How-To - page 47

With a podcast like the CultCast, you can drop in and start listening at any time. News-based podcasts are meant to be listened to, and then discarded. Another one will be along soon. But what about more structured podcasts? Podcasts that work episodically, like a TV series? With those, you want to listen from episode one, and listen in order — episodes 2, 3, 4, etc.

But podcast apps don’t let you do this. They’re geared towards disposable, periodically-updated podcasts. They may show you a list of previous episodes, so you can tap to download them manually, but then it’s no longer a podcast.

What you need is a service that takes any podcast feed and rejigs it, serving you a new episode each week as if the series had just started.

Apple has finally given us the ability to pay for App Store, iTunes, and Books purchases with Apple Pay.

The company’s own mobile payments system can also be used for Apple Music and iCloud storage subscriptions. Here’s how to set it up.

Over the last couple years, tons of iOS apps switched from one-time purchases to monthly or annual subscriptions. As a user, this can seem frustrating — or annoying even — but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The rise of app subscriptions brings benefits to users, developers and the app ecosystem as a whole. Whether you’re subscribing to your favorite weather app, task manager or podcast player, the subscription model offers perks that never existed in the one-time-purchase world of apps.

If you’ve been wearing an Apple Watch for a while now, chances are you have built up a huge amount of data related to your health. But do you know what it all means? What exactly is that wrist-mounted technological marvel trying to tell you?

All those different stats Apple Watch saves to the Health app can be a little overwhelming. But if you know how to interpret them, they provide a surprisingly wide variety of insights into your health. Like how fit you are, how much stress you are under and whether you are at risk of heart disease — click here to learn more.

It’s worth taking the time to understand what your Apple Watch is telling you. It can help you improve your wellbeing — and it might even save your life.

In the bad old days, there used to be just one way to send an email attachment from your iPhone. You had to find the file or image, and use the share sheet to send it via email. Then, you’d add the address, subject line and message, and send the mail. And if you needed to add another file to that email? Tough.

Now, things are much better. There are now several ways to send mail with attachments on iOS — the exact number depends on whether you’re using the iPhone or iPad. Let’s check them out.

Way back in iOS 9 days, Apple added “content blocking” to the iPhone and iPad. More commonly known as “ad-blockers,” this tech lets you use third-party apps to block ads, malware, trackers, comments, and more, in Mobile Safari. Apple itself doesn’t do any more than make blocking possible. To actual decide what to block, you need a third-party app.

Enabling ad-blocking is easy, once you know how, and you can set-and-forget it once done. Or you can keep on top of things, adding custom rules, and white-listing trusted websites. Here’s how.

If Apple Watch ever becomes as common as the smartphone, TV dramas will get a whole lot less dramatic. You know how when a beloved character is in danger — perhaps there’s a killer stalking them in their own home — and you scream at the screen, telling them what to do?

Well, the Apple Watch’s SOS Mode pretty much does everything you’re telling them to do. It can call the cops, notify a friend, and track your location, all with a squeeze (and maybe a swipe). That might not be great as a standard storytelling trope, but it’s fantastic for your personal safety.

Did you know that you can record the music playing on your iPhone, to your Mac, straight up the USB cable? Just hook your Mac up to your iPhone (or iPad), using the Lighting cable that came in the box, and you can record anything. Additionally, if you’re looking to play music while recording video iPhone, this guide will show you how.

It’s just like taping off the radio when you were a kid — or maybe when your dad was a kid — only better quality.

Everyone knows you can do running, cycling and swimming workouts with your Apple Watch. But did you know you also can log sports like football, golf and boxing? There’s even support for pastimes as diverse as fishing, horse riding and fencing.

These workout types are not easy to find, however. Apple hides them in the “Other” workouts menu. With a bit of hunting around you’ll discover 60 additional options there to choose from.

So, if you’re bored with your regular workout and fancy trying something more exotic, why not give these Other workouts a try? Here’s how to find and use them.

