multiple accounts extremely simple. This helps to take the strain off your primary Mail app account for iOS by not cluttering it up with too many notifications and alerts, and works well in line with our general recommendation to separate email accounts with different apps to aid in handling the inevitable inbox overload we all suffer from.
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The MacBook Air just might be the greatest laptop ever made, it’s extremely light, powerful, has an amazing battery life, and somehow packs all of that into an affordable package. To get the absolute most out of this wonderful Mac, you’ll want to run through these four (well, technically six) essential tips, which cover what I routinely recommend for every MacBook Air owner.

Whether you just got a brand new Air for the first time or you’ve been a longtime Air owner, you’ll get a better looking display, more screen real estate, better battery performance, and a better handling of the limited storage capacity offered through the superfast flash drives.
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Any photo taken in Instagram will automatically post directly to your Instagram feed, sharing the picture with the world (or at least whoever follows you). But what if you want to take a picture or two with the Instagram app, apply those fancy filters, and not actually share them with anyone? That’s not an option directly within the Instagram app itself, but you can use a neat little trick on the iPhone (or Android if it floats your boat) to indirectly obtain such an ability yourself.
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The Mail app bundled with Mac OS X is an excellent email client, but if you have a giant mailbox that has been in use for a long time you may encounter some peculiar problems with sluggishness, message content issues, and searching irregularities. Usually these issues are of distinct types; search errors where some messages don’t come up in results when you know they should, unusually slow behavior when performing mail searches, or just general mail content problems, where an opened message appears blank, incomplete, corrupt, or is otherwise displayed improperly.

Fortunately these issues are very easy to correct thanks to a two step process of forcibly rebuilding the mailbox, and then forcibly reindexing all messages contained within the Mac OS Mail app.
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The excellent curl and wget tools provide for a simple way to test the speed of an internet connection directly from the command line. Curl is bundled with most unix variations, but Mac users who want to use the wget trick will first need to grab wget for OS X in order for this to work, wget is a simple terminal utility used to download files from the web and ftp and it’s handy to have around for a variety of uses making it worthwhile to have anyway. Curl should be preinstalled on every unix flavor that is even vaguely modern, including all versions of Mac OS X and linux.

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The next time you’re heading to a theater or sitting on the couch and you just aren’t sure which movie to watch, turn to Siri.

No he/she won’t decide what to watch for you, but the iOS virtual assistant can quickly retrieve movie trailers which can help you decide. Just grab your iPhone or iPad and do the following:

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The Wi-Fi Personal Hotspot feature available with just about every smartphone is incredibly useful, but most cell providers impose a cap on the number of devices that can connect to the wi-fi hotspot. Typically the connection limit provides for a maximum of 3 to 5 device connections, but if you find yourself in a situation where you need more than the maximum device allotment, you can use a workaround to bypass the hotspot connection limit.

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