A web browsers user agent is how a website knows what type of computer, operating system, and browsing app you are using. Some sites serve different themes, CSS, content, or even different sites to different browsers and OS’s, and many developers often need to change their own user agent to be able to test these abilities and build these alternate sites.
We’ll cover how to change the user agent for all popular modern web browsers available to the desktop user in Mac OS X and Windows, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
Want to get new emails faster on your iPhone or iPad? You can do that with a settings adjustment to how the Mail app works.
Have you noticed that it can sometimes take a while to get an email notification on to the iPhone? The time it takes to check for new emails from mail servers is actually a simple settings option for some email providers, and this means it’s easy to speed up if you want to get alerts sooner and closer to the time the message was actually received.
Many longtime Mac users may know the handful of keyboard shortcuts to instantly reboot, shut down, and sleep Macs, but for those who haven’t memorized the precise keystrokes yet, a much safer option is to instantly summon the power controls for OS X instead. This allows you to choose the power option you need while also providing a measure of safety if you have unsaved documents open or if users are connected to the Mac by networking, and it let’s you review the various power options before just jumping right into one of them with a direct keystroke.
We’ll cover how to summon the Power Controls instantly, and then how you can interact with them by using only the keyboard.
TextEdit is a reasonably decent text editing app that has been bundled along with just about every version of OS X since the beginning. If you’ve ever opened an HTML file with TextEdit you have probably discovered the app actually renders the HTML code, displaying the formatted text, rather than displaying the source itself. This is actually really simple to adjust, and all it takes is a settings change to turn TextEdit into an HTML code viewer rather, and as a side effect, a simple plain text code editor.
MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit, and a larger MTU size generally increases efficiency of a network connection because each packet carries more data, but sometimes the default MTU sizes (often 1500) will cause issues with some networks and needs adjusting. If you need to change the MTU size on a Mac, you can do so through the command line, as well as through the System Preference panel. We’ll focus on setting MTU size from the command line in this particular walkthrough.
Like many of you, I’m a sucker for fancy new wallpapers of neat looking stuff, and if there’s one place that routinely cranks out some of the most mind-blowing amazing imagery that is perfect for wallpapers, it’s NASA. This little mini-collection is a handful of freakishly gorgeous pictures of various nebulas around the universe, and because they’re from NASA every image is available to download at extremely high resolution, making them ideal fits for just about any iOS device, PC, or Mac you have. Don’t be stuck with a boring background picture, grab a fancy nebula shot and be amazed every time you look at your desktop.
The iPad is a great cooking tool that’s perfect for keeping track of recipes and being the ultimate kitchen resource, but if you’ve ever cooked with an iPad you’ll know the screen can get pretty mucked up with various ingredients, and if you aren’t careful it could even damage the device. Thankfully, another kitchen item can completely prevent the iPad from becoming a mess throughout the cooking process: a clear plastic zip lock bag.
Want to know exactly how much storage photos are taking up on your iPhone or iPad? Opening the Photos app in iOS will tell you how many total photos are within the different picture albums and Camera Roll, but how much space do the pictures actually take up? If you want to know the actual storage size of all those pictures and camera shots are consuming on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch you’ll need to dig a bit deeper into the device settings to reveal that information, follow along.
This weeks great Apple setup comes from Fletcher C. in the UK. He’s got a pretty snazzy desk and uses his Mac and other gear for video production and amateur photography, the hardware shown in the shot includes:
Fletcher gets big bonus points for taking his desk setup shot with OSXDaily.com open in Safari!
Show us your Apple gear and Mac desk setups! Email us a good picture or two, along with a brief description of hardware and what you use the gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com
If you need to get a new IP address from a router that any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or other iOS device is connected to, you can either set a manual IP address or, what’s likely more relevant to most people, you’ll want to renew the DHCP lease directly from the wi-fi router itself.
Renewing the lease this way should alleviate any potential conflicts with other devices on the network, and it also fills in everything from subnet mask, router, DNS settings, in addition to the new IP.
Let’s walk through how to renew DHCP lease from a connected wi-fi router in iOS: Read more »
You may already know that the cheapest place to buy a new iPhone 5 is usually Walmart, but wallyworld is outdoing itself right now and offering a brand new iPhone 5 for only $127! Yes, that’s a whopping $60 cheaper than their already lowest price of $187, and you can pick up that stellar offer with two-year carrier contracts from Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
What’s the catch you ask? There isn’t one really, except that you have to go into a Walmart store to make the purchase and get the additional $60 discount.
