MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit, and a larger MTU size generally increases efficiency of a network connection because each packet carries more data, but sometimes the default MTU sizes (often 1500) will cause issues with some networks and needs adjusting. If you need to change the MTU size on a Mac, you can do so through the command line, as well as through the System Preference panel. We’ll focus on setting MTU size from the command line in this particular walkthrough.
Like many of you, I’m a sucker for fancy new wallpapers of neat looking stuff, and if there’s one place that routinely cranks out some of the most mind-blowing amazing imagery that is perfect for wallpapers, it’s NASA. This little mini-collection is a handful of freakishly gorgeous pictures of various nebulas around the universe, and because they’re from NASA every image is available to download at extremely high resolution, making them ideal fits for just about any iOS device, PC, or Mac you have. Don’t be stuck with a boring background picture, grab a fancy nebula shot and be amazed every time you look at your desktop.
The iPad is a great cooking tool that’s perfect for keeping track of recipes and being the ultimate kitchen resource, but if you’ve ever cooked with an iPad you’ll know the screen can get pretty mucked up with various ingredients, and if you aren’t careful it could even damage the device. Thankfully, another kitchen item can completely prevent the iPad from becoming a mess throughout the cooking process: a clear plastic zip lock bag.
Want to know exactly how much storage photos are taking up on your iPhone or iPad? Opening the Photos app in iOS will tell you how many total photos are within the different picture albums and Camera Roll, but how much space do the pictures actually take up? If you want to know the actual storage size of all those pictures and camera shots are consuming on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch you’ll need to dig a bit deeper into the device settings to reveal that information, follow along.
This weeks great Apple setup comes from Fletcher C. in the UK. He’s got a pretty snazzy desk and uses his Mac and other gear for video production and amateur photography, the hardware shown in the shot includes:
Fletcher gets big bonus points for taking his desk setup shot with OSXDaily.com open in Safari!
Show us your Apple gear and Mac desk setups! Email us a good picture or two, along with a brief description of hardware and what you use the gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com
If you need to get a new IP address from a router that any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or other iOS device is connected to, you can either set a manual IP address or, what’s likely more relevant to most people, you’ll want to renew the DHCP lease directly from the wi-fi router itself.
Renewing the lease this way should alleviate any potential conflicts with other devices on the network, and it also fills in everything from subnet mask, router, DNS settings, in addition to the new IP.
Let’s walk through how to renew DHCP lease from a connected wi-fi router in iOS: Read more »
You may already know that the cheapest place to buy a new iPhone 5 is usually Walmart, but wallyworld is outdoing itself right now and offering a brand new iPhone 5 for only $127! Yes, that’s a whopping $60 cheaper than their already lowest price of $187, and you can pick up that stellar offer with two-year carrier contracts from Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.
What’s the catch you ask? There isn’t one really, except that you have to go into a Walmart store to make the purchase and get the additional $60 discount.
This deal means iPhone 5 is the same price as what they offered during their big holiday idevice sale, and you can find the details in some fine print on their websites product page though there really isn’t much to it:
“Get a $60 discount off the original price in-stores only. Offer requires new 2-year contract or upgrade. Price before discount: $187.00”
The deal appears to only be valid for the base 16GB model, for either black or white colors.
Of all the places where you can buy an iPhone 5, Walmart is quickly becoming the best overall deal for bargain shoppers and for anyone looking for some seriously steep discounts. If you’ve wanted a new iPhone and the price was holding you back, you won’t be able to beat this one. Move quick and find a local Walmart store to lock in the price, the deal probably won’t be active for long.
Converting images to new file formats is very easy thanks to a variety of tools built directly into OS X (and most Linux distributions). Though the easiest method uses Preview for converting images, there’s a command line option that uses the same sips tool we’ve discussed before to perform batch resizing from the command line. Using sips, you can convert single images to new image formats, or even perform batch image conversions. Read more »
Most Bluetooth accessories don’t have battery indicators located on the device itself, and that includes the Apple Wireless Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad. Rather than waiting for the battery to run low, thereby causing the devices connection to weaken, stop registering movements, clicks, or certain behavior, you can choose to manually intervene by periodically checking the battery level of most Bluetooth devices connected to a Mac. This is done easily by looking in either the Mac OS X Bluetooth management menu and Preference panel, we’ll show you how to do both.
This lovely colorful plastic toilet is also an iPad stand, and that means you can now finally potty train a child (or yourself, no judgment here!) with the help of a convenient iPad-toilet combo.
I don’t know about you, but I have far more questions than answers about this thing. Is there an app that goes along with this “accessory”? And what does that app do? Is this just the modern toddlers version of reading magazines while on the loo? This is either the absolute worst iPad accessory ever made, or contrarily, it’s perhaps the best accessory ever made, and I suppose your opinion of that is going to depend entirely on whether or not you 1) have kids that are being trained to use a toilet, and 2) your opinion of potential doo-doo butter being on or around the vicinity of an iPad. Me? Well personally, I’m not a fan of the mere concept of poos being in the remote region of my iPad, but I readily admit that I don’t have children that I’m trying to get out of diapers… so maybe I’m not the target market here.
