Tired of seeing that linen wallpaper in the background of Notification Center of OS X? You can change that linen pattern to something else, giving a nice customized appearance to the Notifications panel when you’re checking alerts on the Mac. There are actually two ways to swap out the Notifications background, the harder manual way by way of the command line, and the easy way using a free third party tool called Mountain Tweaks. We’ll cover both, but we generally recommend the easy MountainTweaks method because it’s faster and remarkably simple. The end result of either method will be a customized Notifications background in OS X:

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Apple has released a minor update for iPhone 5 users, versioned as iOS 6.1.4 with a build ID of 10B350. The brief release notes suggest the only change is an “Updated audio profile for speakerphone”, though in our own before and after testing we were not able to determine any obvious differences in speakerphone output sound or quality upon installing the update.

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Apple is intending to release it’s next-generation iOS 7 mobile operating system in September, with an initial preview release shown to developers this June at WWDC 2013, according to a series of new reports from Bloomberg and AllThingsDigital.
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Having regular backups of your Mac is a necessity, and there is really no easier way to consistently back up your Mac than by using the excellent Time Machine feature of OS X. But with the enormous size of external hard drives and their prices becoming cheaper and cheaper, it’s not always necessary to dedicate an entire gigantic hard disk just for Time Machine backups, particularly if your Mac has a smaller hard drive and thus the backups won’t take up that much space in general. For these situations, configuring the single external hard disk to have dual use is an excellent choice. The end result will be an external storage drive split into two partitions, one to be setup exclusively for Time Machine backups, and another partition intended for typical file system access and file storage.
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The easiest way to exclude many specific files or a group of matched files from a zip archive is by skipping the easy zipping utility built into Mac OS X’s friendly UI and turn over to the command line, where the powerful zip command resides.
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Siri defaults to speaking responses back through the speakers of the iPhone and iPad, and often quite loudly at that. Though you can control Siri’s volume level independently of general system audio levels, having the voice of Siri be set to a very quiet level isn’t much of a solution if you actually want to hear responses. This is made worse in crowded situations or areas with a lot of background noise, because to hear a response you have to set volume quite high, which has the undesirable side effect of blasting responses to the world and also likely annoying those around you.
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Notification Center in iOS has both Twitter and Facebook integration and the ability to post to either service with a “Tap to Tweet” and “Tap to Post” button. On the iPad and iPhone these are accessed with the rest of Notifications by using a downward swiping gesture from the top of the screen. If you’d rather not have those social posting features in Notification Center though, you can actually disable both of them without removing your Twitter and/or Facebook accounts from iOS, and without losing the broader social integration in the OS.

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The little red badges that appear on app icons stored in the Mac OS X Dock are intended to provide a quick alert and overview of some important notification pertaining to the respective app. Whether it’s the new unread email count, new iMessages, a Calendar event, unfinished Reminders, missed FaceTime calls, or any other number of alerts, the red app badge icon updates with a number and sits atop the apps icon in both the Dock and Launchpad until those given notifications have been addressed.

While these red badges can be undeniably useful, there can also be an element of annoyance to those badge icons too, since some alerts and notifications are just reoccurring and therefore we don’t necessarily need a constant red alert sitting atop an icon to notify users of it’s presence. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to toggle those badge alerts on or off, and that’s what we’ll cover.
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Ever wanted to connect a Mac to a TV screen? Maybe you want to use the TV as a giant external monitor, to play games on a big screen, or just for video playback and movie streaming? It’s actually quite easy to do, and we’ll cover the entire process from start to finish. We’re going to focus on connecting any newer Mac to any fairly modern TV by way of a physical HDMI connection, thus, a few third party accessories will be necessary for the task. The result will be the Mac exporting both video and audio signals to the TV.

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The delete key on a Mac keyboard functions like a backspace key on a Windows/PC keyboard, deleting a character at a time backwards from where the cursor is located. Pretty straightforward, but many newcomers to the Mac platform are confused as to why there isn’t a forward delete key… well it turns out there is forward delete and it’s actually the same button, flipped to remove characters forward by holding a modifier key.

