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How to Back Up Your iPhone Contacts

Jun 14, 2012 - 24 Comments
backing up iPhone contacts

For many of us, our contacts list are the most important part of our iPhones and what we care most about backing up. It’s easy to re-download apps and adjust settings, but it can be very difficult to rebuild a large contact list of names, email addresses, and phone numbers if you lose it. For … Read More

Fix for Kernel Panics and Crashing After Thunderbolt Software Update 1.2

Jun 12, 2012 - 26 Comments
Thunderbolt update kernel panic

Some of you may have experienced the unfortunate kernel panic on boot problem that is occurring on certain Macs after they’ve installed recent software updates. If you haven’t installed the “Thunderbolt Software Update 1.2” yet it’s best to avoid it completely until a fix comes from Apple. If it’s too late and you’re experiencing crashes … Read More

Mac Screen Looking Blurry? Optimize & Troubleshoot Font Smoothing in Mac OS X

Jun 9, 2012 - 6 Comments
Incorrect screen resolution looks fuzzy

If you think a Mac display looks fuzzy or blurry there are a few common solutions to check into before assuming the screen itself has a problem. Likewise, if your screen text just doesn’t look right it may be due to a few settings within Mac OS X. With that in mind here are a … Read More

Redownload & Reinstall Any iOS App on iPhone or iPad

Jun 7, 2012 - 8 Comments
List Purchased Apps in iOS for redownloading

You can redownload and reinstall any previously purchased apps that have since been deleted from an iOS device, even if you deleted them a long time ago or never even installed them in the first place. As long as the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is using the same Apple ID where the original app … Read More

14 Tricks & Tweaks to Speed Up Photoshop CS6 Performance

Jun 5, 2012 - 25 Comments
Speed Up Photoshop CS6

Photoshop CS6 is arguably the best release of the image manipulation app from Adobe in a very long time. It’s feature packed and generally quite fast, but not everyone is pleased with it’s performance on some hardware. With that in mind we’ve compiled a list of tweaks, adjustments, and tricks to speed up Photoshop. Some … Read More

iPhone or iPad Ran Out of Storage Space? Here’s How to Make Space Available Quickly

Jun 2, 2012 - 35 Comments
Find large apps to delete and free up space

You’ve been downloading tons of apps, books, music, and movies galore, and when you go to download the latest great app you find yourself unable to, confronted with a “Cannot Download – There is not enough available storage” message. What are you supposed to do when your iPhone, iPad, or iPod runs out of disk … Read More

Improve Diablo 3 Performance in Mac OS X

Jun 1, 2012 - 13 Comments
Improve Diablo 3 Performance in Mac OS X

Diablo 3 system requirements are fairly lenient but as many Mac users have discovered, performance on some computers just isn’t that great. Even some of the newest Macs with the best GPU’s are experiencing performance issues. The good news is that Blizzard is on the case and actively working on patches to address many of … Read More

Save High Resolution Images from Safari on iPad 3 Despite Downsampling

May 28, 2012 - Leave a Comment
iPad 3 Safari downsamples high resolution images but you can save high quality pictures anyway

Have you ever noticed that some very high resolution images are downsampled when viewed on the iPad 3 in Safari? With certain image file types, high resolution pictures that are larger than 1700×1400 or so will be shrunk down and not display at any greater resolution within Safari, not even sizing up to the native … Read More

Check Hard Drive Health of a Mac with Disk Utility

May 24, 2012 - 27 Comments
Check Hard Drive health of a Mac with OS X Disk Utility

It’s a good idea to check the hard drive health of a Mac as part of a periodic maintenance routine. Doing this is extremely easy with Disk Utility, and we’ll cover exactly how to verify hard disks, how to repair them, and what to do if you encounter any issues or errors in the process. … Read More

Not Enough Storage for iCloud Backup from iOS? Here Are 2 Solutions

May 21, 2012 - 17 Comments
Not Enough Storage message from iCloud backup

Running out of iCloud backup capacity happens quick whether you have a single iPhone or a handful of iOS devices. You’ll know this has happened because you get a friendly popup informing you of “Not Enough Storage” and that the automatic backup can not occur as a result. So what to do? There’s really two … Read More

Consultant’s Canary is the Ultimate Troubleshooting Aid for Mac OS X

May 21, 2012 - 5 Comments
Consultants Canary for Mac OS X

Troubleshooting computer problems is never particularly fun, and with so many potential third party add-ons, plugins, extensions, scripts, and whatever else is buried into OS X, how are you supposed to find everything to help determine what’s causing an issue? You need Consultant’s Canary, because whether you’re troubleshooting your own Mac or someone else’s, it’s … Read More

How to Set Manual DHCP and Static IP Address on iPad or iPhone

May 19, 2012 - 19 Comments
Speed up iPhone networking with new DNS

Certain Wi-Fi networks require clients to use static IP addresses or manual DHCP information in order for a device to connect properly to that network. Adjusting the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to use a static IP address or manual DHCP settings is easy in iOS, here’s how you can do it with any version … Read More

Quick Fix for iOS 5.1.1 Battery Life Problems

May 17, 2012 - 32 Comments
iOS battery life

iOS updates can come with some unexpected surprises regarding battery life and iOS 5.1.1 isn’t much different. While there are a fair amount of reports of positive battery improvements not all of us were so lucky, the battery life on my iPad 3 absolutely tanked after updating to iOS 5.1.1. After rebooting several times and … Read More

Prevent Beachballs & Slow Downs in Mac OS X When External Hard Drive is Attached

May 14, 2012 - 21 Comments
Disable Sleep Hard disk when possible to prevent drive access slow downs

Many Mac users have an external hard disk for Time Machine backups or other media storage purposes, and if you leave it connected to the Mac all the time you’ve probably noticed an annoying side effect: the drive will spin down when it’s not in use, only to be spun up again unnecessarily at random … Read More

See What Files & Ports an Application is Using with Activity Monitor

May 5, 2012 - 2 Comments
See Open Files and Ports of a process with Activity Monitor

The OS X task management tool Activity Monitor includes an excellent and little known feature that lets you see precisely what files, ports, and IP’s are being interacted with by any single process or application. Here is how to use it: Launch Activity Monitor, found in /Applications/Utilities/ Double-click on the process or application name you … Read More

Disable Automatic Syncing in iTunes When Connecting an iPhone, iPad, or iPod

May 1, 2012 - 16 Comments
Stop Auto Syncing in iTunes

Each time you connect an iPhone, iPad, or iPod to a computer, iTunes launches and immediately begins to automatically sync all content between the iOS device and the connected computer. If you’re annoyed with the auto-syncing aspect of iTunes, or you just want to disable it on an auxiliary Mac or Windows computer, here is … Read More

4 Tips to Speed Up Reboot & Start Up Time in Mac OS X

Apr 25, 2012 - 16 Comments
Disable App and Window Resume to boot faster

Does your Mac feel like it takes forever to boot up when you turn it on? Does your Mac seemingly take forever to reboot? If your Mac is feeling sluggish when booting or starting up Mac OS X it’s probably a result of a few things. This walkthrough will address how to speed up reboot … Read More

How to Remove OS X Mountain Lion (or Any Other Mac OS X Boot Partition)

Apr 21, 2012 - 6 Comments
uninstall OS X Mountain Lion

For those dual booting between OS X Mountain Lion and OS X Lion, or any other two versions of OS X for that matter, there comes a time when you inevitably want to remove one of the operating systems. For this walkthrough we’ll assume the boot partition you want to delete is one of the … Read More

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