How-To - page 50

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.

The quick answer is “Yes, of course you should.” The more complex answer is “But only if you need it.” Your iPhone has an equalizer built in, although it’s not exactly easy to find. Annoyingly-hidden-yet-essential interface elements aside, there’s usually not much point in tweaking the EQ of your Apple Music library unless you have a problem in your setup.

But if you do want to use it, here’s how.

Maybe you need to restart your Apple TV. Perhaps something didn’t load right, or the whole thing is acting screwy. It happens. The Apple TV is just another iOS computer after all. And while unplugging your Apple TV is one valid option, that means getting off your couch. And what do TV lovers hate more than unnecessary exercise? Nothing, that’s what. Happily for you, my lazy friend, you can restart the AppleTV using the remote. If you can find it.

For many guys wanting to get in shape, a chiseled six-pack is the ultimate goal. But achieving that iconic washboard look is not easy. Especially as you get older.

Fortunately, your Apple Watch can help you along the way to achieving a tighter core. Apple’s Health app, Activity app and even the Breathe app have a role to play. Here’s how to get a six-pack with a little help from your iPhone and Apple Watch.

iOS 12.2 brought many changes and additions to the iPhone and iPad — four new Animoji (giraffe! boar!), better-quality voice messages — but one handy new feature may go unnoticed unless you know where to look. Now, you can check the expiration date of your iPhone or iPad warranty right there on the device itself.

If you’re sick of YouTube’s ever-shifting terms, or you don’t like how lame Instagram has become, and you just want somewhere to post your videos without interference, then why not post them on your own microblog? Thanks to an update to Micro.blog, you can now do just that, as easily as posting a photo.

The Photos app’s Faces feature is fantastic. It does a pretty good job of gathering all the pictures of a person together, for both browsing and search. And it’s really easy to add new faces to the list. But what about managing those faces? What if the Photos app’s AI added some photos of a stranger into the photos of your husband?

It’s easy to tell your iPhone or iPad that a photo does not contain the person it thinks it does. Unfortunately, it’s a real pain to find the setting you need to tweak.

Ounce for ounce, Apple’s replacement Apple Pencil tips are probably more expensive than gold¹. It will cost you $20 for four of the tiny things, all of which are ridiculously easy to lose.

But if you use your Pencil for anything more than the odd casual stroke, sketch or swoosh, you’ll eventually need to replace a worn tip. The good news is that it’s easy. The bad news? That price.

Are you thinking of switching from the Mac to the iPad? Maybe you’re sick of your MacBook’s glitchy keyboard, or you would prefer to be able to remove the keyboard altogether when you don’t want it, and use touch instead?

Or perhaps you’re tempted by the cheaper pro apps on iOS, or the portability, or you just can’t see the point of a 27-inch iMac on your desk when all you do is read and write.

Whatever your excuse, switching from macOS to iOS is easier than ever. Thanks to iCloud, and a host of great apps and accessories, switching can be almost seamless. Let’s see what you need.

This post could more correctly be titled “How to get Apple News outside Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.” Those are still the only places that Apple News is available, almost four years after the service’s launch in September 2015.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to get the app even if you don’t live in one of those countries. Here’s how.

Sometimes, when I want to wire up a few guitar pedals and connect them to my iPad, maybe via a mixer or audio interface, I make a diagram before I plug everything in. But the trouble with drawing a wiring diagram on the iPad is just the same as drawing it on paper: If you want to move a component, or change the routing, you have to erase the wires and redraw them.

There are apps made for this. Omnigraffle is one, and it’s great. But it also costs $60, which is too much just for a few diagrams.

Then I thought, what about using Keynote, Apple’s free presentations app? Doesn’t it do diagrams? It does, and it’s quite good.

Contrary to what you might expect, merging PDFs is easier on your iPhone than on your Mac. On the desktop, you first need to open both PDFs in the Preview app, and then work out how to combine the two of them. On the iPhone or iPad, you can select your PDFs in the Files app (or in the Mail app, or anywhere else you find them), and use a quick shortcut to combine and save them in one go.

It’s instant, foolproof, and Just Works™. Let’s see just how easy it is to merge PDFs on iOS.

Got a new Apple Pencil? Once the initial novelty wears off, you might find that it spends most of its time magnetically clipped to the side of your iPad Pro or, worse, stuck in the back of a drawer. After all, there are only so many PDFs to annotate and screenshots to mark up.

Which is a great shame, because what your Apple Pencil really wants to do is create art. You only appreciate the true joy of owning one when you draw with it. So, why not follow this handy how-to guide and start sketching lifelike portraits of friends and family? It’s a really fun hobby.

As Kate Winslet once said in Titantic, “Draw me like one of your French girls.”

Did you know that you can send the audio from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac via the Lightning cable? That audio stays in pristine digital ones and zeros, and can be recorded (or otherwise used) anywhere you can edit audio on your Mac.

For musicians, this turns your iPad and all its music apps into a plugin for your Mac. And for anyone else, it could just be a neat way to route audio into your Mac’s speakers. The feature is called iDAM, and it’s built into your Apple devices. Oh, and it works with MIDI too.

Apple’s Contacts apps are terrible. On both iOS and Mac, they’re opaque, confusing and frustrating to use. Cardhop is a brand-new contacts app for iPhone and iPad that is better than the built-in app in almost every way.

Here’s how to add a new contact without typing a thing.

This might seem like an absurd subject for a how-to. I mean, all you have to do to charge your new AirPods with the new wireless charging case is toss them onto the charging mat, right? That’s true, but there are a couple of neat tricks that you might like to know.

They are simple, but these AirPods charging tips can save you frustration and wasted time.

If you’ve updated your iPhone or iPad to iOS 12.2, and you own a pair of first-gen AirPods, the wireless earbuds probably got an automatic firmware update already. Today we’ll see how to check your AirPods firmware version, and learn what’s new in the update.

Spoiler: Some owners even report better battery life in their original AirPods.