Rob LeFebvre - page 24

This week, we focus on four non-obvious yet essential tips and tricks for using that fancy new Apple Watch on your wrist. Rob plays a new Apple Watch game, calling Lifeline the best game he’s played on his wrist, while Leander takes a speedy trip around the block on Stromer’s amazing electric bike. Luke digs into an Apple patent for a magical new Apple TV remote, and Buster checks in on how the Apple Watch will likely prevent heart attacks in the future.

All that and much, much more in the weekly installment of Cult of Mac Magazine!

The default calendar view on Apple Watch is a list of the upcoming events for the current day. If you tap on the Today link in the upper left of the screen, you can see the whole month at a glance, which lets you tap on any day to see that day’s list of events.

But what if you want it to look less like a list and more like a calendar on your iPhone or Mac?

Luckily, there’s a simple way to do just that.

Let’s just leave aside the obvious Apple Maps jokes and focus on how cool this Etsy user’s Westeros map is.

It’s the continent where the war, sex and epic political conniving takes place in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, made to look like a modern map you might find on your iPhone or Mac.

How cool is that?

Rusty Griswold is all grown up in the upcoming reboot of classic comedy National Lampoon’s Vacation. If you’ve ever laughed out loud when someone says “prairie-doggin’,” you’ll love this new reboot just as much, what with it’s scatological and sexual humor.

Bonus: The new red-band trailer for the upcoming flick gives us a look at Thor’s Chris Hemsworth playing an Airbnb owner and showing off his six-pack abs (along with his other, less-family-friendly assets).

If you’ve got an extra $14,000 to $18,500 sitting around, you might consider grabbing yourself one of these bad boys from Japanese manufacturer ELP.

The ELP Laser Turntable promises the best in fidelity when playing your precious vinyl records because it uses a laser, not a needle, to decode the music that’s been cut into your LPs.

Notifications are the mainstay of Apple Watch (or any smartwatch, for that matter). Chances are you’ll get a ton of them, as most of the iPhone notifications will transfer over to your Apple Watch after you pair the two devices.

Typically, you swipe a notification left and then tap the X button when you want to dismiss a notification, or you tap through to the notification itself and then tap “Dismiss.”

But what happens when you have a slew of notifications and you’re just not interested in swipe-tapping them one at a time to go away?

CBS just landed Supergirl, the network’s first series pick up for the upcoming season.

This is, of course, rather historic, since the last decent female-led superhero show was 1975’s Wonder Woman, starring Lynda Carter. It’s even got a chance of being pretty good, as it’s coming from the same creators of successful DC properties The Flash and Arrow, both over on the CW Network.

The less said the better about Electro Woman and Dyna Girl or the more modern yet still awful Birds of Prey.

Messaging is one of the best use cases for Apple Watch – you get a message, you dictate a reply, you get on with your day.

Apple has included several pre-written responses for you to use when you’re just too busy to dictate a response (or don’t want to talk into your watch). They’re pretty awful, though, ranging from the terse (“OK”) to the fairly robotic (“Sorry, I can’t talk right now”). None of them really quite fit the way we talk, do they?

Happily, Apple lets you change these canned responses to better reflect your personality and style. Here’s how to do so.

How do you keep a jaded gamer engaged on the small-screened Apple Watch? Strand a young astronaut on an alien moon and ask that gamer to keep the doomed traveler alive.

That’s exactly what happens in Lifeline, which is simply the best game I’ve played on the Apple Watch so far.

Playing music on the Apple Watch is a lovely thing. You can control your iPhone’s Music app using the Apple Watch Music app, choosing playlists and adjusting volume on the fly.

You can even start apps like Spotify or Rdio on your iPhone, then use the Music Glance on your Apple Watch to forward, reverse, pause or play music from these streaming services.

Did you know, however, that you can also send music from your Apple Watch to your Apple TV or any AirPlay-enabled speaker?

Here’s how.

If you’re like us, you’ve been playing the crap out of the amazingly addictive online arena game, Vainglory, since it came out for the iPad and iPhone, ganking enemies from the safety of the bushes, releasing the Kraken, and pushing down the lane to smash the opposing team’s base crystal to win the game.

While the development team at Super Evil Megacorp has released updates in the past, they’ve just dropped the most major update yet: the introduction of a character skin system to customize the look of your heroes as they dash across the map, wreaking havoc and crushing the enemy team.

There are six new heroes with two tiers of customization out in the update today, with a ton more to come.

Here’s how it’s going to work.

16 hours to make, mere seconds to destroy this huge LEGO model of Darth Vader’s Super Star Destroyer from Return of the Jedi.

If there’s anything more symptomatic of our consumer culture — aside from the iPhone and Apple Watch destruction videos out there — it’s this.

On the bright side, these folks over at Wired filmed their wanton destruction at a whopping 1,000 frames per second so you could see every little smashed brick as this plastic masterpiece hits the ground. All to celebrate Star Wars day.