This deal means iPhone 5 is the same price as what they offered during their big holiday idevice sale, and you can find the details in some fine print on their websites product page though there really isn’t much to it:
“Get a $60 discount off the original price in-stores only. Offer requires new 2-year contract or upgrade. Price before discount: $187.00”
The deal appears to only be valid for the base 16GB model, for either black or white colors.
Of all the places where you can buy an iPhone 5, Walmart is quickly becoming the best overall deal for bargain shoppers and for anyone looking for some seriously steep discounts. If you’ve wanted a new iPhone and the price was holding you back, you won’t be able to beat this one. Move quick and find a local Walmart store to lock in the price, the deal probably won’t be active for long.
Converting images to new file formats is very easy thanks to a variety of tools built directly into OS X (and most Linux distributions). Though the easiest method uses Preview for converting images, there’s a command line option that uses the same sips tool we’ve discussed before to perform batch resizing from the command line. Using sips, you can convert single images to new image formats, or even perform batch image conversions. Read more »
Most Bluetooth accessories don’t have battery indicators located on the device itself, and that includes the Apple Wireless Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad. Rather than waiting for the battery to run low, thereby causing the devices connection to weaken, stop registering movements, clicks, or certain behavior, you can choose to manually intervene by periodically checking the battery level of most Bluetooth devices connected to a Mac. This is done easily by looking in either the Mac OS X Bluetooth management menu and Preference panel, we’ll show you how to do both.
This lovely colorful plastic toilet is also an iPad stand, and that means you can now finally potty train a child (or yourself, no judgment here!) with the help of a convenient iPad-toilet combo.
I don’t know about you, but I have far more questions than answers about this thing. Is there an app that goes along with this “accessory”? And what does that app do? Is this just the modern toddlers version of reading magazines while on the loo? This is either the absolute worst iPad accessory ever made, or contrarily, it’s perhaps the best accessory ever made, and I suppose your opinion of that is going to depend entirely on whether or not you 1) have kids that are being trained to use a toilet, and 2) your opinion of potential doo-doo butter being on or around the vicinity of an iPad. Me? Well personally, I’m not a fan of the mere concept of poos being in the remote region of my iPad, but I readily admit that I don’t have children that I’m trying to get out of diapers… so maybe I’m not the target market here.
What do you think, worst iPad accessory ever or the best ever? Would this actually be useful?
We’re not quite sure who made this amusing WTF find, but it was found by @MacFormat, cheers to them.
Have you noticed that when you’re browsing through folders on the Mac that icons are actually previews of images and even live playable videos? This sure makes the OS X Finder snazzy looking, but in some situations where tons of images and video files are contained within single folders, it can have the unwanted side effect of general sluggishness. A simple solution to that slowdown is to turn off the image and video preview generation of the Finder, both for icon thumbnails and for the Preview panel that appears in the Column view. This tip isn’t necessary for the average Mac user, but it should be particularly valuable for people who work with very large images and video files as it will offer a nice performance boost to working with any such documents within the Finder.
Note that neither of these settings will impact the functionality of Quick Look, letting you still easily scan through pictures but having more direct control over what is loaded and when. In other words, system resources will only be used when Quick Look is activated on the files in question, not simply when opening a directory.
The default iOS setting for iPhones is for message alerts to chime with the text tone twice, in a two minute interval. While the repeat text message alert sounds, notifications, and vibrations on the iPhone can be helpful for some people, those of us who are basically glued to our phones tend to experience quite the opposite and end up finding the repetitive alerts a nuisance, since it can seem like you’re being inundated with texts when you’re not. We’ll cover how to turn that off so that the alert never repeats at all, meaning if you get one text message, you will only get one alert sound and one notification for it.
Emoji icons are a lot of fun and special characters can be extremely useful, but the standard way of opening the character viewer panel isn’t the smoothest in the world. Fortunately, OS X has an excellent bundled menu bar option that can be enabled to allow for extremely fast Emoji and character access, letting you nearly instantly summon that special character panel from quite literally anywhere on the Mac and from all apps.