The song you’re listening to on your iPhone is a bit too quiet, so you adjust the volume. Perfect. Then the song ends, and the next one blasts your ears. You fumble your iPhone from your pocket and tap the volume down a notch or two.

Thanks, Apple Music. Why can’t you just play all the songs at the same volume? Obviously that’s what everyone wants.

Wait, what’s that? You can? How?

Accessorizing your Apple Watch with a slew of bands can be an expensive undertaking. But if you know where to look, you can find some high-quality bands that seem just as good as Apple’s — but only cost a fraction of the price.

The CultCast host Erfon Elijah is out with a new video today that will show you how you can pimp out your Apple Watch with multiple colorful bands without breaking the bank. The trick is knowing where to look on eBay and Amazon.

Take a look at some of these gorgeous bands!

Both macOS and iOS have excellent built-in support for subtitles. And many video player apps will play a subtitle file for you if you just drop it into the same folder as a movie, or even drag and drop it onto a movie that’s already playing.

But if your hearing is fine, why should you bother with subtitles? I came up with a short list:

• The audio on the movie/TV show is unclear.
• English isn’t your first language, and you appreciate the help.
• You want to watch a movie with the sound low.
• You don’t understand the accents in that British TV drama.

The good news is that subtitles are easy. And the bad news? There is none.

You’re listening to an awesome podcast, and one of the hosts makes a super-smart point about a fascinating subject. It’s so good that you just want to share it with people. But how? Tweet a link to the podcast along with a timecode so folks can hunt down that pithy quip themselves? Good luck! People on Twitter are too lazy to… well, they’re just too lazy.

But if you use the Overcast podcast player app, then you can now share a short audio or video clip of any podcast, to Twitter, Instagram, or anywhere else. It’s dead easy, and it might be the best thing to happen to podcasts in quite a while.

Siri may still be hopeless, but one thing it’s always been good at is setting alarms. In fact, I don’t use Siri much at all any more¹, but for alarms and timers, I use it exclusively. Even with iOS 12’s great 3-D Touch timer widget, Siri is quicker.

Today we’ll see how to tell Siri to create an alarm, set a timer, how to edit an alarm, and how to delete one.

Twitter is a swamp of spoilers. You can’t move for tweets about the plot of the new Star Wars movie or spoilers about whatever new TV show is dropping all its new episodes this week. There are two ways to avoid spoilers. One is to avoid Twitter entirely.

The other is to mute keywords, so you don’t see references to — well, references to whatever you want. Mutes don’t have to be about the long-awaited meeting between Spock and Obi-Wan, though. You can mute anything. You could avoid all mentions of President Donald Trump, for example. Brits could stanch the flow of Brexit mentions. Or you might temporarily mute mentions of a sports event if it’s taking over your timeline.

If you have an old Mac that doesn’t support AirDrop, or you use a PC with your iPhone or iPad, then getting files from one to the other is a real pain. Readdle’s Documents app fixes this, making it easy to beam anything from one place to the other, wirelessly. Today we’re going to see just how easy it is. And one other neat trick is that you can use this on any computer, not just your own.

You wake up or restart your Mac, and nothing is connected. Your Bluetooth keyboard does nothing. You wiggle your Bluetooth mouse or trackpad, and the on-screen pointer refuses to wiggle in response. The problem? Your Mac’s Bluetooth is switched off. But how do you switch it back on without a mouse? If you ever find yourself in this situation, here’s a simple guide on turn on Bluetooth Mac without mouse.

Today we’ll see how to activate Bluetooth on an iMac, Mac Pro or Mac mini ¹ without having to touch a mouse or trackpad. All you need are a USB keyboard, Spotlight and one clever trick.

Good day, sleepy humans. I assume you are a fellow appreciator of delicious coffee, and that you suffer the same morning paradox as me: You just woke up, and are still rather groggy. And yet you also want to make a great cup of coffee. After all, you can’t drink that many in a day without wigging out.

The answer is here: It’s the Clever Dripper, and it’s almost impossible to make a bad cup of coffee with it. Not only that, but it might make the best coffee you’ve ever tasted.