If you forget your passcode on Apple Watch, or you’ve entered an incorrect one too many times, you can use the Apple Watch app on the iPhone to enter the passcode one more time. If you still can’t quite remember it, though, you’ll need to erase and restore the erased Apple Watch. This sets it back to factory default settings, and takes all the content off of it.

So how do you get all your stuff back onto the Apple Watch?

You’re bound to love the Apple Watch as much as we do, and we’ve got a fantastic issue of Cult of Mac Magazine to prove it.

Buster and Rob team up to review the fan-flipping-tastic Apple wrist-held, while Leander waxes rhapsodic about how great this new Apple gadget really is. Rob takes a look at 7 stealthy tips along with 12 things the team noticed after a week with Apple Watch. Alex chimes in with 10 of the weirdest Apple Watch apps, plus much, much more, all in this week’s installment of the greatest Apple digital mag you’ve ever read.

So, you just got your shiny new Apple Watch and you’ve doubled down on learning how to use its all-new interface. That should keep you busy for a while.

There are still a few things that you might not know about it, however, especially these not-so-obvious tips and tricks for Apple Watch we’re going to share with you right now.

If you’re looking for new games to explode onto your Mac, look no further than these three “best of” gaming guides from one of the most Mac-centric gaming voices on the web, Mac Gamer HQ.

Featuring the 10 best strategy games, the 10 best first-person shooters, and (just published!) the 10 best MMORPGs — all only for Mac gamers — these three lists are bound to point you in the right direction, letting you set your sights on some amazing Mac gaming experiences without having to buy and try them all yourself.

Glide helped Jim Dalrymple reboot The Loop into a gorgeous digital magazine way back in October 2013; we’re excited to see how much progress the Glide publishing app, invented by Chris Harris, has made during the time between then and now.

We’re not the only ones, either: With 15 days left to go on its Kickstarter campaign, iPad publishing app Glide has already garnered $12,000 over its goal.

“I’ve been following Glide since the release of ‘The Loop’ app, and I’m so excited to see it finally approaching release,” says Kickstarter commenter Nick R. “I didn’t know much about ‘The Loop’ at the time, but was blown away by the functionality of the app itself. Amazing to see how far its come in 2 years. Glad they took their time and did things right. —- Good job Glide team.”

As I was scrolling down the page over on Facebook, reading the latest posts from friends and family, i noticed a new ad to the right: Pied Piper, the fictional company from HBO’s hit show, Silicon Valley, is hiring!

The ad is pretty convincing; here’s hoping no one actually clicked through hoping for a tech job.

Way back in the day (1972), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak designed and started selling “blue boxes,” devices that generated specific tones that would game the telephone networks of the day (called “phreaking.” These would allow phone phreaks to make free long distance calls, for instance.

It was illegal then (the two Steve’s inspiration, “Cap’n Crunch” Draper, was sent to prison for five years for his own phreaking attempts), but you can get the same fun minus the jail time now at a new website that emulates the blue boxes of yesteryear.

Far from being a superfluous device strictly for hard-core Apple fans, the Apple Watch is a surprisingly delightful and useful device.

Now that we’ve spent enough time with the latest gadget from the mothership, we’re noticing quite a few sweet little positives (and a couple negatives) about Apple Watch.

Bottom line: The more you use this thing, the better it is.

When Apple picked up Beats, they got a music service along with the headphone hardware and executive talents of Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine.

It looks like Apple has just upped its game, internally, in creating a Spotify-killer: Cupertino has just picked up four producers from BBC Radio 1, including key talent from hot radio property “BBC Introducing.”

When I found out I’d be able to change out the band on my Apple Watch Sport, I was ecstatic. While I really don’t mind the green fluoroelastomer band, I’m looking forward to swapping it out for something a little less Swatch and a bit more Gap casual.

Changing the band is a pretty simple affair, but if you haven’t had the chance to put one on your wrist yet, it’s a bit hard to tell just how to do so.

Attack on Titan, the cult-hit in ink (manga) and on the small screen (anime), is getting a live-action treatment this summer. The good news is that the feature film is hitting Japan on August 1 and Australia and New Zealand later this same year. The bad news is that we have no details on a U.S. release, though both the manga and anime are still available in this country.

The film is the first of two planned parts, with the second flick, Attack on Titan: End of the World, headed to Japan this coming September.

So, you just got that shiny new Apple Watch. It’s amazing, right?

So amazing that someone may try to steal it from you. Sure, that sucks, but it could happen.

Here’s how to clear the credit card info from the stolen device if you no longer have physical possession of your Apple Watch.

Apple Watch is the most confounding device to come out of Cupertino since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Is is it a watch? Is it a tiny computer on your wrist? It’s both — and it’s so much more.

After four days playing with the Apple Watch, we’ve found it to be far more futuristic — and far more fun — than we could have imagined. (It’s even more impressive if you’ve tried any of the other smartwatches on the market.)

Apple Watch isn’t without its disappointments, though. If you’re still unsure whether to shackle yourself to Jony Ive’s fabulous timepiece, here’s our take on what works — and what doesn’t.