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.
Read more »

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.
Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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?

Want to hide an app or two from appearing on the iOS home screen? Maybe you want to hide all apps downloaded from the App Store, but keep the defaults visible? Or maybe you just want to hide a stock app that shipped with your iPhone or iPad like Safari or iTunes? You can do all of the above or any of the above, and none of it requires any funky tweaks or downloads to perform. It turns out that hiding any type of app is really easy in iOS.

We’ll cover three different ways to hide apps, including hiding Apple’s default apps that ship with iOS devices which can’t be deleted, hiding downloaded apps from the App Store, and another approach that will hide anything from immediate view while still retaining the apps accessibility in iOS.
Read more »

Bookmarks saved within Safari will sync between all of your other iCloud equipped devices, assuming you have iCloud configured correctly do so. This means a website you bookmark on your Mac will sync over to an iPad, and something bookmarked on your iPhone will sync back to your Mac, iPad, and Windows PC, and vice versa. Bookmarking syncing is incredibly useful, and if you haven’t enabled it yet be sure to take a minute or two to do so.
Read more »

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.
Read more »

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.
Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.
Read more »

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:

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.
Read more »

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:
Read more »

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.
Read more »