While the Mac Delete Key is super easy to use, we’ll also show you how to add a physical forward DEL button which won’t require the modifier key, and we’ll also cover a couple extra common Mac delete key functions too.

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Apple has started to run a new iPhone commercial on TV titled “Photos Every Day”, focused entirely on the devices camera and iPhone photography.

The ad centers around people taking photos with an iPhone throughout daily life activities, then performing simple edits, cropping pictures, using Instagram, and other pretty typical fair for the many of us who rely on the phone as a primary point-and-shoot camera.

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You can retrieve forgotten website and browser passwords by using a command line tool in Mac OS X. This is a handy feature that gives you access to the Keychain via Terminal.

How many times have you forgotten the password to a website? Don’t feel bad because it happens to the best of us. The good news is that if you use the Mac OS X Keychain feature to keep track of login information for websites through your browser (you know when the browser asks to save/store your login information?), you don’t need to worry, all you need is the websites URL and you’ll be able to retrieve a forgotten password as long as you’re logged into the same user account that you originally saved it with. This will work for all websites that have stored information through Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and it should work for any other browser as well. This is a great alternative to using the “password reset” or forgotten password features that are multi-step processes on many web sites and services since it doesn’t require any internet connectivity.

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The iPad and iPhone don’t freeze or crash often, but when they do it can be an epic freeze-up, where the device can either get stuck in an app or, worse, it gets frozen on the dreaded iOS “spinning wheel of death”, the little wait cursor that never goes away. Left on it’s own in that state, that spinning wheel can quite literally spin forever until the battery drains and the device dies out, but that’s obviously not a solution to resolve the rare major iOS crashes. We’ll cover three tricks to fix major iOS crashes, the first will attempt to just exit out of the crashing application, the next will forcibly restart the device, and finally for the worst scenarios, we’ll restore iOS as new, though that really should be a last resort that is rarely applicable to most situations.
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If you’re a heavy command line user, you’re probably well aware that the arrow keys can be used to flip through previously executed commands and the tab key can complete them. But both of these functions can be significantly improved upon for searching through past command history by adding a few modifications to your .inputrc file.
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Apple has announced the Worldwide Developer Conference for 2013 will be held June 10 through the 14 in San Francisco at the Moscone West center. Tickets will be made available for purchase April 25 (tomorrow morning) at 10AM pacific time, and will cost $1599 per developer.

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Though it’s somewhat rare to encounter ownership and permissions errors in Mac OS X, it can happen, particularly when an account has been moved, or a files owner has been modified by a third party application. Oftentimes you can just run through the process to repair user permissions, but that’s not always guaranteed to sort out a problem, and in some situations you need to adjust a files ownership directly on either a single document or a group of files before the intended user will regain proper access to the file. For these situations, there are two ways to manually change a files ownership, through the Finder and also through the command line. We’ll cover both, though for more advanced users the chown command is really much faster, and in some respects, it can be easier too.
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Need to delete a contact from the iPhone? Maybe you want to delete all contacts from the iPhone, iCloud, Mac OS X, iPad, and everywhere else they appear, so that you can start anew with a completely blank address book? You can do both easily and quickly, and while deleting a single contact is quick and easy from iOS in the Contacts app, as of now the only way to delete every single contact in an expedient manner requires the usage of a Mac.

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The newest Macs ship with a Recovery partition rather than a separate external reinstall disk, and if you’ve ever rebooted a newer Mac, iMac, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with an SSD from the Recovery partition to reformat the drive, you may have noticed that by default the “Security Options” button is greyed out in the Disk Utility options, seemingly preventing a standard “secure” erase procedure. The precise reason for this isn’t entirely clear, though some speculate it’s because writing 1’s and 0’s to an SSD can lead to performance degradation and a reduction in the drives lifespan, and that it persists even in the most recent versions of OS X suggests it’s not just a bug. Nonetheless, many users want the option for secure removal of data from the SSD. The most obvious solution to this problem is to boot the Mac from an external boot drive (here’s how to make one for Mountain Lion), but that isn’t always an option for everyone, but fortunately there is a workaround that lets you perform a secure erase directly from the Recovery partition itself.
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