If you’re accustomed to using Slack and you find the :emoji search and shortcut tool from Slack to be convenient, you’ll really appreciate Rocket for Mac.

Rocket is a fun Mac app that brings the Slack implementation of Emoji insertion to macOS, where simply typing colon, emoji name, return, prints out the emoji.

For example, typing :thumbs up and hitting return will immediately insert the Thumbs Up emoji. Or typing :heart return will immediately insert a heart Emoji.

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Got a red dot on the screen of your Apple Watch? Wondering what the red dot is at the top of the Apple Watch screen?

You’re certainly not alone, as many Apple Watch users are wondering what the red dot means, and perhaps how they can get rid of it on their device.

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Want to unpair your Apple Watch from your iPhone for whatever reason? Maybe you want to pair it do a different iPhone, or unpair it for troubleshooting purposes?

If you are facing any sort of connectivity issues with your Apple Watch, perhaps it’s getting randomly disconnected from your paired iPhone even when it’s nearby, for example, you may find that unpairing the Apple Watch and then pairing it again can be helpful. Especially if the issue persists even after rebooting your devices.

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Like trivia? Love Siri? You’re in luck, because Siri can play True or False trivia games, right on your device. You’ll get 5 random questions on all sorts of subjects that you can answer true or false to.

Like any good digital April Fools Prank (or Siri experience), the first few efforts to play True or False with Siri failed with error messages. But as usual with Siri, repetition and persistence pays off, and on the third request the True or False trivia game began as expected.

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Want a stupid, goofy, harmless tech prank to play on someone this April Fools? Set the all new Windows Black Screen of Death (BSOD) error screen as the screen saver on their computer!

This trick works for both Mac and Windows, and it’s arguably even more funny on the Mac since, well, the Mac isn’t likely to be running Windows, thereby giving the unsuspecting target a pause – did they enter an alternate dimension where all Macs run Windows? Nope, it’s just April Fools.

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Apple has released iOS 15.4.1 and iPadOS 15.4.1 for iPhone and iPad, the update addresses an issue that was causing battery drain for some users, so if you’ve felt like your battery life has not been as great recently, you may want to install the update sooner than later. Some other small bug fixes and security improvements are also included in 15.4.1, making the update recommended for all iPhone and iPad users.

Additionally, Apple released macOS Monterey 12.3.1 for Mac to address an issue where Bluetooth devices and game controllers were disconnecting from the Mac.

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Apple has released macOS Monterey 12.3.1 for Mac users running the Monterey operating system. The update addresses an issue where Bluetooth devices and game controllers were disconnecting from the Mac. Additionally, a display issue for Mac mini was also resolved, and there are security patches in the 12.3.1 update.

Separately, Apple released iOS 15.4.1 to address a battery draining issue for iPhone users, along with iPadOS 15.4.1 for iPad, watchOS 8.5.1 for Apple Watch, and tvOS 15.4.1 for Apple TV.

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Want to quickly zoom into a webpage or document? If you use a Mac with a trackpad or Magic Mouse, you can use a super easy tap gesture trick to zoom in and zoom out of web pages and documents.

This is super useful if you want to get a closer look at something, perhaps to see details of a picture, or some small text, a phone number, or anything else you want to get a closer look at.

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If you are a Mac laptop user and you spend a lot of time at the command line, you may appreciate knowing that you can enable Low Power Mode on a Mac laptop through a terminal command.

Enabling Low Power Mode through the command line on a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and MacBook is the same end result as if you toggled Low Power on through the macOS Battery preferences, except of course that you never have to leave the comfort of the terminal. You can also enable Low Power Mode through the Terminal, then turn it off from System Preferences, or vice versa.

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iPad users can spice up their Home Screen by adding widgets, which can display useful information and other data from apps and sources right on the Home Screen of your device. The latest versions of iPadOS allow users to add widgets to anywhere on the iPad Home Screen too, offering an excellent way to customize your Home Screen.

Home Screen widgets come from many of the built-in apps, as well as plenty of third party apps and widgets, and they can show all sorts of things like show the weather, display a calendar, give an overview of unread emails, show a clock or world clocks, display sports scores, show crypto prices, see brokerage balances, show a gallery of photos, see devices and people with Find My, show RSS feeds, and so much more.

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The Notes app on iPhone and iPad is super useful, allowing you to jot down information quickly for all sorts of purposes.

There are various ways to create a new note in the Notes app on iOS and iPadOS, some of them are quite fast and might be new to you, so if you’re an avid Notes app user, take a look and see some handy ways to make new notes on iPhone or iPad.

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If you have attempted to use nano at the command line on MacOS recently, you may have noticed that the pico text editor is launched instead, via a symlink for /usr/bin/nano to pico. This is because the latest versions of MacOS remove the nano text editor from the command line for whatever reason, and instead have replaced nano with pico.

If you prefer to use the nano text editor, you can get nano back in the command line by installing it manually yourself.

The simplest way to install the nano text editor on MacOS is to use Homebrew.

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Got an Apple Watch that is turned off and you want it to turn on, or perhaps you found an Apple Watch that is off and you want to turn it on to help return it to its owner?

Turning on the Apple Watch is super easy but if you’ve new to the device you may be unfamiliar with the process.

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All Mac computers need an administrator account to be able to function properly and perform certain tasks, ranging from installing certain software, to changing some system preferences. A variety of situations can arise causing a Mac to lose an administrator account, often if a user attempted to add a new admin account or new user account to the Mac, or rename an existing users account.

Whatever the case, if the Mac does not have an administrator account available, here’s how you can add an admin account to macOS in macOS Monterey, Big Sur, and earlier.

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Ever wanted to blur your background while on a FaceTime call? Maybe it’s a busy room or a messy kitchen behind you. Fortunately, you can use the same Portrait mode you use for your selfies, right on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

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Do you make use of the Reading List feature in Safari to save web pages for later? In that case, you may want to clear the list every now and then once you’ve read them. It’s kind of similar to why anyone would want to clear their browsing cache and history once in a while.

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If you use the Notes app frequently on the Mac to jot down information and store important data, you’ll be happy to know that the excellent Quick Notes feature has a super simple and near instantaneous keyboard shortcut to go along with it.

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If you have recently installed MacOS Monterey and regret doing so for whatever reason, perhaps incompatibility with some critical applications, general instability, or experiencing some other problems with MacOS Monterey that make it unworkable for you, you may be interested in downgrading from MacOS Monterey back to macOS Big Sur, or whatever the prior macOS release was.

Downgrading macOS Monterey involves erasing the Mac, reinstalling macOS, and then using Time Machine to restore the data, and that is the method we will cover here. The process is a bit different on Intel Macs versus Apple Silicon Macs.

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