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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Email signatures are appended to the bottom of emails sent when used, and if you routinely use the Gmail app on iPhone or iPad, or have it created an email signature for Gmail using the Gmail web client, by default it will carry over to your usage of the same Gmail account used on the Gmail app for iPhone or iPad. However, you may wish to have a custom Gmail signature for when using the Gmail app in iOS or iPadOS, perhaps indicating that you’re using a mobile device, kind of like the default iPhone email signature.

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Do you want to stop your Apple Watch from locking automatically every time you take it off the wrist? This can be easily done by disabling a feature called Wrist Detection on your Apple Watch. And of course if this is disabled on your watch, you can turn it back on.

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Do you want to add some songs that are locally stored on your Windows PC to your desktop iCloud Music Library? This could be music that you downloaded from the internet or just any other song you have that’s not available on Apple Music. You can get this done using iTunes.

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Are you seeing a constant spinning icon indicator on your Home Screen, next to the wi-fi, location, and battery icons in the upper right corner?

The spinning loading icon shows up when the iPhone or iPad is attempting to contact a remote server, or load data. It looks like a spinning wheel made up of little dashes, and when it has gone haywire it will rotate endlessly, never going away.

If you see the spinning wheel icon while you’re on the Home Screen of the iPhone or iPad, it is likely because something on the Home Screen is attempting to use the internet.

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The iPad Air 5 with an M1 chip is a pretty great new iPad and it comes with a collection of nice new wallpapers too, but who says you need to buy a new iPad just to enjoy the wallpaper?

You don’t. Instead, you can grab the full sized iPad Air 5 wallpapers right now, and use them on any device at all.

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Full screen mode on the Mac defaults to hiding the menu bar, and while you can swing your cursor to the top of the screen to reveal the menu bar, some Mac users may prefer to have the menu bar always visible when in full screen mode.

If you’d like to keep the menu bar always visible when in full screen mode of macOS, follow along to see you how to make the appropriate settings adjustment.

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Universal Control allows a single mouse and keyboard on a Mac to control additional Macs and iPads, simply by dragging the mouse cursor over to those screens or devices. It’s a fantastic feature for Mac users who have several Macs and an iPad or two, and it can really help propel productivity to a new level.

We’ll walk through which devices support Universal Control, how to enable it, and how to use the excellent feature on Mac and iPad.

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Wondering how you can check the health status of an SSD drive in your Mac? Thanks to a third party app called DriveDX, determining the health of a Mac SSD and other disk drives is easier than ever.

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Apple has released macOS Monterey 12.3 to Mac users running the Monterey operating system.

Notably, macOS Monterey 12.3 includes support for Universal Control, the hotly anticipated feature that allows a single mouse and keyboard to to control multiple Macs and iPads. To use Universal Control with macOS Monterey and iPad, all connected devices must be running macOS 12.3 or later, and iPadOS 15.4 or later. The feature is enabled by default.

MacOS Monterey 12.3 also includes other small refinements, dozens of new Emoji icons, and bug fixes, making it recommended for all Mac users running the macOS Monterey operating system. Note that macOS Monterey 12.3 removes Python 2 from macOS, so you’ll want to make Python 3 the default or find an alternative solution if you rely on python.

Separately, Apple released iPadOS 15.4 for iPad, iOS 15.4 for iPhone, tvOS 15.4 for Apple TV, and watchOS 8.5 for Apple Watch.

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