Have you got some embarrassing entries in your Safari browsing history? Or maybe it’s a question of security: You don’t want your iPad’s history to fall into the wrong hands, etc.

Smutty jokes aside, there are plenty of legit reasons to clear your Safari history on your iPhone or iPad. And the good news is that Safari for iOS has some great tools for doing so. For example, did you know that you can clear just the last hour of browsing history, or the past couple of days?

Get ready to learn how to sanitize your Safari history on iOS devices.

If I’m watching a TV show and a great song comes on, I usually try to find my iPhone in time to shazam it. I almost always fail, as 1) TV shows don’t tend to play entire songs without people talking over them and 2) I can never find my phone in time. Or rather I’m too lazy to look for it.

A similar thing happens for movies, only I promise myself that I’ll check the credits at the end, and I seldom do.

My dad, old-school guy that he is, likes to call up the TV company and ask them. Maybe I’ll do that when I’m retired, if there are still TV companies with phone numbers.

But did you know that there’s an almost 100% foolproof way to find that awesome track that played in that TV show you saw last night? It’s called Tunefind, and it’s great.

At first glance, the decade-old OP-1 synthesizer from Swedish musical instrument makers Teenage Engineering looks about as standalone as it gets.

The tiny device couples a short, piano-style keyboard with a screen. And it contains a drum machine, several synthesizers, a sampler, a handful of sequencers, a virtual four-track tape recorder and even an FM radio. You can create entire tracks on it with no other gear, or you can hook it up to electric guitars and microphones and bring the outside world in.

But it also pairs surprisingly well with an iPad. You can record audio back and forth, but things go much deeper than that. You also can use the OP-1’s hardware keyboard to play instruments on the iPad, and use iPad MIDI apps to control the synthesizers on the OP-1.

Making music with an iPad and a synth

If you own both pieces of gear already, hopefully this how-to will give you some new ideas about making music with an iPad. But if you only own an iPad, this in-depth article will provide tips for using your tablet with other music gear.

And if you know nothing about the OP-1, or about Teenage Engineering’s work in general, you’ll learn why the company is kind of the Apple of the synth world. Teenage Engineering is known for its incredible interface design — and for having a quirky personality similar to 1984-era Apple, when the brand-new Mac was making waves.

At first glance, the iPhone Activity app seems pretty simple. It’s basically just a calendar to keep track of your daily Activity Rings. But if you know where to look, you’ll find a surprising number of pro features buried beneath that slick, simple interface.

So check out our top 10 iPhone Activity app tips and discover some indispensable stats that will help take your fitness to the next level.

This weekend I made a shortcut that takes a list of songs, adds up the total duration, and shows it in a notification.

The first part was easy. The Shortcuts app has a great action that can tell you anything about an iTunes Media file (or any other media file), including its duration. I whipped up a shortcut to cycle through a list of music tracks, adding up the durations along the way. It took five minutes, tops.

Then things started to go wrong. The shortcut returned the total duration in seconds. I don’t know about you, but for me, a number like 4,166.867 isn’t that useful. I prefer something like 01:09:26, or 1 hour 9 minutes and 36 seconds. The problem was, I couldn’t get from one to the other.

I love my AirPods, but I hate that they don’t fit right in my ears. They’re not designed to seal the ear canal, and therefore block external noise, but they often sit so loose in my ears that a) I can’t hear them without setting the volume way too high, and b) they feel like they’re about to fall out.

Today we’ll see how to add grippy dots to your AirPods. These dots will make the AirPods fit snugly in your ears, but — crucially — they will still fit in their charging case.

Why would you bother to back up your iMessages? After all, they’re all stored in iCloud these days, right? Well, yes your messages are all stored in iCloud, but they’re not backed up up there. They’re synced, which means that if you delete a message thread, it’s gone forever. The answer is to make a local backup, which requires a Mac. Which is ridiculous in 2019, but there you go.

Here’s how to back up your iMessages in case the worst happens.