Rob LeFebvre - page 30

A longtime Cult of Mac reader wrote in with a question about some odd-looking folders she sees on her Mac.

“The ‘All Pictures’ folder has a sprocket looking icon,” she writes. “Same with All PDF documents and Recently Changed documents.

Are these files located elsewhere and if I deleted a file from one of the above folders does it remove it from all my files? Don’t understand the purpose of these.”

Excellent question, for sure. Let’s take a look at what these folders are, and how to use them to their full potential.

The Grand Theft Auto series is known for its violence; you’re usually cast as a thug or criminal of some sort, and set loose on a rampage across an open world landscape, able to steal cars, beat up civilians, and even gun down the cops.

Watch as these older folks do just that in Grand Theft Auto V, reacting to the crazy violence with fear, loathing, and a little bit of evil joy.

As the world gets smaller and smaller thanks to the global marketplace called the internet, you may sometimes need to know exactly how much your dollar will get you in the wider world. Is that £15 widget really worth it? You’ll only know if you convert it to some form of currency that you understand better.

Your Mac has at least three ways to do this sort of calculation: with a Dashboard widget, the built-in Calculator app, and even with Spotlight. Here’s how to convert currencies into something that makes more sense, right from your handy Mac computer.

These days, any photo you shoot with your iPhone or other smartphone will typically contain location data (unless you have that feature turned off) to allow apps like iPhoto to place your images on a map.

Even photo-sharing services use this data, with some — like Flickr — posting it prominently on your photo pages (along with all the other EXIF data, like shutter speed and f-stop).

If you don’t want the location of your photos to be known, the Yosemite version of OS X’s Preview can take care of it for you. Let’s strip that location data before we post that photo to the Web, OK?

I launched SimCity: Complete Edition last night at around 8 p.m. I played around with my new city, getting a feel for the controls, zoning for residences, commercial ventures and industrial centers.

I zoomed in and out to get up-close and bird’s-eye views of my own private Idaho (well, Squifton, if we’re being literal). I checked out the various data views, gave my city police buildings and power, water and fire departments. I added parks, more residential areas, roads and even created a neighboring city — a sleepy little hamlet that purchases power and water from the main city. Just a quick little foray into a game that I’ve been itching to play.

When I glanced up at the clock, it was three hours later.

iPhoto is a free download for everyone these days, making it a basic bit of kit for anyone dealing with the deluge of photographic data we seem to collect. Still, it’s often overlooked by the best of us because of its limitations.

That’s unfortunate, because the simple program offers some pretty useful features that can quickly let you get on with enjoying your photos rather than tweaking them.

Here are five simple tips for using Apple’s built-in photo “shoebox,” letting you make your photos better and more organized even more quickly.

Fresh off his deep dive into CES, Alex takes on home automation and how HomeKit may just change everything, making the dream of an easy, ubiquitous home future a reality. Rob takes a look at a new game that turns your Apple TV into a motion-controlled gaming console, Buster shows us how the Apple Watch has already won the war for your wrist, Luke builds his own fun with a shoebox full of maker-kit for kid-friendly iPad gadgets, and Lewis spends a little time in Microsoft’s holographic future.

We’ve got all this and more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, so make sure to subscribe and download your copy today.

Do you think your state has a lot of iPhone users? You might be surprised to learn that you’re right – if you live in Alaska, Montana, or Vermont.

This surprising result comes from a survey conducted by mobile advertising firm Chitika, who wanted to quantify the level of iPhone usage on a state-by-state basis.

While the data doesn’t show much correlation with geographic or raw population figures, the survey did figure out that the three states had the highest percentage of iPhone users, with 65, 60 and 59 percent respectively.

The Elder Scrolls Online is a massive online role-playing game that lets you join up with your friends to explore the vast realm of Tamriel, the world featured in various high-fantasy games like Oblivion and Skyrim.

Bethesda Softworks has just dropped the subscription model from its award-winning massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, and is bringing the massive virtual world to current-generation consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, as well as updating the PC and Mac versions of the game to The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited.

It’s true — Hollywood has fully exported its heroes to the newest media kid on the block, video games. It wasn’t enough for Martin Sheen to play the chain smoking Illusive Man in 2008’s Mass Effect 2 , or Kevin Spacey to turn in a star performance in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Now John Malkovich, Bill Paxton, Rose McGowan and Jon Bernthal lend their voices and likenesses to the sci-fi-tinged military shooter for the new Exo Zombie mode that comes with the new downloadable content pack “Havok,” available January 27.

Here, they’ve even made a video to show you.

Candide Thovex is having another one of those days in an aptly named new YouTube video, “One of those days 2.”

The professional skier from France has released yet another amazing point of view of his extreme skiing, and in this one, he skis through the actual mountain.

This week, Leander breaks a story about how Apple’s secret product plans could be found using a little-known Web portal for retailers, Buster calls out a respected Apple analyst for a sketchy prediction, Stephen gets the skinny on removing adware from your Mac, and Rob gives you seven things you never thought you could do with an extremely old iPhone.

All that, plus all the news you’ll want to hear about, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, ready for you now on Newsstand in the iTunes App Store.

Keep reading for our top stories this week.

To get the fun of virtual bowling without a Wii, look no further than Bowling Central, a magical iOS app that lets you swing your iPhone around to send a virtual bowling ball slamming into all the pins at the end of the lane.

The game is powered by Rolocule Games’ motion-tracking technology, called “rolomotion,” which lets you swing your iPhone like a Wii remote. The gaming company’s two founders wanted to create a Wii Bowl-style experience, only with an Apple TV and an iPhone, and they won a 2014 Edison Award for their solution.

