Many older Macs lost out on the ability to run OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3!), but some hard working fellows have created a free third party tool called MLPostFactor that allows for the newest version of OS X to be installed on older, officially unsupported Macs. The process used to be quite complicated, but with MLPostFactor it’s easier than ever and can now be done by creating a partition, running the MLPF app, installing OS X as usual, then using the MLPostFactor app again to patch the ‘failed’ installation. Reboot and automagically OS X Mountain Lion will be running on the older Macs, breathing new life into older hardware.
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Whether you just got a new phone number, changed a number from an old one, or you happened upon someone else’s iPhone and want to know the number of who it belongs to, you can easily retrieve an iPhone’s associated mobile number. The obvious solution might be to call another phone, but if the device has no service or the service has been disconnected, don’t despair. There are two super simple ways to find the number on the device itself – even if the phone no longer has any service and no sim card – but you can also get it from iTunes and sometimes even on the sim card itself.
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You can change the default alert times of calendar events on iPhone and iPad.

Forgetting a birthday or an important event never feels good, and if you have a habit of either completely forgetting dates or not remembering until it’s too late, you can adjust the default alert times settings in iOS to better correspond to your needs and level of forgetfulness. You may have noticed that iOS has no standard alert time for events and birthdays, but through a settings change and give yourself one of four options: an alert on the day of the event at 9AM, an alert a day before the event, two days before the event, or a week before.

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Want to quickly remove text styles and font formatting from some text? Here are two three super fast ways to do just that, and they don’t require any third party downloads, both features are built right into Mac OS X. The first two methods will use an alternate copy & paste command that removes styling in the process, and the third trick will use TextEdit to strip all styling. Both solutions will work great if you want to remove or formatting when copying from the web to emails, and can save you the embarrassment of sharing hideous and unprofessional font styling with the world.
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Anyone who takes a lot of screenshots in Mac OS X knows the challenges associated with them; how quickly their desktop will fill up with various PNG files, sorting those into folders or just tossing them elsewhere, converting the screenshots to a different image format, copying them to the clipboard for pasting into another app, cropping down to size, or whatever else is required before the screen captures are in their final usable format.
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If you’re hitting the road with your iPhone, you’ll probably be relying on either Apple Maps or Google Maps to help you get to your destination. But before you settle on an uncertain route, remember to check the default routes and compare alternate routes in both mapping apps to find the best directions, and don’t be surprised if both apps give you very different suggestions initially. If you haven’t done so yet grab Google Maps for iPhone before taking off, it’s better to have the app already on your iPhone before you hit the road so you don’t have to download it while driving.
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Two new updates are available for Mac users that aim to increase security and control over how the Java web plugin runs in the Safari web browser. Named as Java for OS X 2013-003 and Safari 6.0.4 (or Safari 5.1.9 for older versions of OS X), the updates are available right now through Software Update via the  Apple menu. The updates combine to roughly 110MB and requires Safari be quit before installing, though a reboot is not necessary, and should be considered must-have upgrades to existing software for those who use Safari and/or Java on the Mac.
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If you’ve ever encountered the “Visual Voicemail is currently unavailable” error on when going to check new voicemail on the iPhone, there are two quick tricks that almost always fix the problem. So before calling the actual voicemail number like you’re some kind of cave dweller in the stone age of cell phones, try these speedy fixes first.
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If you have ever wished you could schedule the opening of a specific file, or set an application to launch on a specific date, either on a one off basis or on a recurring scheduled event, you can actually do both right in Mac OS X with the help of none other than the default Calendar app. Opening files and apps on a Mac at scheduled times is an astonishingly useful feature that is largely unknown, but it’s extremely easy to use.

We’ll cover how to launch specific files on a schedule, or just an application. Just like a standard alert or event, you can create repeat schedules with these as well. If you’ve ever created a generic event or Reminder in Mac OS X before, this is quite similar, except of course you are scheduling the opening of a file or application on the Mac instead.

