In an unusual and fairly rare situation, the Mac cursor can randomly disappear from OS X. More accurately, the cursor itself becomes invisible, because you can still click around on the screen but without being able to see what the mouse or trackpad is focused on. This seems to happen out of the blue, and … Read More
Every once in a while an iOS device or app will get stuck in the wrong orientation, unresponsive to rotating the device and it either stays in portrait or horizontal mode, despite every effort to rotate the device any which direction. Though this seems to happen more often on the iPad than the iPhone or … Read More
iOS is obviously going in the direction of not needing iTunes at all, but in the meantime you still need to sync an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to copy over music libraries, videos, media, perform local backups, apps, and more. Typically iTunes will sync with an iOS device without incident, but sometimes things go … Read More
Though most iPhone owners know what which model they have, not everyone does, and sometimes you’ll come across an iPhone and have no idea what it is. This is usually because some iPhone models share the same enclosure, and because of that it can be very hard to differentiate them just by a first glance. … Read More
Disk Utility usually works trouble-free, but a frustrating “Couldn’t Unmount Disk” error can halt whatever the attempted task is right in its tracks. This can happen during partitioning, disk verification and repair, and even during formatting, and there’s usually little to no additional information provided as to how to resolve the problem or even what … Read More
Many of us have found a situation where an iPhone just won’t turn on. Pressing the power button causes literally nothing to happen, the iPhone just displays a black screen. Fortunately, this is usually just a simple problem to resolve, because either iOS has suffered an unusually severe crash and needs the device to be … Read More
Ever had your iPhone get stuck in Headphone mode? The symptoms are fairly obvious; you go to change the volume level and the little volume indicator says “ringer (headphones)” like shown below, and no audio our sound works through the normal speaker output.
Just about every iPhone user loves the iPhone, but if there is one thing to complain about it’s almost always about the devices battery life, or rather, lack thereof. Nearly all who use their iPhone constantly will offer some variation of this complaint, and for many of us it’s the first iPhone that has to … Read More
If you’ve ever had a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro’s battery disappear at random it can be a disconcerting feeling. This is often accompanied with the battery menu having an “X” through it and saying “No Batteries Available”, a very sluggish Mac, and even after a reboot or not the Mac will often have fans … Read More
Bluetooth devices are usually extremely reliable, but every once in a while something can start acting up and either lose it’s connection with the Mac completely, or suddenly develop a flaky connection. With something like the Apple Wireless Keyboard, a Magic Trackpad, or a Magic Mouse, it’s fairly obvious when something is going wrong; clicks … Read More
The iPad and iPhone don’t freeze or crash often, but when they do it can be an epic freeze-up, where the device can either get stuck in an app or, worse, it gets frozen on the dreaded iOS “spinning wheel of death”, the little wait cursor that never goes away. Left on it’s own in … Read More
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 … Read More
One of the best general iOS features is wifi syncing, which, just as the name implies, allows you to sync content, data, pictures, music, whatever, to and from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and a computer running iTunes, without ever connecting the device with a USB cable. Of course, this feature is only useful … Read More
Ever had a zip file turn into a cpgz file? This is an infrequent problem, but here’s what happens; When the .zip file is attempted to be unzipped, it extracts into a .cpgz file, which then can also be launched in Archive Utility, only to then turn back into a .zip file, which then turns … Read More
DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, and is commonly used to configure network devices so they can communicate with one another. Typically you’ll have a DHCP server (like a wireless router), and client machines on the local network (like a Mac, iPhone, PC, etc) that pull a dynamically assigned local IP address from that … Read More
Archive Utility is the little system app that launches anytime an archive needs to be dealt with by OS X, usually it launches itself, extracts a zip, sit, tar, gz, or whatever other archive file, then quits on it’s own. Lately there’s been widespread reports of weird problems with Archive Utility though, where a zip … Read More
Surely you have noticed the default behavior for connecting any iOS device to a Mac is that either iTunes or iPhoto launches itself automatically. This happens when any iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is connected to a computer, and which app opens depends on if the other one is already opened, or if one has … Read More
If your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air feels slow to wake from sleep after it’s been sleeping for a while, there may be a fairly simple cause: standby mode. Standby mode allows a Mac to potentially have up to 30 days of ‘standby’ time, meaning it can sit in a prolonged sleep state for that … Read More
