The iPad can play a variety of video formats without any additional apps or tools, and the bundled Videos app is more than sufficient to play a variety of very common movie file types including mp4, m4v, mov, and mkv. If you have such a movie on a computer that you want to watch on the iPad, you’ll need to follow a fairly simple process to copy it over, but nonetheless it’s not always so straight forward to users who are new to the platform.
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One feature the iPhone Camera app badly needs natively is a self-timer, which allows you to set a time delay, say 10 seconds, before the camera shoots a picture. This lets you as the photographer be able to set the camera up somewhere, set the timer, then walk on over to be in the frame of their own shot. It’s a widely used and essential camera option for taking group photos of family and friends when there isn’t another individual around to take the picture, and in the age of posting everything to Facebook and Instagram, a lot of people just use it to shoot “selfies” too. The self timer feature is so widely used and so standard on every other digital camera out there that it’s actually quite surprisingly Apple hasn’t included it in the iOS cameras yet.
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Contact Sheets, often called Proof Sheets, are essentially columns and rows of image thumbnails, making a bunch of photos very easy to quickly review. Though they’re commonly used by photographers, they have a wide range of uses outside of the pro-photography world, from artists to designers to UI/UX engineers. Rather than creating a contact sheet by hand the hard way in Photoshop or Pixelmator, we’ll show you to instantly generate one that is fully customized, all you’ll need to do is select a group of pictures in the Mac file system and let the excellent OS X app Automator do the hard work. Everything used here is free and bundled into Mac OS X, there’s no need to buy anything else or download any other apps.

The end result will be able to contact sheet PDF file that is a specified paper size with a chosen number of thumbnail columns, saved to where ever you want, and it will look something like this:

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Using the Calendar app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to navigate far into the future or back in time doesn’t have to be a slow process of constant taps to find a distant event or important date, and neither does jumping back to the current date once you’re far removed. Here are two quick tricks that will dramatically speed up navigation in the iOS Calendar app.

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Screen Sharing in Mac OS X allows you to set up a Mac so that it can be connected to remotely through the VNC protocol, with the full screen being both visible and usable to the connected user. As you may have guessed, this means Mac OS X has a built-in VNC client, and not only is it able to connect to Macs running the VNC server (called Screen Sharing in Mac OS X), but it can also connect to any Windows or Linux machine running a VNC server as well.

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Most iOS Safari users know by now that you can quickly type out TLD (top level domains) for websites in Safari by hitting the “.com” button on the keyboard, and that by tapping and holding on that same “.com” button a variety of TLD’s will be available that are relevant to your default keyboard language. That tap-and-hold menu helps you visit websites faster on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, by reducing typing, and in the USA you will find options for .com, .us, .net, .org, and .edu in that pop-up menu. If you’ve ever wished there were additional TLD’s for other countries too, you will be thrilled to find out you can easily add international domains to that quick-access menu as well, all you need to do is enable their respective keyboards on your iOS device.

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The login screen of OS X typically shows a list of users in addition to a variety of power options, including sleep, restart, and shut down. While most home users will want to keep those options available, there are many instances where hiding the power buttons is desired to prevent the Mac from going offline. This is fairly common for deploying Macs in corporate and education environments, setting up a public use computer, or even just for having finer tuned controls over multi-use Mac when configuring a new user account or the Guest account.

To be clear, these are the buttons that we are talking about, visible only at the bottom of the login window:

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If you like to tweak Mac OS X with a lot of defaults write commands from the terminal, you already know how hard it can be to keep track of them. Sure you can query command history for specific command syntax, and you can always use grep to find executed defaults commands, but there’s a better way to keep track of them all, and that’s by keeping an automatically updated text file that stores a list of all used defaults tweaks. This makes it very easy to keep track of which defaults commands have been activated or disabled on a specific Mac.

This tutorial walks you through how to automatically track every defaults write and all other defaults command strings entered on a Mac by generating a text file that specifically tracks those command executions. This is hugely useful for those who tinker defaults commands often and either forget what is enabled or disabled, or just want a running tally of all defaults changes on a Mac.

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Want to watch a video that is sitting on your computer on an iPad instead? That’s simple, and for most video files you can just copy them right over and watch instantly through the Videos app. On the other hand, if you’ve ever tried to copy a movie over to an iPad and discovered an error message like this, it’s almost always because the existing video format is incompatible with playback on the iPad:

“Movie name” was not copied to the iPad because it cannot be played on this iPad

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Apple is set to start production of the next iPhone soon, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The new iPhone is said to be “similar in size and shape to its current one”, which is consistent with rumors that have indicated the next iPhone release will be a “5S” model rather than a complete ground-up redesign.

