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?

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.
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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.
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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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