One way to customize your Mac beyond simply the desktop wallpaper background picture is to customize your lock screen wallpaper, which is what shows up when you either log out and go to log back into the Mac, wake from screen saver, or restart a Mac.

You may have noticed by now that when you change your desktop wallpaper on the Mac, the login screen wallpaper changes automatically to reflect that wallpaper too. Some users may be thrilled with that level of customization alone, but it turns out you can actually set these as two different images if you’d like to.

The procedure to change the login screen wallpaper is different in MacOS Sonoma & Ventura, so we’re going to cover how you can customize your Mac login screen background image in Ventura 13 and newer.

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Did you know the HomePod Mini can tell you the indoor temperature and humidity level, of where ever the HomePod Mini is located?

The HomePod Mini recently received a software update that enabled two built in sensors on the device that were previously dormant; indoor temperature, and indoor humidity level. This is completely different from getting the weather of your general location with Siri on HomePod, because instead it gives you the exact temperature of where the HomePod itself is located.

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Tax season is nearly everyone’s favorite time of year, and who doesn’t love doing taxes with software from a super friendly company like Intuit TurboTax that obviously wants to help you do taxes on your own?

If you’re a Mac user running MacOS Ventura, you will be pleased to know that TurboTax 2022 does indeed work in MacOS Ventura.

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One of the handier features available on iOS and iPadOS allows scanning documents into the Notes app on iPhone and iPad. But rather than opening the Notes app and then initiating the document scanning process, you can scan documents even faster by using a handy trick that relies on long-pressing the Notes app icon itself.

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Have you ever deleted a message on iPhone and decided you want that deleted message back? If you have deleted messages that you’d like to retrieve, you’ll find the latest versions of iOS and iPadOS make recovering deleted text messages to be super easy on both iPhone and iPad.

As long as the deleted messages are within 30 days old, you’ll be able to find them on the iPhone or iPad to restore those deleted messages and read them again. This works to restore all messages on iPhone, whether they’re iMessages, text messages, media, photos, videos, or otherwise, as long as the message is within the Messages app on iPhone, or iPad.

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The iPhone camera offers a much higher resolution camera experience than the built-in cameras on Macs, so if you’re a frequent Zoom meeting attendee or host, you may appreciate using the iPhone camera instead of the funky camera in most Macs.

Let’s take a look at how easy it is to use your iPhone camera as the Zoom video camera on your Mac.

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Stage Manager is an alternative multitasking interface available for the Mac that allows you to juggle between active apps in a different way. It’s a bit more minimalist because Stage Manager defaults to hiding your desktop, and it only shows up to four apps at once, allowing you to focus on what you’re working on. Recently used apps appear on the left side of the screen for quick app switching, allowing you to flip back and forth between recently used apps with ease.

Stage Manager for Mac is interesting and worth experimenting with to determine if it is right for you and your workflow, so if you’re running MacOS Ventura 13 or newer, read on to learn how to turn on Stage Manager on the Mac, and how you can use it. And of course we’ll show you how you can disable Stage Manager on Mac too.

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If you’re an advanced Mac user and you’d like to easily see all running processes and which files, directories, sockets, and pipes are open by those processes, the free Sloth tool may be useful to you.

The Sloth app is basically a GUI front-end to lsof, a powerful command line tool that allows you to see what apps and processes are interacting with specific files, using the internet, have open network connections, and much more. Rather than issue a bunch of lsof commands with various flags, the Sloth app lets you adjust toggles within the GUI to reveal all sorts of information relating to process/apps and their usage of things within the system.

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Have a video on iPhone you want to play repeatedly in a loop? There are a few ways to do this, but we’ll focus on the simplest method here, which involves looping a single video using a trick in the Photos app. This will work to loop any video that is either on your iPhone or saved to your iPhone and accessible in the Photos app.

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Want a super simple internet browser for gemini, gopher, finger, and of course http and https? Kristall is a fun little app that strips away css, JS, and graphics on websites, leaving you with a pure text experience. It does support styles with HTML, gemini, and markdown, however, which makes it perhaps more usable than you may initially expect, kind of like a beefier lynx command line browser.

