Network Locations in Mac OS X allow you to save specific configurations and settings for different networks. Once they’re setup, you can use them to change between various network configurations quickly, without having to re-enter any settings. These are perfect if you are switching between things like an automatic DHCP config vs a manually assigned IP address, different routers with unique settings at different locations, toggling proxy use on or off, using different and specific DNS configurations, or just have custom network configs for specific places like work, home, or school.

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iOS is obviously going in the direction of not needing iTunes at all, but in the meantime you still need to sync an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to copy over music libraries, videos, media, perform local backups, apps, and more. Typically iTunes will sync with an iOS device without incident, but sometimes things go awry, and iTunes just won’t sync at all. If you find yourself in that frustrating situation, here is what you can do to fix it and get the iPhone, iPod, or iPad syncing with iTunes on a Mac or PC again.

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Gmail is an excellent mail client, but one feature that has always felt missing was a simple sorting ability to view only the unread email messages residing in an inbox. It turns out you can show only the unread messages with Gmail though, you just have to use either a simple search operator to reveal only unread messages, or use a different Inbox sorting method that displays unread emails first regardless of the message age. Using either method is very simple, so pick whichever is best for your situation.

This tutorial will show you two different approaches to easily view and see unread messages in Gmail.
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Personal Hotspot allows you to turn an iPhone or cellular equipped iPad into a wireless router, thereby sharing the devices internet connection with other Mac, Windows PC, iOS, Android, or any other capable hardware that connects to the hotspot. Often called “internet tethering” or simply Wi-Fi Hotspot, this is an excellent feature for telecommuters and travelers in particular, and it’s also a great backup internet connection if a home or work network temporarily goes down. Plus, with the ever increasing range of LTE and 4G service, it’s not uncommon for a cellular connection to actually be faster than standard DSL or a cable modem anyway.

Widely supported, the only real requirement for using Personal Hotspot, other than an iPhone or 4G/LTE iPad, is a cellular data plan from a carrier that offers the service. Fees vary per provider and per area, so you will need to check with your specific cell carrier if you are not sure what it costs to use, or how to order the feature for your data plan.

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It’s time for a new wallpaper roundup, so we’re bringing you nine high-resolution space themed images. These pictures are all large enough that they should look great on just about any screen size, whether its a desktop Mac, PC, iPhone, or a retina iPad.

Click through the images or links to get to the full versions, most of which are hosted by NASA from their Hubble and Picture of the Day sites, download them to your devices, and switch up that desktop with a journey into deep space.

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The famous white Apple earbuds are great, but anyone who has had any pair of headphones and heavily used them for a long time knows they can damage over time, and sometimes you’ll wind up with a set that no longer plays sound out of both ear pieces. The problem with this is that many stereo recordings have sound tracks that are intended specifically for the left and right channels, so when one side of the headphones, earbuds, or even a speaker dock and car speakers stops working, you can wind up missing some of the audio that is playing.

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Though most iPhone owners know what which model they have, not everyone does, and sometimes you’ll come across an iPhone and have no idea what it is. This is usually because some iPhone models share the same enclosure, and because of that it can be very hard to differentiate them just by a first glance. For example, the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S look almost identical, the iPhone 3G and 3GS also look practically identical, and the iPhone 5 and it’s successor (5S?) are also likely to look basically the same. Thus, the easiest way to differentiate an iPhone when it’s not immediately obvious is by looking at the actual iPhone model number, then comparing that to a list of devices to determine what the iPhone actually is.

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Ever needed to quickly mirror a Mac display, switching another screen from an extended desktop to the mirrored image of what’s on the primary screen? Sure, you can visit the System Preference Display panel and fumble around in settings, but there is a much easier and faster way to toggle display mirroring with just a simple keyboard shortcut.
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iOS devices can use an optional encrypted backup feature that protects all backups with a strong encryption layer and password, meaning those backups are both unusable and unreadable without that password. If you chose to encrypt the backups of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with such a password and then somehow forgot the password to those backups, you may have an option available to recover it and then regain access to those backups for recovery and general usage.

