From time to time, the iPhone Home button can become less responsive to clicks, and pressing the button will either result in a delay, lag, or sometimes complete unresponsiveness requiring multiple clicks. While this could be symptomatic of a hardware issue caused by moisture damage or dropping the phone, sometimes you can fix the response … Read More
The recently released iPhone 4S specific build of iOS 5.0.1 resolves an ongoing SIM card issue that was effecting some users. The issue would cause some iPhone 4S’s to not recognize a SIM card, with the iPhone reporting a “No SIM Card Installed” or “Invalid SIM” error message, in addition to the phone not connecting … Read More
If your iPhone Wi-Fi connection seems inexplicably slow, particularly when having moved from one wireless network to another, try manually setting custom DNS servers. This speeds up the response time and your wireless connectivity in general.
Completely disabling and reenabling Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mavericks can be done with the help of the Terminal. The following command unloads the Spotlight mds agent from launchd, thereby preventing the daemon from running or indexing any drives entirely. Open up the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) … Read More
Although you can set scrollbars to always display in windows, there is no option to show the actual scrollbar arrows anymore in Mac OS X. A simple workaround to get used to this is to start using the keyboards up and down arrow keys instead:
I’ve gotten in the habit of immediately putting my MacBook Air to sleep by shutting the lid, by far the easiest method if you’re on the go. Typically this works without a hitch, but today the Air didn’t sleep when shut. Because the MacBook Air has no moving hard drive or sleep light, I didn’t … Read More
Forgetting a user account password can be a major frustration for Mac users, but fortunately there are a some simple and secure ways to recover and reset a lost password on any Mac. One of the best ways to handle this situation and reset a lost password is to use an Apple ID, which allows … Read More
If you’re recording video chat or just troubleshooting problems with iChat, knowing the frame rate and other video statistics can be helpful information. From the Video menu, pull down to “Connection Doctor”, then select the “Statistics” option from the pull-down menu to see the window shown up top. The group under “Local” is your own … Read More
Traveling abroad can quickly become frustrating when you attempt a search on Google.com and discover you are redirected to the local countries variant of Google, with the local language and all. This language redirect can happen when using a VPN or proxy as well. While this is convenient for things like local search and Maps, … Read More
If you signed up for iTunes Match and you’re seeing some peculiar icons in your music library alongside track names, don’t miss this chart put together by Apple that explains what each icon means, helping you troubleshoot the problem. The icons include: Cloud with a slash through it – ineligible for iTunes Match X’ed out … Read More
After you’ve made the transition to iCloud from MobileMe, the option to remove the old and now obsolete MobileMe menu bar icon disappears. It’s easy to get rid of though, as Tony R shows us in this tip he sent in: Hold down the Command key and click and hold on the old MobileMe icon, … Read More
In modern versions of Mac OS X, repairing permissions from the Disk Utility app doesn’t repair the users file permissions, oddly this has to be done separately on a per-user basis. If you’re running into problems with Spotlight not finding documents or folders, or if you’re having other issues that can usually be fixed with … Read More
If your iPad or iPhone is running slow after updating to iOS 5 you’re not alone, for many the update has made their device feel sluggish, with taps taking longer to register, stalls between swipes, and just a general noticeable decrease in performance. This seems to effect all iOS devices too, indicating it’s not necessarily … Read More
Mac System Preferences are grouped by categories by default, basically into Personal / iCloud, Software, and Hardware. For most of us this is intuitive and easy enough to navigate, but with modern versions of macOS they’ve been condensed down from more category separation, from Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, System, and Other, to just the … Read More
Over-the-Air (OTA) updates are one of the better refinements to iOS as part of the whole “post-PC” thing, they bring delta software updates directly to your devices, making for quicker updates and using less bandwidth (a delta update means only the differences between the iOS versions are sent, preventing a much larger package from being … Read More
We’ve published a variety of fixes for wireless connections dropping in Lion, and even a keepalive script that helps many users maintain a connection in some of the stubborn cases, but some Mac OS X Lion users continue to have problems with their internet connection failing. After diagnosing another MacBook with wireless stability problems post-Lion, … Read More
If you’re trying to update iOS to the latest version on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and you get an error in iTunes saying: The iOS Device “Device Name” could not be updated. This device isn’t eligible for the requested build. You’re most likely encountering one the following problems: either you are using an … Read More
If you have a newer MacBook Air you should pay attention. Some of the MacBook Airs are shipping with Samsung displays, and some are shipping with LG displays, both are quality displays, but the LG’s default color profile is lighter and a bit flat. Most users probably won’t notice this, but if you sit a … Read More