Those who use external Bluetooth devices with a Mac, whether it’s a keyboard, mouse, headset, or anything else, are probably aware that connection strength between the device and the computer is going to directly impact how usable the device is. The next obvious question then is, how do you check the strength of such a connection? Regular readers may recall a previous tip that allows Mac users to quickly check the signal strength of a connected Bluetooth device, but we’ll expand on that greatly and get a bit more advanced, revealing a live connection monitoring graph that updates the RSSI (received signal strength indicator) of a connected Bluetooth device. This allows for easy troubleshooting when trying to find out if, and help to determine why, a Bluetooth accessory may have a poor connection to the Mac.
Symptoms of a Bad Bluetooth Connection
Symptoms of a weak or bad connection for Bluetooth headsets are audio that cuts out, inappropriately fuzzy audio or bad audio quality, or even no audible sound at all. For things like a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse, a bad connection may range from key presses going unnoticed, mouse movements being imprecise, and erratic cursor control. Gamers and graphic designers in particular are sensitive to shoddy Bluetooth signals since the imprecision of cursor control can make the difference in their activities.
Monitor Bluetooth Device Connections
The connection monitor will only be available to OS X if Bluetooth is enabled and a device is connected to the Mac.
Open System Preferences from the Apple menu
Choose “Bluetooth” and select the device you want to monitor the connection for
Next, Option+Click the little gear icon and from the pulldown menu choose “Monitor Connection RSSI” to bring up the connection monitor window
With the connection monitor visible, it’s time to check and perhaps troubleshoot the devices connection to the Mac.
With the signal graph now visible, let it gather data for a few seconds before jumping to any conclusions. The screenshot up top shows a device reading in the -40 range, which is quite good, and even though it moves around a tiny bit, that is not indicative of an issue.
Reading the Bluetooth Connection RSSI
RSSI can be a bit weird to read, but essentially a higher number means a better connection, and a lower number means a worse connection. Note however that the numbers are negative, so that may read opposite to what you’d expect. For example, a connection of -45 is significantly stronger and better than a connection of -100, which is weaker and more likely to have issues. The rough guidelines below may help read the connection, though the precise signal you get is going to vary on other factors we’ll discuss below:
-40 to -55 is a very strong connection
-70 and above represents a good connection
-100 and below represents a bad connection
-110 and below is almost unusable
If some of this looks familiar to you, it’s probably because the same RSSI scale applies to those who have enabled iPhone Field Test Mode before, where the numbers seen in the corner that replacing the standard cell bar signals are read the same way.
Taking Action on a Weak Bluetooth Connection
The two most likely reasons for a bad Bluetooth connection are low batteries and heavy interference from something in the environment. Batteries are easy to test, all you need to do is swap in a new set of batteries or charge the device in question and see if the RSSI increases and if the device becomes more stable. Environmental factors can be trickier to track down, but using the live connection monitor can make worlds of difference as you move a Bluetooth device around and watch the graphs response. If you see a huge drop in the RSSI when you move a headset behind a fireplace for example, you can surmise that something in the wall is causing the interference and you should rearrange the equipment accordingly. It’s also vaguely possible that the device itself has a defective antenna, though that’s fairly rare for most quality devices.
A web browsers user agent is how a website knows what type of computer, operating system, and browsing app you are using. Some sites serve different themes, CSS, content, or even different sites to different browsers and OS’s, and many developers often need to change their own user agent to be able to test these abilities and build these alternate sites. 
Many longtime Mac users may know the 
TextEdit is a reasonably decent text editing app that has been bundled along with just about every version of OS X since the beginning. If you’ve ever opened an HTML file with TextEdit you have probably discovered the app actually renders the HTML code, displaying the formatted text, rather than displaying the source itself. This is actually really simple to adjust, and all it takes is a settings change to turn TextEdit into an HTML code viewer rather, and as a side effect, a simple plain text code editor.
under the MacBook Air
Most Bluetooth accessories don’t have battery indicators located on the device itself, and that includes the Apple Wireless Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad. Rather than waiting for the battery to run low, thereby causing the devices connection to weaken, stop registering movements, clicks, or certain behavior, you can choose to manually intervene by periodically checking the battery level of most Bluetooth devices connected to a Mac. This is done easily by looking in either the Mac OS X Bluetooth management menu and Preference panel, we’ll show you how to do both.
The default iOS setting for iPhones is for message alerts to chime with the 