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The iPhone includes FCC & FEMA alerts on all major US carriers, known as Wireless Emergency Alerts. This translates into two basic types of alerts; AMBER alerts for abductions, and general emergency alerts issued by national, state, and local governments. Both of these alert types are free to receive, fairly severe, and also pretty rare, and by no means should an iPhone get a bunch of random alerts from governmental agencies unless something truly dangerous is going on that applies to you. The alerts themselves typically coincide with extreme weather, ranging from blizzards, floods, wild fire, extreme heat, hurricanes, to other natural disasters, but could theoretically include man-caused incidents, and other dangers and emergencies the government would like to immediately inform you about.

Nonetheless some users may find the government alerts to be annoying, particularly since the sound effect that comes with them is quite loud, often shocking and startling, and abrasive. If you’d like to disable emergency alerts on the iPhone, read on.

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Alright faithful OSXDaily readers, listen up: 11,471 of you are STILL using Google Reader to access our RSS feed, but Reader is scheduled to end on July 1. While that is a huge improvement from the 40,000+ that were a few months ago… that’s still too many of our wonderful readers to have not migrated over to an alternative RSS reading platform yet. I’m assuming the reason is because of the perceived complexity of migration, and that’s why we’re focusing on two super easy solutions here: Feedly and Pulse. These are by far the two simplest solutions and migrating to either (or both) only takes a minute at most, so stop slacking and migrate those RSS feeds to a new reader!
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Apple has released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 2 to registered developers. The update to the existing OS X 10.9 beta is versioned as 13A497d and is recommended for all users who are currently running the first version of OS X Mavericks Developer Preview.

OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 2 can be downloaded immediately through the Software Update menu and the Mac App Store.
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The iPhone is easily one of the best pieces of technology ever invented, but let’s just go ahead and admit that nothing is perfect. There are a few default settings on the iPhone that are just plain annoying, but within just a minute or two you can fix all of that with a handful of simple adjustments, and have a much better experience.

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The second beta of iOS 7 is now available to download for registered developers. Arriving as build 11A4400F, this update includes many bug fixes and improvements to the beta release, and is available for iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch 5th gen, iPad 2, iPad 3, iPad 4, and iPad Mini. This is the first iOS 7 beta that has been made available for the iPad series.

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Certain situations require a Mac to be booted from an external boot volume, rather than the primary startup disk. There are plenty of reasons for booting from external volumes, whether it’s to troubleshoot problems, repair disks, partition, format everything, update, or even reinstall Mac OS X. We’ll cover the two easiest ways to do this, during boot with the Mac Boot Manager, and also through System Preferences using the Startup Disk selection tool.
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Instagram, the popular photo sharing app for iOS, recently added video support that allows users to post filtered videos to their picture collections. Browsing through an Instagram feed now results in quite a few videos that auto-play by default, an aspect which can be pretty obnoxious if you want to keep quiet. Perhaps worse than the auto-play audio though is that it also will consume a fair amount of bandwidth over time, especially if you follow a lot of people posting videos and you’re on a 3G or LTE connection. The reason is pretty simple, video, even short ones, are much larger to download than a simple static photo.

Not to worry, you can turn off video auto-play on the Instagram app for iPhone and for Android, we’ll show you exactly how to do this regardless of the version of the Instagram app you are running.

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The Virtual Keyboard feature of Mac OS X is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a software-based keyboard that can be used as an auxiliary onscreen keyboard to type anything on a Mac. These virtual keys are pressable by clicking on them with a cursor, rather than tapping the physical keys on a hardware keyboard.

Enabling this screen keyboard is a little hidden away in system preferences, but it’s very easy to show, hide, and use, once it has been made accessible:
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There are tons of video converter apps out there for the Mac, many of which are free, and some are paid but priced all too high. We’re cutting through the chafe and giving you three of the best video converter apps that are completely free. Each app also sits at a different complexity and skill levels, so if you’re just looking to perform a quick conversion without tinkering around you’ll be able to do that, while if you do want to fine-tune a video or hardcode in subtitles, you’ll be able to do that too. We’ll even give you an option that doesn’t require any downloads at all, because it’s built right into Mac OS X.

You’ll never be left with a useless video file or unreadable movie format again, so the next time you download a movie in an unusual format or copy one from that old Windows PC and think it can’t be opened or is unwatchable on that iPad, think again and use one of these free apps to get it converted on your Mac.
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