Ever needed a quick place to paste some text or make a quick note while you’re doing web work? Using a neat trick, you can turn any web browser window or tab into an instant notepad that you can write in, copy and paste out of, and even adjust the font sizes within. There really isn’t much to this trick, and it works in just about web browser on just about every platform, whether you’re currently in OS X, Windows, Linux, or whatever else.
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Some countries use fahrenheit, others use celsius, and if you’re an alien on an unusually extreme planet maybe you even use kelvin… whatever the case we’ve all run into the situation where someone from elsewhere is referring to a temperature in a scale you’re unfamiliar with. Obviously if someone in the USA says “wow it was 10 degrees!” that means it’s really cold weather, but if a native German said the same thing, that’s quite mild weather. Rather than trying to do the funky math in your head, just ask Siri. No, she won’t report the weather back directly in another temperature scale (we’ll cover that through a Settings adjustment, however), but she will perform temperature conversions from celsius to fahrenheit and vice versa.
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Nmap is a powerful command line network discovery utility that lets you review network inventory, host response and uptime, and perform security auditing through port scans, OS and firewall detection, and more. Though it’s free (and open source) and ships along with many versions of linux, it doesn’t come standard with Mac OS X installations, and thus must be installed separately. Nmap is generally fairly advanced, but it has plenty of useful applications even for those of us who are not network administrators and security professionals, and it can also be helpful for simple network setup tasks and troubleshooting.

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T-Mobile will begin to offer the iPhone on their USA network starting April 12. Unlike other US carriers, the iPhone comes to T-Mobile without the annual contract obligation, and instead includes a financing plan that usually brings the total cost of ownership down when compared to most other competing networks. T-Mobile also becomes the first US carrier to offer high definition voice calling with iPhone 5, dubbed “HD Voice”, a technology that is offered in other countries.
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As we all know, any time a photo is taken with the iPhone camera, a little shutter sound accompanies the snapping of the picture. That sound effect is all software, and so though you might expect there to be a simple settings change to toggle that sound effect off, well, you may be disappointed to learn there just isn’t such a setting.

But not to worry, you can take photos with the iPhone camera in silence, without hearing that shutter sound effect when you snap a picture. There’s a few tricks to take silent pictures with iPhone camera, let’s learn each:

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Unless an entire music library consists of only a single genre of music, it’s fairly rare to have find one equalizer setting for your iTunes collection to rule every single song or album. Sure there are some pretty good general settings, and the preset options are great too, but for the best experience with diverse playlists and music collections, consider setting individual equalizer settings for specific albums, artists, genres, or even songs on a per-song basis.

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Using the automatic log out feature is a good way to bring an additional layer of security to a Mac. It works just as you’d expect; after a predetermined amount of time has passed without activity, the active user account logs itself out. This means all currently running apps close out as well as all documents which save in their current state through the Versions & Resume features. Then, in order to use the Mac again, someone will have to log back in with appropriate user and password credentials, thereby preventing unauthorized access. And of course because of the relatively new OS X Resume feature, once you do log in again all of your past apps and documents will launch again where you left off.
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If you ever want to show off some great pictures from your iPhone, you can instantly start a slideshow from the Photos app. This under-appreciated feature is extremely easy to use, and it can be livened up a bit by adding some fitting music to play alongside the slideshow. Everything is remarkably easy to set up:
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Itching to upgrade to a new iPhone but don’t want to pay full price? You can easily find out when you are eligible for the subsidized upgrade rate, plus set an automatic reminder for when the new upgrade rate is available for your current plan. This is great if you want to upgrade your iPhone only when you are eligible for the discounted carrier subsidized rate, which is fairly common considering it’s quite a bit cheaper than paying the early-upgrade rates.
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Overloaded with too many active windows from too many apps? Want to quickly flip through them, minimize one, maybe maximize another? Maybe you’d just like to really focus and go full screen? We’ve got this all covered with some simple keyboard shortcuts that can improve workflow by speeding up window management and how you interact with app windows in MacOS and Mac OS X. This is not about Mission Control, this is about direct window management of any windows for any apps, so check out the keystrokes and let us know if we’re missing anything.

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Apple has added an optional two-step verification security authentication feature to Apple ID’s, the login which is used to manage everything from iCloud storage settings to iTunes and App Store purchases. With Two-Step Verification enabled, you’ll login as usual, but then be required to verify your identity by entering in a special verification code on a device before being able to make changes to that account, or before being able to make purchases on a new Mac or iOS device. Those verification codes are delivered either through SMS or through the Find My iPhone protocol, assuming it is set up, and you’ll also receive a Recovery Key that can be used if SMS or Find My iPhone is not available.
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As you know, OS X plays a sound when a new Notification pops up in Notification Center. That default sound is called “Basso”, a low toned sound effect that is kind of like a short tap on a low note piano key. CultOfMac hilariously describes the sound as a “frog fart”, and if you aren’t a fan of that alert sound and you don’t want to mute the sound effects for Notifications manually (or mute all system UI sounds, for that matter), you can easily change the alert sound yourself by tossing another .aiff file into a specific directory found in the user library folder. It’s not particularly complicated, but it can be a fun additional way to customize your Mac experience, so if you’re interested here is what you’ll need to do:

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It’s not unusual for peoples names to change, for someone to switch jobs or phone numbers, or even for a company to change their name or information. It’s frustrating to wander into the Contacts app on the iPhone to discover a ton of entries for a single person or entity to cover each of those changes, so when you find your Contacts getting overrun with duplicates or multiple entries for a single person, take the time to clean them up, merge the contacts, and eliminate the duplicates.

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The Voice Memo app bundled with the iPhone allows you to use the device as a personal recorder, in much the same way people used to carry tape recorders to jot down thoughts, meeting notes, or just personal messages.

But if you’ve recorded something that is either too long for your purposes, or just contains a bit of unnecessary audio, you can easily trim down the voice recordings right in iOS.

You don’t need any fancy audio editing software to change the length of the memos, the feature is built into the Voice Memo app itself.

This article is intended for earlier versions of iOS, users of modern versions of system software can refer to this article instead.

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Anytime you take a screen shot in Mac OS X or empty the trash you hear a little sound effect that accompanies the action. With a screenshot it sounds like a camera shutter clicking, and with the Trash it kind of sounds like a bunch of papers being crumpled and dumped out.

Cute sound effects, and they certainly serve their purpose of alerting a user to the completion of the task at hand, but are they necessary? Whether or not you want the audio feedback is for you to decide, but you can easily turn turn off those Finder sound effects by toggling a setting:

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Apple has released iOS 6.1.3, a relatively minor software update that includes a patch for the bug that allowed someone to bypass the lock screen and access the Phone app, and also brings some improvements to Maps in Japan. Additionally, the update patches the evasi0n jailbreak, thereby preventing devices from being jailbroken by that tool in the future. There are no known feature additions or changes.
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Disabling the camera access in iOS prevents the Camera app icon from appearing on the home screen, it turns off the lock screen camera, and it also prevents all third party apps from using the camera at all, which as you may have guessed also disables FaceTime. No, you don’t have to physically remove the camera lens, this is all done by simple software settings.
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Have you ever wished you could quickly save a file to a target directory, one that had a lengthy path buried somewhere deep in OS X? It turns out that by using the excellent Go To Folder shortcut, you can do exactly that, and if you know the destination path or have it in your clipboard, you don’t even need to click around in the Save dialog window to navigate through those deep directory structures.

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