What do you think, worst iPad accessory ever or the best ever? Would this actually be useful?
We’re not quite sure who made this amusing WTF find, but it was found by @MacFormat, cheers to them.
Have you noticed that when you’re browsing through folders on the Mac that icons are actually previews of images and even live playable videos? This sure makes the OS X Finder snazzy looking, but in some situations where tons of images and video files are contained within single folders, it can have the unwanted side effect of general sluggishness. A simple solution to that slowdown is to turn off the image and video preview generation of the Finder, both for icon thumbnails and for the Preview panel that appears in the Column view. This tip isn’t necessary for the average Mac user, but it should be particularly valuable for people who work with very large images and video files as it will offer a nice performance boost to working with any such documents within the Finder.
Note that neither of these settings will impact the functionality of Quick Look, letting you still easily scan through pictures but having more direct control over what is loaded and when. In other words, system resources will only be used when Quick Look is activated on the files in question, not simply when opening a directory.
The default iOS setting for iPhones is for message alerts to chime with the text tone twice, in a two minute interval. While the repeat text message alert sounds, notifications, and vibrations on the iPhone can be helpful for some people, those of us who are basically glued to our phones tend to experience quite the opposite and end up finding the repetitive alerts a nuisance, since it can seem like you’re being inundated with texts when you’re not. We’ll cover how to turn that off so that the alert never repeats at all, meaning if you get one text message, you will only get one alert sound and one notification for it.
Emoji icons are a lot of fun and special characters can be extremely useful, but the standard way of opening the character viewer panel isn’t the smoothest in the world. Fortunately, OS X has an excellent bundled menu bar option that can be enabled to allow for extremely fast Emoji and character access, letting you nearly instantly summon that special character panel from quite literally anywhere on the Mac and from all apps.
Those who use external Bluetooth devices with a Mac, whether it’s a keyboard, mouse, headset, or anything else, are probably aware that connection strength between the device and the computer is going to directly impact how usable the device is. The next obvious question then is, how do you check the strength of such a connection? Regular readers may recall a previous tip that allows Mac users to quickly check the signal strength of a connected Bluetooth device, but we’ll expand on that greatly and get a bit more advanced, revealing a live connection monitoring graph that updates the RSSI (received signal strength indicator) of a connected Bluetooth device. This allows for easy troubleshooting when trying to find out if, and help to determine why, a Bluetooth accessory may have a poor connection to the Mac.
Symptoms of a Bad Bluetooth Connection
Symptoms of a weak or bad connection for Bluetooth headsets are audio that cuts out, inappropriately fuzzy audio or bad audio quality, or even no audible sound at all. For things like a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse, a bad connection may range from key presses going unnoticed, mouse movements being imprecise, and erratic cursor control. Gamers and graphic designers in particular are sensitive to shoddy Bluetooth signals since the imprecision of cursor control can make the difference in their activities.
Monitor Bluetooth Device Connections
The connection monitor will only be available to OS X if Bluetooth is enabled and a device is connected to the Mac.
Open System Preferences from the Apple menu
Choose “Bluetooth” and select the device you want to monitor the connection for
Next, Option+Click the little gear icon and from the pulldown menu choose “Monitor Connection RSSI” to bring up the connection monitor window
With the connection monitor visible, it’s time to check and perhaps troubleshoot the devices connection to the Mac.
With the signal graph now visible, let it gather data for a few seconds before jumping to any conclusions. The screenshot up top shows a device reading in the -40 range, which is quite good, and even though it moves around a tiny bit, that is not indicative of an issue.
Reading the Bluetooth Connection RSSI
RSSI can be a bit weird to read, but essentially a higher number means a better connection, and a lower number means a worse connection. Note however that the numbers are negative, so that may read opposite to what you’d expect. For example, a connection of -45 is significantly stronger and better than a connection of -100, which is weaker and more likely to have issues. The rough guidelines below may help read the connection, though the precise signal you get is going to vary on other factors we’ll discuss below:
-40 to -55 is a very strong connection
-70 and above represents a good connection
-100 and below represents a bad connection
-110 and below is almost unusable
If some of this looks familiar to you, it’s probably because the same RSSI scale applies to those who have enabled iPhone Field Test Mode before, where the numbers seen in the corner that replacing the standard cell bar signals are read the same way.
Taking Action on a Weak Bluetooth Connection
The two most likely reasons for a bad Bluetooth connection are low batteries and heavy interference from something in the environment. Batteries are easy to test, all you need to do is swap in a new set of batteries or charge the device in question and see if the RSSI increases and if the device becomes more stable. Environmental factors can be trickier to track down, but using the live connection monitor can make worlds of difference as you move a Bluetooth device around and watch the graphs response. If you see a huge drop in the RSSI when you move a headset behind a fireplace for example, you can surmise that something in the wall is causing the interference and you should rearrange the equipment accordingly. It’s also vaguely possible that the device itself has a defective antenna, though that’s fairly rare for most quality devices.