Kristall is kind of a fun browser for playing around, but it does have some valid uses too, like for testing websites for accessibility (if a site doesn’t work at all without CSS/JS… that’s not great), or for reading the web in ultra-low bandwidth situations. Or even if you’re just having a bit of fun and goofing off, it’s a fun free utility you can grab from the developers site, or via the projects github page. Whether or not it’s practical for your usage is up to you to decide, but not every fun tool or utility needs to be practical does it?

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Do you have an older Mac that is not able to run MacOS Ventura, but that you’d like to run MacOS Ventura on? You may be able to accomplish that through the help of a third party tool called OpenCore.

While the official list of Macs compatible with MacOS Ventura is fairly limited and requiring a Mac built from 2017 onward, many earlier Macs still have plenty of hardware power and life left in them. OpenCore allows you to install MacOS Ventura on unsupported Mac models, offering a way to run the latest system software versions on Mac computers that Apple has decided to no longer support.

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Apple has released the first beta versions of MacOS Ventura 13.3, iOS 16.4, and iPadOS 16.4.

The beta builds are available now for developers and are typically soon released for public beta testers as well.

iOS 16.4, iPadOS 16.4, and macOS Ventura 13.3 betas all include new Emoji icons like a donkey, hair pick, jellyfish, and moose head. Presumably the releases will also include bug fixes, feature refinements, and perhaps introduce a new feature or change or two.

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Apple has released MacOS Big Sur 11.7.4 with bug fixes for Mac users who are continuing to run the MacOS Big Sur operating system. MacOS Big Sur 11.7.4 fixes an issue with Safari where favorite icons would not load, and apparently also includes some security updates.

No concurrent update is available for MacOS Monterey users, however MacOS Ventura 13.2.1 is available for Ventura users.

Additionally, Safari 16.3 is available for both MacOS Big Sur and MacOS Monterey.

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The Mail app in MacOS now supports the ability to schedule the sending of emails. Scheduling email is fantastic for so many obvious reasons, for both work and personal purposes, and for people like myself who forget important days like anniversaries and birthdays.

You will need to have Mail app in macOS Ventura 13.0 or later to have this feature available, and for the email scheduling to work properly the Mac must be on and connected to the internet at whatever time the email is scheduled for. For example, if you schedule an email to send next Thursday at 7 PM, the Mac would need to be powered on and online then for this feature to work as intended.

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Have you ever wished the keyboard brightness adjustment keys on a Mac could control the brightness of your external displays? Ever wanted to change the brightness on a secondary display, right from your Mac?

For users with multi-monitor setups, controlling brightness on multiple screens can be a chore when you have to manually fiddle with physical buttons on the external displays.

Fortunately with the help of a free third party utility called MonitorControl, you can easily set and adjust the display brightness of your external screens with the same brightness control keys (F1 & F2) on a Mac keyboard or Touch Bar. You can even sync every displays brightness together to easily make changes to all screens brightness at the same time.

This is a fantastic utility for all Mac users who use external third party displays, particularly if you find yourself working at night or in dimmer lighting, and you want to easily adjust the brightness of your external screens.

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As just about any Microsoft Word user knows, often you will create a Word document that ends up containing unwanted blank pages, usually at the end of the document, and these wind up getting printed or included in Word-to-PDF files unnecessarily. You may encounter this with any Word document creation, or even converted Pages docs to Word files. Additionally, sometimes you will be editing a word document that has a page you no longer want attached or included in your word doc, and you’d want to delete that page.

Whatever the situation, you may want to delete a page from a Word document, and that’s exactly what we’ll show you how to do on Microsoft Word for both Mac and Windows PC.

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Apple has released macOS Ventura 13.2.1 as a software update for Mac users running the Ventura operating system. The update is said to include bug fixes and security updates, and is therefore recommended to install for all eligible Mac users.

Separately, Apple released iOS 16.3.1 for iPhone, iPadOS 16.3.1 for iPad, along with updates to HomePod, Apple TV, and WatchOS. Mac users running MacOS Monterey or Big Sur will find an update to Safari available instead.

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Apple has released iOS 16.3.1 and iPadOS 16.3.1 for iPhone and iPad, respectively. The update includes bug fixes and security enhancements, and is therefore recommended for all eligible users to download onto their devices.

Additionally, Apple has released software updates for MacOS Ventura 13.2.1, watchOS 9.3.1, HomePodOS 16.3.2, tvOS 16.3.2, and Safari updates for Big Sur and Monterey Mac users.

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