Summer Release Possible

The report from the Wall Street Journal suggests the next iPhone may launch as soon as this summer. Summer 2013 officially begins on June 21 and ends on September 21, providing a fairly wide range for a possible release that is consistent with several past iPhone launches.
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Mail app in recent versions of Mac OS X defaults to not include the original attachments of an email when that email is replied to. While that can be fine for many cases, if you cc or bcc another person to an email it can be very frustrating to discover the originally attached document or file is no longer visible, and thus the new recipient of the email won’t have access to the original attachment. Likewise, the lack of reply attachments can complicate email chains that go on over lengthy periods of time, since it makes it more difficult to retrieve the original document that was part of the initial correspondence.

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Ever wished you could find a new creative way to rickroll your particularly tech savvy friends? Just about nobody is fooled by the random YouTube links anymore, and URL shorteners alone aren’t always enough, but now you can bring the persistently annoying rickrolling to the Terminal of OS X and Linux by running a simple fairly innocuous looking command. What happens when you or the suspect runs it? You’ll get a full ASCII rendition of the infamous Rick Astley video but best of all it’s complete with audio, so be sure they have their speakers turned up or headphones on.
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Being April Fools Day, the internet is largely useless, news is a mess, and much of what you’ll read today is inaccurate rubbish. But don’t worry, we’re not going to fall into that trap, and instead for April Fools we’ll offer up a few pranks that you can play on anyone that has an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. All you’ll need to do is get ahold of the individuals iOS device and each prank only takes a few seconds to implement, so plot accordingly and have some fun.
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If you’ve ever wanted to get a foreign app that isn’t named in your native language, let alone native alphabet, onto your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you’ve probably noticed it’s not the easiest thing in the world. For one, App Stores can be separated, so for example some apps available on the US App Store may not be available in China, or vice versa. As we’ve discussed before, it’s fairly simple to download apps from the US App Store from outside the USA, but going the other direction can be challenging, and finding some of those foreign apps can be particularly difficult when an apps default alphabet is completely different, and that’s what we’ll cover here.

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Bokeh is a photography effect that creates strong light blurs on any out of focus light, frequently rendered as circular blurry elements where a point of light is visible in the image. You’ll see it often in professional photography as well as more abstract artistically oriented photography, and it can help to create a depth of field and also add some very unique character to photos. But bokeh isn’t just for professionals with expensive lenses and DSLR cameras, you can get that same effect shooting with an iPhone as well. We’ll cover two easy ways to do it, one uses nothing but your iPhone, and the second uses the excellent third party lens attachment known as Olloclip.

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Many apps for both iOS and OS X store documents and app data directly in iCloud, this allows easy syncing between devices and also provides a certain extra level of backup for some apps, since it’s all stored in the cloud. On the other hand, you may want to remove some of those documents and app data from iCloud, and that’s what we’ll show you how to do easily directly from Mac OS X. This is done through the iCloud preference panel similar to how you can manage and delete iCloud backups for iOS devices from OS X, though obviously rather than deleting a device backup it’ll only be application data or specific documents that is being removed.

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You can quickly access AirPlay streaming right from the lock screen of any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The only requirement is that you have some form of audio (or video) playing with the lock screen active, and that can be playing from a default app like Music or from something like Pandora or Spotify.

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We all know that Apple products are quite popular around the world, but would you ever have guessed that the North Korean “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Un is a Mac user? Well, he is, and in a recently released press photo from the North Korean state media you can see Kim Jong Un sitting at his desk reviewing plans to nuke America – yes, seriously that is the theme of the photo set – alongside a 21.5″ iMac. Specifically, the iMac is prior generation model with a side-loading SuperDrive, not the recent super-sleek thin revision, and NKNews says the photo can be “confirming long-held rumors of the Kim family’s passion for Apple Macs.”

Quite peculiar, indeed. Though perhaps it shouldn’t be too shocking considering that Kim Jong Un’s legendary father, Kim Jong Il, also had a favorite computer from our favorite fruit company too, and that was a MacBook Pro 15″.

Anyway… it’s Friday, so uh, yea, most interesting Mac setup post ever maybe?