Can’t decide whether to have pizza or thai for dinner, but you’re all out of coins to flip and make the decision for you? Or maybe you can’t play Yahtzee or Bunco because you lost your dice? No big deal if you have an iPhone or iPad laying around, because Siri can both roll dice and flip coins for you.

To use either of these tricks, just summon Siri as usual and then say either of the two:

• “Flip a coin”
• “Roll dice”

With either statement, you’ll get a completely randomized response reported back to you.
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Printing wirelessly from an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to a printer is very simple, particularly if the printer in question is AirPrint compatible. Essentially AirPrint means the printer has native wireless support for direct-from-iOS printing, and setup is an absolute breeze.

If you don’t have a printer yet or are thinking about upgrading and are shopping around, ideally you will get one of the designated AirPrint printers, thus allowing direct printing over wi-fi from any iOS device. They are by far the easiest to use and print to, but if you have an older printer or one that isn’t AirPrint compatible then we’ll also show you how to turn any standard printer into a wireless one by using a free solution available to both Mac OS X and Windows.
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Large empty files are often used for testing purposes during disk access tests, development, QA, zeroing out data, and scripting. Though it’s certainly not applicable to most users, it’s easy enough to do that anyone can try it out even if you don’t have a specific need.

We’ll cover three ways to quickly generate files of virtually any size, two will use the command line; one being operating system agnostic and the other MacOS and Mac OS X specific, and another more user friendly approach that utilizes the Disk Utility app native to Mac OS X.

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Need to quickly free up some processing power? You can do that easily by temporarily pausing and then later resuming any active process or application in Mac OS X. Technically, this is actually ‘stopping’ and ‘continuing’ a process, but a stop is not to be confused with the more aggressive killing or force quitting applications and thus the terminology of pausing or halting is often easier to differentiate the two.

This means you can take a process that is consuming 100% CPU and temporarily pause it while you do something else, then resume it when you are ready to let that process do it’s thing. This is achieved through a command line trick, and we’ll cover two different ways to do it by using the kill and killall commands with the -STOP and -CONT flags. Ideally you will have some comfort and knowledge with the command line before using this, but it’s certainly not necessary.

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If you need to create an encrypted PDF with password protection, forget about buying Adobe Acrobat or other expensive software, because Mac OS X has you covered with built-in tools. Yes, the Mac can natively create secure password protected PDF documents, meaning it’s free, and it’s also impressively easy to do.
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The full video of Apple CEO Tim Cook being interviewed at the D11: All Things Digital conference is now available to watch online. The hour and twenty minute long conversational talk features AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg asking Cook a vast array of questions on a wide variety of topics, including Apple’s stock price, current and future products, Apple’s TV endeavors, hints of the iWatch and wearable computing, iPhone, market share, Android, Google Glass, taxes, the upcoming releases of iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 which are due at WWDC in the coming weeks, Apple’s environmental practices, acquisitions and the usage of Apple’s cash pile, and much more.
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Spotlight is the core of Mac OS X’s Search functionality, and if you want Spotlight to ignore a file, folder, or drive, the traditionally recommended advice is to drag the items to exclude from indexation into the Spotlight system preference panel exclusion list. That’s the recommended approach because it’s simple to use and easy to manage, but there is another way that utilizes a naming extension to force Spotlight to ignore any given document or directory.
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Want to save that great video someone emailed you, so that you can access it anytime locally on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? You can, but as many users notice, saving video to iOS device is a bit different than saving photos locally. With video, you can’t just tap and hold to save a movie the same way you would for a picture that is attached to an email (or on the web for that matter). Instead, you have two choices to save a movie attachment from an email directly to an iOS device:
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While Photo Stream is a great feature of iCloud, if you self manage your iPhone photos, it can quickly end up eating tons of disk space on a Mac hard drive. How, might a reasonable individual ask? Well, it may be unintentionally adding duplicates of all the photos you’re already importing yourself. This happens because Photo Stream automatically copies images from the iPhone (or iPad and iPod touch) to the Mac. But if you’re self managing your photo collection, you’re doing this as well, thus you’ll end up with duplicates stored on the hard drive, whether you know it or not, and those dups can add up to a lot of storage space rather quickly.
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Do you need to type foreign currency symbols on iPhone or iPad? The iOS keyboard supports a variety of major world currency symbols by default, and you can add other nations currencies symbols to the keyboard on an iPhone or iPad as well.

This tutorial will show you how to type foreign currency symbols from iOS, including the symbols for US Dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen, Cent, British Pound, and Korean Won, as well as how to add other currency symbols if desired.

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Something that many Android phones and tablets are able to do is connect to a computer as if they were an external disk drive. It’s remarkably easy to set up, and all that is required is connecting the Android to a Mac through USB, and it’ll then mount accessible through the desktop and Finder, from which you can treat it like any other storage device to copy files to and from, making it an excellent a replacement to a USB thumb drive. No downloads are required on either the Android or the Mac to accomplish this.

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Apple is set to unveil a preview of iOS 7 for the first time on Monday, June 10 at the annual Worldwide Developer Conference. Though Apple has been typically tightlipped about any features or changes with the upcoming iOS update, some rumors have surfaced from traditionally reliable sources that help to paint a picture of what to expect.
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Country association with an Apple ID, and thus the App Store and iTunes Store, can be changed easily. This allows access to content and apps that are country or region specific, and it’s extremely helpful for a variety of situations, whether for travelers, expatriates, or for anyone who is trying to view, download, or purchase items on another countries App Store or iTunes Store. While switching is easy, there are a few caveats to consider when changing the Apple ID country.

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Apple has started to run a new television ad for the iPhone 5, titled “Music Every Day.” The commercial follows people listening to music while performing various activities while using the classic white Apple earbuds. Though the commercial itself stays fairly quiet with soft piano music and a few occasional sound effects, it ends with a brief message:

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It’s really easy to delete calls from the iPhone call history log, and you can get quite specific in the process. You can delete a single specific call, outbound calls, incoming calls, all missed calls, received calls, basically, if it is included in the Phone app “Recents” list, it can be deleted with ease. While we’re on the subject, we’ll also show you how to recover anything that has been deleted from iPhones call history.

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Photo Booth is the goofy picture taking application in OS X that can take normal shots or apply a bunch of weird effects to distort faces. It’s not the most complex app in the world and that’s by design, but if you like to dig into things a bit more than the average Mac user, you can enable a hidden debug menu that can adjust some behavior of Photo Booth.
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Ever had your iPhone get stuck in Headphone mode? The symptoms are fairly obvious; you go to change the volume level and the little volume indicator says “ringer (headphones)” like shown below, and no audio our sound works through the normal speaker output.

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FileVault is an amazing disk level encryption feature that comes with Mac OS X. When it has been enabled, it encrypts everything, all disk contents, and actively encrypts and decrypts data on the fly, meaning any newly created data or document will instantly be encrypted as well. It’s fast and incredibly secure, using XTS-AES 128 encryption to keep things far out of the reaches of prying eyes.
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