Author: Paul Horowitz

Large empty files are often used for testing purposes during disk access tests, development, QA, zeroing out data, and scripting. Though it’s certainly not applicable to most users, it’s easy enough to do that anyone can try it out even if you don’t have a specific need. We’ll cover three ways to quickly generate files … Read More

Need to quickly free up some processing power? You can do that easily by temporarily pausing and then later resuming any active process or application in Mac OS X. Technically, this is actually ‘stopping’ and ‘continuing’ a process, but a stop is not to be confused with the more aggressive killing or force quitting applications … Read More

If you need to create an encrypted PDF with password protection, forget about buying Adobe Acrobat or other expensive software, because Mac OS X has you covered with built-in tools. Yes, the Mac can natively create secure password protected PDF documents, meaning it’s free, and it’s also impressively easy to do. The great thing about … Read More

Services and the service menu appears at the bottom of the contextual menu actions when you right-click (or control+click) any item in the Mac OS X Finder. These typically perform various actions, ranging from launching the selected file or folder in a specific app, to conversions that you’ve created yourself through Automator actions. Here is … Read More

The next time you need a new randomly generated strong password, pull out an iPhone and ask Siri. Yes, the voice assistant that lives in iOS. You won’t find this trick in Siri’s own listing of commands list, but it’s a piece of cake to use and quite powerful. There are tons of examples where … Read More

The easiest way to unmount a drive in OS X is to either just drag a volume into the Trash, use the eject keys, disconnect the drive, or use one of the force eject methods. Along the same lines, if you want to remount a drive you can usually just physically unplug the drive and … Read More

If you’ve ever run into a .zip file on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you will probably have discovered it’s a bit of a dead-end initially, because by default there isn’t much you can do with zips or any other archive format. That doesn’t mean you can’t open ZIP files though, and in fact … Read More

Nearly every Android smartphone can share it’s cellular data connections and turn itself into an internet hotspot, an infinitely valuable feature that lets you connect Macs, PC’s, iPad, or Nexus tablets get online through the cell connection. Of course the iPhone has this ability too, but we’re going to focus on getting this feature working … Read More

The iPhone is easily one of the best gadgets ever made, but it’s not perfect, and there are a few things that are just kind of annoying. We’re aiming to address a few of those frustrations here, with these five fairly minor iPhone tips that can have a big impact, offering nice improvements to usability … Read More

Running out of disk space is never fun, and drive space comes at a premium for those of us with smaller SSD drives like the MacBook Air with a 64GB or 128GB drive. These tricks are fairly advanced and thus aimed at the pro segment of SSD users who are comfortable modifying system functions and … Read More

Emails opened in Mail app for iOS default to loading all images attached to that message. This makes emails format and arrange themselves as the sender intended, often with nice little header graphics and signature files, but it has a potentially serious downside: increased bandwidth usage. On a wi-fi connection that bandwidth usage hardly matters, … Read More

Ever wished you could turn off the phone call portion of your iPhone, while still retaining the ability to use data, access the internet, even send iMessages? You can do that with a funky workaround we’ll cover here, and it’s an amazing solution if you’re looking for some peace and quiet but in a situation … Read More

Apple has long had a love affair with including incredible ocean and wave imagery into their product shots. They’ve been doing it for years, with some stunning wave and surf photography featured prominently on the screens of Macs, whether it’s from the old PowerBook days, to even right now on Apple.com with the iMac, Retina … Read More

Two new updates are available for Mac users that aim to increase security and control over how the Java web plugin runs in the Safari web browser. Named as Java for OS X 2013-003 and Safari 6.0.4 (or Safari 5.1.9 for older versions of OS X), the updates are available right now through Software Update … 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

If you’ve ever wished you could schedule the opening of a specific file, or set an application to launch on a specific date, either on a one off basis or on a recurring scheduled event, you can actually do both right in Mac OS X with the help of none other than the default Calendar … Read More