Author: Paul Horowitz

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

Tor is a free anonymity network that aims to conceal a users location and browser usage from snoopers, in addition to allowing access to websites that are otherwise blocked or filtered out through firewalls. The official description of the Tor browser and network is described as follows: The Tor software protects you by bouncing your … Read More

An update to Google Maps for iOS has brought native support for the iPad, but perhaps the most useful feature of the new Google Maps app is the ability to cache maps for offline use on the iPhone. It’s really easy to use, so the next time you’re expecting to venture off into an area … Read More

Need to quickly get your external IP address from the command line for SSH or otherwise? No sweat, you can use either the curl command or dig to extract the information quickly from a variety of sources. We’ll focus on two different options that have proven to be reliable over time, the first is quite … Read More

The iPhone autocorrect feature is fairly aggressive with certain words and phrases. Though you can persistently cancel out the corrections to teach autocorrect what you actually meant to type, you still might find particularly colorful words are continuously autocorrected to much friendlier variations, often involving animals, which if you’re trying to sound a certain way … Read More

The iPad already has very impressive battery life and regularly lasts all day, but who wouldn’t want to have their iPad last even longer? With a group of simple tips, you can extend an iPads battery life even further and get the absolute most out of your tablets battery for as long as possible. These … Read More

Ever wondered what all those status icons and symbols mean that sit in the iPhone status bar, along the top of the screen? You’re certainly not alone, and while some of those little symbols make perfect sense, others can be a bit of a mystery even to longtime iPhone users. Sure, the obvious ones like … Read More

An unlocked iPhone means it can use any cellular network, so long as you have a compatible carrier SIM card. Due to this, unlocked iPhones are more valuable and highly desired for both local and international users, because it allows you to use any GSM carrier whether at home or abroad just by swapping out … Read More

Wondering what is in that zip file or archive you downloaded, but you don’t want to extract it to find out? Maybe you are hunting around in a see of archives for a specific file you zipped up a while ago, but you’re not quite sure which archive contains it? You can easily peer into … Read More

Setting up a dual-boot environment for OS X Mavericks and OS X 10.8 (or even 10.7 and 10.6 if you’re still running an older version of Mac OS X) is easy and allows for a fresh installation of Mavericks to test and develop with. Because the original OS X installation remains untouched, it’s also the … Read More

For those of us who use several different types of network connections to get online, you may want to take a moment to set the networking service priority in OS X. This insures that a Mac isn’t connecting through the wrong networking interface when multiple network services are available. For example, if you have a … Read More

The visual change between iOS 7 and iOS 6 is obviously significant, and this graphic does a great job of showing just how the iOS home screen has evolved over time with the iPhone. Covering versions 1.0 through 7.0 and a time period of 2007 to 2013, it gives an interesting look into how things … 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

The visually overhauled iOS 7 beta includes a handful of nice new default wallpapers, two of which are static (the left pink blue dots and galaxy image), and two are animated (the right two varieties of blue and purple vector bubbles). Obviously without iOS 7 you won’t be able to get the animated wallpapers, but … Read More

You’re probably aware that iPhone will automatically detect phone numbers in web pages, allowing you to tap directly on a phone number and choose to call that number, send it a message, add it to Contacts, or to copy it to the clipboard. The tap-to-dial function is easily the quickest way to call a number … Read More

iOS 7 brings a significant user interface overhaul to Apple’s mobile devices, and though it’s best to be experienced and used first hand, screen shots can do a fair job of demonstrating the differences. If you’re not a developer and can’t use the beta releases yourself, then comparing iOS 7 to iOS 6 side-by-side can … Read More