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Anything to boost productivity and reduce time spent emailing is a big win in my book. Accordingly, the “Sent from my iPhone” signature attached to an email has become associated in everyones minds with brevity, since naturally nobody expects a lengthy email reply sent while on the go from a smartphone, right? As a result, short replies from smartphones and iPhones are not considered rude or overly brief, and you can use that expectation of a brief and concise message to your advantage when sending emails from the Mail app of OS X. This is a great way to improve your email productivity when writing and replying from the desktop, and while some people call it a brand vanity signature, I like to call it the “brevity signature”.
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It’s been a while since we’ve done an iPad specific wallpaper roundup, so we took the time to gather a collection of 20 absolutely gorgeous high resolution retina wallpapers for the iPad, sized at 2048×2048. You’ll find a mixture of amazing scenery, abstractions, and textures that are so good you can almost feel them. Click through each image to get to the full size version, then a tap and hold and choose “Save Image” to save it locally to the iPad in your Photos app where you’ll be able to set them as your desktop background.

Though these wallpapers are specifically aimed at the iPad’s high resolution display and are perfectly fit for the iOS homescreen, there’s really no good reason they won’t work on a desktop Mac or PC, iPhone, or Android too, since almost all of each are typically lower resolution than the iPad’s retina screen anyway.

Without further ado, enjoy the wallpapers!
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Practically all apps that store documents in iCloud let you delete them from the app itself, which simultaneously removes them from iCloud and thus all other synced iOS & OS X devices. But if you’re looking to manage and remove specific iCloud documents and data, there is a better way to do it through a centralized control panel within iOS that will let you view all documents stored in iCloud, much like the same feature that is on the Mac which is accessible through OS X System Preferences. Let’s focus on the mobile side of things and learn how to do this in iOS.
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Dunking a $650 electronic device into water is a pretty terrible feeling. The standard advice is to dry it off and stuff it into some rice, then cross your fingers and wait. But does that actually work? After accidentally dropping my iPhone for a swim into a pool of water where it was fully submerged, I had the unfortunate opportunity to test out the iPhone-in-a-rice-bag hypothesis, and I have good news; it actually works!

Here is exactly what I did, and what I learned from the process of saving an iPhone from extensive water exposure with the good old rice bag trick. The result is a completely functioning iPhone with zero water damage.
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A little-known screen flashing feature exists in Mac OS X that provides an alternative way of being notified of system alerts, meaning that anytime you’d typically hear the general system sound effect feedback, see a bouncing Dock icon, or have a new icon badge appear, the screen will briefly flash instead. The screen flash alert is silent but offers unmistakable feedback that an alert has occurred, and can be used in conjunction with the standard alert sounds too.
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Ever wanted to create a reminder on the iPhone that is on a unique repeating interval? Maybe of alternating days, like a reminder every other day, or a reminder every 3 days? Oddly, this option isn’t available natively in the Calendar or Reminders apps of iOS, but these custom repeat reminder options do exist on the iPhone and iPad, you just have to use Siri to create them.

Like almost everything with Siri, it’s actually quite easy to do, and once these custom reminders have been created they will sync across to your other iCloud equipped devices to their Calendars and Reminders just as you’d expect.

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Having been inundated with spam text messages and SMS lately on my iPhone, I went looking for a solution to put an end to it all. Though it’s not as simple as it should be, there is a way to block virtually all spam texts from ever reaching your phone, and it actually works. To do so we’ll have to go through the respective cellular carrier you use, but to understand why this proposed solution it’s helpful to understand the problem a bit more.

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A very unique and amusing way to customize the bash prompt appearance is to add one of Mac OS X’s Emoji icons to transform the appearance of the prompt itself.

This isn’t going to be the most practical tweak in the world on it’s own, but it is entertaining and because it’s using traditional methods of customizing the bash prompt you can make it as useful or useless as you want.

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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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