Moving email around between inboxes in the iOS Mail app is easy, and perhaps sometimes it’s too easy, because accidentally moving or archiving mail messages seems to be an ongoing issue for many. In fact, one of the most frequently asked questions I get from newcomers to the iPhone or iPad is “where did my email go? It disappeared from my inbox, I think I pressed something accidentally and deleted it!” I’ve even accidentally done this myself in a half-daze of sleep at the wee hours of the night, only to return to my Mail inbox in the morning to not be able to find the email message I was looking for.
Not to worry, your archived emails aren’t missing – well, unless you deleted them, but even in that case if you move fast enough you can usually recover them from the “Trash” folder using the same method we’ll discuss below. Whether that email move was accidental or not doesn’t really matter because the process will be the same to get your mailbox in order again.
In this tutorial we will discuss how to locate and move archived emails back into the primary inbox of Mail app on iPhone and iPad.
Your iPhone is a smartphone, and if it isn’t making you smarter as well then you just aren’t using the devices included features to it’s full potential. Here are three super simple tips that let your iPhone make you smarter, these will be perfect for educators, learners, students, or really, just about anyone – unless you’re a human dictionary and encyclopedia, that is. There’s no need to download any new apps or do anything that’s not included in stock iOS. Read more »
Have you ever gotten a new album or podcast, synced it over to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, then when you went to play the songs you discovered they were grayed out in the Music app? The album is there, the song title is there, but because the song is grey you can tap it all you want and nothing happens, the music won’t play. This is fairly common, and if you’ve run into it before it’s almost certainly nothing wrong with your music, iOS device, or iTunes, it’s probably just a transfer error. This usually means they songs are either not done transferring, or they haven’t transferred at all because the iOS device was disconnected from the computer before the transfer could complete. As a result, this is really easy to resolve:
Relaunch iTunes on the Mac or PC and make sure the iOS device is connected either by USB cable or by wi-fi, then do either option 1 or option 2:
1: Resync the entire device completely
2: Selectively transfer the greyed songs only without syncing everything else by dragging and dropping them from the iTunes playlist to the iOS device
Wait for the device to finish syncing before disconnecting again, as indicated by the disappearance of the spinning sync/transfer icons
Sometimes just reconnecting the device to a computer alone will restart the transfer too, this will be made obvious by the little spinning circle in the black iOS title bar and the same logo appearing alongside the device in iTunes. You can also open the Music app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod and look at the grey songs, when they are transferring over again there will be an indicator showing you the progress of the song, when it reaches a full circle the song should appear black and be playable as usual.
It seems the grayed song issue is particularly prone to happen with syncing over wi-fi, and automatic syncing, both incredibly useful features that can have some hiccups if the wireless connection isn’t stable, there is heavy interference, a weak signal, or there are wifi or connection troubles in general.
There is always a possibility that songs aren’t transferring for other reasons, or that there is something else wrong. Here are some other possible problems and situations where you’ll end up with greyed out songs in the Music app:
If connecting via physical cable, check if the device is fraying or torn, this could be impacting the sync and transfer. If so, you may need a new USB cable
Update: Adobe apparently made some sort of error, and is not actually giving away any CS2 software for free. Here is what they have to say on their Community Forums:
On behalf of Adobe Systems Incorporated …
You have heard wrong! Adobe is absolutely not providing free copies of CS2!
What is true is that Adobe is terminating the activation servers for CS2 and that for existing licensed users of CS2 who need to reinstall their software, copies of CS2 that don’t require activation but do require valid serial numbers are available. (Special serial numbers are provided on the page for each product download.)
If you have an older Mac you’re in luck, because the entire Adobe Creative Suite 2 is available for free, including Acrobat, GoLive, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier. Keep in mind that Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2) is dated from 2005, but if you have an older Mac (or Windows PC) that can support the old versions they’re actually very capable apps and for the most part aren’t too different from the gazillion dollar versions offered today. Here is all you need to do to download the apps:
Log into your Adobe account to get the serial number
Note this only works for older versions of Mac OS X that have Rosetta PPC support, meaning OS X 10.6.8 or earlier. Adobe is more specific is suggesting they only work for later versions of 10.2 to 10.4 but they will run in any version of OS X with Rosetta installed. Unfortunately that means OS X Lion and Mountain Lion users aren’t so lucky to get CS2 for free.
Update: Adobe’s site is getting hammered by all the attention this is getting and is often down, check back and refresh their download page from time to time and you should get through ok. The impatient can also check out a Slickdeals page which has direct download links to all of the disk images and installers.
under the MacBook Air
Most Bluetooth accessories don’t have battery indicators located on the device itself, and that includes the Apple Wireless Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad. Rather than waiting for the battery to run low, thereby causing the devices connection to weaken, stop registering movements, clicks, or certain behavior, you can choose to manually intervene by periodically checking the battery level of most Bluetooth devices connected to a Mac. This is done easily by looking in either the Mac OS X Bluetooth management menu and Preference panel, we’ll show you how to do both.
The default iOS setting for iPhones is for message alerts to chime with the 
