In an unusual and fairly rare situation, the Mac cursor can randomly disappear from OS X. More accurately, the cursor itself becomes invisible, because you can still click around on the screen but without being able to see what the mouse or trackpad is focused on.

This seems to happen out of the blue, and although it is difficult to reproduce reliably, it does seem to happen more often when a Mac is running low on available memory and is using multiple monitors. Thus, you may be more likely to lose the cursor when using apps like Photoshop, or Chrome and Safari with tons of browser tabs open, especially with an external display connected. After running into this bug repeatedly I discovered a few ways to resolve the problem and make the cursor visible again.
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Tor is a free anonymity network that aims to conceal a users location and browser usage from snoopers, in addition to allowing access to websites that are otherwise blocked or filtered out through firewalls. The official description of the Tor browser and network is described as follows:

The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.

Though that may sound complicated, using Tor is actually quite simple. We’re going to focus on using Tor in Mac OS X, but there are Tor clients available for every significant OS, including Windows, Android, and Linux (there is currently no official iOS client).
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Older versions of Google Maps for iOS have native support for the iPad, but perhaps the most useful feature of the new Google Maps app is the ability to cache maps for offline use on the iPhone. It’s really easy to use, so the next time you’re expecting to venture off into an area with poor reception or no cell signal at all, make a quick visit to Google Maps ahead of time to store the cached maps locally on an iPhone or iPad.

But this great feature is a little hidden in older Google Maps versions.
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Need to quickly get your external IP address from the command line for SSH or otherwise? No sweat, you can use either the curl command or dig to extract the information quickly from a variety of sources. We’ll focus on two different options that have proven to be reliable over time, the first is quite short and easy to remember, but the latter option may be considered the most reliable.
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The iPhone autocorrect feature is fairly aggressive with certain words and phrases. Though you can persistently cancel out the corrections to teach autocorrect what you actually meant to type, you still might find particularly colorful words are continuously autocorrected to much friendlier variations, often involving animals, which if you’re trying to sound a certain way can really take the oomph out of your intended words.

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Though the iPad Picture Frame feature is nice, having it appear on the lock screen can be a problem. For one, it’s very easy to accidentally tap which is just frustrating, but perhaps more important is the potential privacy issues caused by Picture Frame defaulting to show the entire Photo app Camera Roll. This means that even with a lock screen passcode set, tapping that flower button may wind up displaying some pictures you don’t really want to share with the world.

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Moving all contacts from an Android to an iPhone may sound complicated, but it’s actually really easy. What you’ll need to do is sync the entire address book from the Android device to Google’s cloud Contacts service, and then use Google Contacts service to transfer them to the iPhone. The result is that you’ll have the same contact list synced between both devices, which is great for permanent migration and transferring the contacts over to iOS, but also for temporary transitions between the two mobile operating systems.

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Lavabit is a secure and encrypted email platform that has been getting a lot of attention lately in light of recent news events. Lavabit aims to prevent reductions of privacy, and so not only does Lavabit have excellent antispam and antivirus features along with your standard email niceties like autoresponders, its most relevant feature at the moment is the usage of SSL and asymmetric encryption for incredibly secured email communications. Here’s the brief description of Lavabits security features, but for those truly interested you can read more here:

How does asymmetric encryption protect your privacy? The short description is that for users of this feature, incoming e-mail messages are encrypted before they’re saved onto our servers. Once a message has been encrypted, only someone who has the account password can decrypt the message. Like all safety measures, encryption is only effective if it’s used. To ensure privacy, Lavabit has developed a complex system that makes the entire encryption and decryption process transparent to the end user. This process works by combining three different encryption schemes with Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) as the cornerstone.

If that sounds good to you, or if you’re just interested in having a new email address with more private and secured email communications, we’re going to walk through setting up Lavabit in the default iOS Mail client.
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Talking calculators are very useful, whether for accessibility reasons or just for entering a lot of numbers that you want to be sure are correct by hearing the auditory response. Thanks to the Mac’s excellent text-to-speech abilities and a simple settings adjustment, you can transform the bundled Calculator app in Mac OS X into a talking calculator, and it will speak both the buttons pressed as well as the calculated result. It’s super easy to enable and use:
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Tired of the “Sent from my iPhone / iPad” default signature of Mail app in iOS, and want to replace it with something fancier, like a fully functional HTML signature with clickable URLs and some rich styling?

