News

Use Guided Access to Let Kids and Others Use Your iPhone Temporarily

Posted by Laurie Berg on

Use Guided Access to Let Kids and Others Use Your iPhone Temporarily

  Let’s get one thing straight. You know that you should never, ever share your iPhone or iPad passcode with anyone you don’t trust implicitly, like a spouse or adult child, right? That’s because, with your iOS passcode, someone could change your Apple ID password, and if you use iCloud for email, completely steal or otherwise abuse your online identity. (Scared? Good. If you’ve given anyone your passcode, go change it right now. We’ll wait.) So if sharing your passcode is such a terrible idea, how do you let someone else use your iPhone or iPad temporarily? Perhaps you want...

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How to Find the Snaps You Want in the Mac’s Photos App

Posted by Laurie Berg on

How to Find the Snaps You Want in the Mac’s Photos App

Digital cameras have been around long enough that people have stopped making snarky comments about how hard it is to find anything in a shoebox filled with hundreds of unorganized photos. But given the tens of thousands of photos many of us now have, it’s hard to be smug about the ease of finding any given image. Luckily, Apple has provided us with numerous tools in the Photos app to help. Some of these organization systems you have to set up and maintain, but others work silently for you in the background. Let’s start with the automatic methods.​ DateIt’s impossible...

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Exercise (Some) Control over How Much Your Location Is Tracked

Posted by Laurie Berg on

Exercise (Some) Control over How Much Your Location Is Tracked

​The New York Times recently published a bombshell article revealing just how completely our every movement is tracked by companies in the business of selling our locations to advertisers, marketers, and others. Anonymous sources provided the Times with a dataset from a single location-data company that contained 50 billion pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans over several months in 2016 and 2017. This data enabled the Times reporters to track numerous people in positions of power, including military officials, law-enforcement officers, and high-powered lawyers. They were able to watch as people visited the Playboy Mansion, some...

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Use Your Apple Watch to Unlock Your Mac, and Apps in Catalina

Posted by Laurie Berg on

Use Your Apple Watch to Unlock Your Mac, and Apps in Catalina

If you’ve resisted requiring a password on your Mac after it wakes up or comes out of the screen saver because it’s too much work to enter repeatedly, an Apple Watch can make authentication much easier. In previous versions of macOS, just wearing an unlocked Apple Watch is enough to enter your Mac’s password; in Catalina, the Apple Watch can also enter your password when prompted by apps. First, make sure your Apple Watch has a passcode (in Watch > Passcode), is on your wrist, and is unlocked. Then, in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General, select “Use...

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AirDrop Reception Not Working? Here’s the Likely Fix

Posted by Laurie Berg on

AirDrop Reception Not Working? Here’s the Likely Fix

AirDrop has become a fast and reliable way to transfer data from one iPhone to another that’s nearby. Just tap the share icon and in iOS 13’s activity view, either tap an AirDrop shortcut in the top row or tap AirDrop in the second row and select choose a person or device in the subsequent AirDrop screen. But what if your iPhone doesn’t appear for the person who wants to share with you? Assuming Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are both on, the fix is generally to go to Settings > General > AirDrop and select Everyone. If you’re concerned about unwanted...

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