“We worked really hard to get the motion gaming controls right,” Rolocule’s Anuj Tandon told Cult of Mac in an email, “and getting the perfect controls took time. Not only … can you give accurate direction to the ball, but by twisting the wrist, the ball can be given a spin, just like real bowling.”

Dillon Markey animates one of the hottest Adult Swim programs on television, Robot Chicken. Better yet, he uses an old Nintendo Power Glove to do it.

The Emmy-winning show consists of short sequences of stop-motion animation using action figures of pop culture characters, like Bill Gates or Shigeru Miyamoto, the famed Nintendo game designer. Funny enough, Markey used his modified Power Glove the first time on that specific scene in Robot Chicken.

Check it out in the video below.

The address book is outdated. On the iPhone, while most of my contacts reside in the Contacts app, I rarely go in there. Instead, I connect with people on Facebook, via SnapChat, WhatsApp and more.

Product designer Frank Costa feels the same way, but he went one step further than simply banishing the Contacts app to an unused folder on his Home screen and designed this address book replacement concept, something he calls an Invisible Address Book.

While having a list of phone numbers might be silly, he says, there is benefit to having information about the people we contact frequently in one place.

“Therefore, as a design exercise,” writes Costa on Medium, “I elaborated on a couple of ideas to turn that seemingly static list of people into a slightly more ambitious project.”

There are tons of new games out every week, and it’s hard to decide which ones to purchase, let alone which free games to download. We’re here to take some of the guesswork out of your decision, though, as we’ve scoured the best games that have come out so far this year.

From time wasters to deep strategic gems, this list will have you gaming in no time. Grab your copy of these five great –and brand-spankin’ new — gaming experiences today and you can thank us later.

There was a time when LEGO brick sets were anything but prescriptive. You’d be lucky to get a wheel or axle part, or maybe even a door or window piece in your giant set of loose bricks.

These days, of course, LEGO typically means putting together a complicated model that just doesn’t need glue (though you can certainly use it to make things permanent).

Imgur user “fickle” put up this photoset showing what a couple of enterprising young women did with their toy juice bar, from the LEGO Friends set.

“It was supposed to be a juice bar,” they wrote on the photo sharing service, (but) “a set of ED-209-inspired power armor is far better!

If you’re like me, you’ve got a junk bin full of old technology. It’s just the way we’re made; there’s nothing better than sifting through the detritus of technology that you loved.

I’ve traded in my iPhone for the last five generations, from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 5, or passed them along to my kids or significant others. The first generation iPhone, however, was something special, so I kept it.

As I was looking for ways to let my daughter listen to music at night without the temptation (or networked connection) of her more modern mobile phone, I chanced upon this lovely little rounded gadget from 2007 in the plastic bin I lovingly refer to as my Dead Technology Museum.

I figured I’d add some music to the thing, and that would be that. But the more time I spent messing around with it, I realized that I could make it into a pretty great little device; even though it pales in comparison with the iPhone 6, there’s still plenty of use in this baby.

Here are seven things, then, that you can do with your own old iPhone to make it just a bit more useful, whether it’s an original iPhone or an even more modern model.

The Cult of Mac team spent the past week sweating it out in Las Vegas and gathered up a ton of hands-on looks at some of the hottest products heading down the tech conveyor belt to you in the near future.

We’ve got the two guys who’s gadget can help you bake the perfect cookie, a self-adjusting belt for when you’ve eaten too many cookies, and a sexy sci-fi car that will help you feel better about not having your futuristic flying vehicles, yet.

Be sure to click on through and see this week’s top stories, and subscribe to our free weekly digital magazine right here.

Older games that we all loved and played relentlessly as kids tend to disappear as the old operating systems that we played them on are sent out to pasture.

The Internet Archive, a free library of millions of free books, movies, websites, and other media, has also archived thousands of older MS_DOS games, like Maniac Mansion, Prince of Persia, and–yes–Oregon Trail, and has given us all access to them for free.

Turns out, you can still get dysentery while traveling to Oregon, even if you haven’t kept your old PC or Mac to play the seminal educational game on.

“The collection includes action, strategy, adventure and other unique genres of game and entertainment software,” writes Jason Scott, the Software Librarian for the Internet Archive. “Through the use of the EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator, these programs are bootable and playable.”

When we first saw the new Jurassic World trailers, we were stunned and excited. Then, after it sunk in that the actor that plays doofus Andy Dwyer on NBC’s hilarious Parks and Recreation would be fighting dinosaurs, we sort of imagined a mashup of the two.

Apparently, Thanks Mom Productions had a similar thought, as they’ve taken footage of Chris Pratt from both the movie trailers and the TV show and edited them together for a funny video that’s all kinds of awesome.

Check it out.

Imagine walking five street blocks in a city like, say, New York. Then think about climbing that distance straight up.

That’s what Kevin Schmidt does for a living: changing the airplane warning lights at the top of super tall TV towers.

This drone from PrairieAerial caught the guy in action as he climed the now-defunct analog KDLT antenna in Salem, SD. Watch the whole thing as he grabs a vertigo-inducing selfie at the top.

That other man being, in this case, freelance graphic designer Viktor Hertz, who spends some of his time making fun little art pieces out of Macintosh progress bars.

He calls this project his “work in progress bars,” and you can see his whole collection on his main page, as well as some of his other illustration work over on Behance. Continue below to see a few more tasty treats from Hertz, who calls it “a quick and silly little side-project of mine.”

Happy New Year to all of you wonderful Cult of Mac readers. This week, we’ve yet again compiled our best content right in one place for you to enjoy over the weekend.

We’ve got the top security tips for getting online safely, a sweet little story about using Siri to wrangle those pesky resolutions, the best games of 2014, and plenty more. Check them out below for the full scoop, and head on over to subscribe to or download the latest issue.