There are a variety of ways to accomplish this, but by far the fastest way to get an HTML signature in iOS is to just use an existing HTML signature, or to quickly craft one in a webmail client with HTML tools. Both will keep you from having to fumble around with HTML syntax or bother with any third party apps, and as you’ll see, they’re both pretty similar.
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Shuttle is an excellent little Mac app for those who frequently use SSH to connect to remote or local servers. It’s functionality is very simple: you gain a little SSH menu bar item that pulls down to give you super-quick access to whichever servers you have configured. Selecting one of the servers immediately launches terminal and connects through SSH.
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We all need as much help as we can get with email, and that’s why we’re offering up a slew of tricks to help master the Mail app on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. With ten tips ranging from having more emails be visible and stored on the device, to bulk management, to replying smarter, moving recipients around quickly, the quickest way to access drafts and add attachments to a message, and using Siri to compose complete emails, you’re sure to become more efficient working with emails in the iOS Mail app while you’re on the go.
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Apple TV makes rearranging the app icons easy enough, but you can also hide channels, services, icons, and apps that you don’t want visible on the screen at all. This is useful as a way of tidying up the Apple TV home screen of apps or services you never use or aren’t interested in watching (like ESPN, HBO, Hulu, whatever), and it’s also a great way to limit access to specific media providers and shows that you don’t want someone else to see.

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OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 3 has been released for Mac developers. Those running OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 2 can find the new update available in the Mac App Store, accessible via the Software Update menu.

If you are not yet running Mavericks but have a registered developer account, the full installer can be downloaded from the App Store and then found in the Applications directory. The installer app can then be turned into a bootable USB install drive if desired.

OS X Mavericks (10.9) includes over 200 new features and improvements to OS X that many Mac users will be pleased to see, including improved dual monitor support, a tabbed Finder, significant improvements to app power management and battery life of portable Macs, an overhauled Safari, and much more. The full public release of OS X Mavericks is expected to be released this fall.

Apple is speeding relatively quickly through developer releases of their major operating system updates. Earlier today, Apple also released beta 3 of iOS 7 and an update to Xcode 5 Developer Preview.

The third beta of iOS 7 has been released by Apple for supported iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models. The beta arrives as build 11A4414e and is expected to include many bug fixes and improvements, as it further pushes iOS 7 to it’s anticipated public release later this year.

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You can switch hard drives that Time Machine backs up to easily, but to properly migrate from one Time Machine backup drive to another and preserve the existing archived backups, you’ll want to take a few additional steps to insure that your existing prior backups are safely moved over as well.

This is an easy process, so whether you are moving backups because you got a new larger hard drive, or because an existing drive is on its last legs, you’ll be sure to have all archived backups accessible from the new Time Machine disk.
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Cellular carriers in the USA are looking to start selling customer usage data to third parties and marketers, according to TechCrunch. This is being done in an effort labeled as ‘personalization’ and using some other boring and friendly sounding descriptions. Though the information is supposedly aggregate and anonymous, it still may include fairly personal details like what apps you use, your location data, and web browsing history, and other bits of info that privacy conscious individuals probably don’t want to share with the outside world.

Fortunately, it’s fairly easy for users to opt out of these efforts through the major US carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile:
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Standby mode is a power saving feature that automatically hibernates a Mac after it has been in sleep mode for a while, which it does to further decrease drain on battery. When a Mac using FileVault encryption is placed into standby mode, a FileVault key (yes, this key is encrypted) is stored in EFI (firmware) so that it can quickly come out of standby mode when woken from deep sleep. For 99% of users, that hardly matters and it’s not a security concern, but for those who are concerned about absolute maximum security and protecting a Mac from some unusually aggressive attacks (i.e. espionage level), you can set OS X to automatically destroy that FileVault key when it’s placed in power-saving standby mode, preventing that stored key from being a potential weak point or attack target.
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