The modern versions of Facebook app for iOS make various sound effects when interface elements are interacted with in the app, from liking something to leaving comments and refreshing the feed. The little popping and squishing sounds have annoyed some people apparently that use Facebook, but some of our readers have found that you can … Read More
Most Mac users know what type of Mac they have, whether it’s a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, or whatever, and many know the model year of their computer too, but typically much less known is the model identifier number for a given Mac. Model identifiers are generally in the format of ModelNameModelNumber,Revision, for example, … Read More
Looking for a date this Valentines Day of the artificial intelligence variety? Maybe hoping for that “Her” experience? Well your iPhone may provide you some form of company, but don’t turn to Siri, for much more than a laugh at least. Unless you want to get rejected, of course. Yup, among the many amusing things … Read More
The latest versions of iOS support an optional display mode that turns everything shown on the screen of an iPhone or iPad to black and white. Called Grayscale mode, the setting is mostly intended as an accessibility option, but it has other uses beyond that as well. This tutorial will show you how to turn … Read More
Rarely, when you plug an iPhone or iPad into a particular Lightning charger cable you’ll see a pop-up or lock screen message on the device that says something to the effect of “This cable is not certified and may not work reliably”. This usually prevents the lightning cable from charging the device as well. Though … Read More
A simple trick that can help manage iPhone battery life is to set the battery percentage remaining to be visible. This battery percentage indicator is off by default in iOS, and while that adds an element of simplicity to the status bar, the lonely battery icon isn’t particularly informative – to me, anyway. We’re going … Read More
Have you ever needed to flatten a directory structure, moving all file contents from a directories child folders into a single folder? While you can do this manually by moving around files and folders from the file system of Mac OS X or Linux, a faster option is to turn to the command line. Maybe … Read More
Now that the Continuity feature allows the Mac to receive incoming calls from your associated iPhone, in addition to standard FaceTime video and audio chat, you may want to take a moment to customize the ringtone that sounds when a call is coming to a particular Mac. This is particularly helpful with multiple-Mac environments with … Read More
Knowing what network an iPhone uses can be important for trying to repurpose an old device, buying a used iPhone, or simply to determine if a particular iPhone will work on a network of choice. While the iPhones top status bar will show the carrier name of an active cellular network, if the device isn’t … Read More
The Mac Notification Center gained widgets in OS X Yosemite, which are revealed when the Notification Center is opened and the “Today” view is chosen. This looks and functions a bit like Widgets in iOS, and these widgets range from World Clock, Calculator, Weather, Reminders, Calendar, Stocks, Social, and an to an iTunes widget, but … Read More
The Instant iPhone Wi-Fi Hotspot feature in Mac OS X is incredibly useful if your Mac is on the go or you need an alternate internet connection, but even if you’re not aiming to use the cellular internet sharing capability of iPhone there are some other handy uses for the feature, like checking two of … Read More
If you’re not happy with the usage of Helvetica Neue as a system font in OS X Yosemite, why not go completely ridiculous and replace the Mac system font with Comic Sans? Yes Comic Sans, somewhere high on the list of worst fonts ever, can now be the universal system font on Mac OS X. … Read More
Sometimes you need to enter a password into the terminal, usually for sudo or su commands, which lets users execute a command with super user privileges. This is fairly typical for allowing access to read or modify something that would otherwise not be possible with a standard user account. You’ll commonly see sudo prefixing another … Read More
TextEdit is a surprisingly handy Mac app that is mostly underutilized and under appreciated, and while it’s certainly not going to compete with the abilities of pro text editors like BBEdit and TextWrangler, it can function as a simple code editor in a pinch. One of the quintessential features of any good text editor is … Read More
Mac users can adjust the idle time to sleep their computers easily through the Energy Saver preference panel, but many advanced Mac OS X users may wish to turn to the command line to perform such a task. This allows for scripting, remote checking and changing idle sleep behavior through SSH, and you can also … Read More
If you have ever switched from an iPhone to an Android or Windows phone, either temporarily, out of necessity, or for testing purposes, you may have noticed that a new phone will sometimes not receive inbound messages that have been sent from other iPhone users. Well, you probably didn’t notice it because you didn’t get … Read More
Mac users who have multiple user accounts on a single machine may sometimes wish to hide a specific user account from appearing on the login screens of OS X. This is fairly common for systems administrators who want to hide an admin account that can be used for direct or remote troubleshooting, but it can … Read More
Mac users who are running the newest version of iTunes in OS X Yosemite can choose to enable an optional iTunes widget in Notification Center. Despite being the primary change to iTunes 12.1, the widget is not enabled or shown by default on any of the Macs I’ve updated, which is likely to be the … Read More
