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If you want to skip out on posing for photos during the next family vacation, do what Hauke Scheer plans to do — use a 3-D-printed version of yourself as a stand-in.

The Scheer family might let him get away with it, since the fully articulated action figure of himself that he created is a pretty good likeness. The quality of his miniature plastic doppelganger — and the geeky scheme to get out of family portraits — tell you something about Scheer, 39, who earns a living making 3-D-printed figures of mechanized whales and other crazy characters from his home in Frankfurt, Germany.

“I am a total geek with a huge collection of comics, science fiction and fantasy movies and, of course, action figures,” Scheer, who runs Deep Fried Figures, told Cult of Mac. “I started sculpting my own figures during my early teenage years at a time when lots of characters I loved were not available in figure form. After a while, I realized it was even more fun to make characters of my own.”

On the Mac, it’s super-easy to search for a word or phrase within the currently loaded page. You simply hit Command-F on your keyboard and Safari, Chrome or any other web browser will open up a little field to type your search terms into.

But what about when you’re using mobile Safari on your iPhone or iPad? How do you find a specific word or phrase there?

It’s pretty simple, but not super-intuitive. Here’s our recipe for finding search terms on your iPhone’s version of Safari.

Mastering a few crucial Mac keyboard shortcuts will make using your Apple computer easier and much more efficient. Cutting your reliance on your mouse will help you work more quickly, and you’ll undoubtedly impress your family, friends and co-workers to no end. You might even end up becoming the go-to Mac person in your office, and we all know how wonderful that will be.

Here are the top 10 Mac keyboard shortcut tricks you really need to memorize right now, whether you’re a Mac newbie or a veteran user who still uses the mouse for everything out of habit.

A zombie survival game called Apocalypse Rising doesn’t sound like a story that should have a happy ending. For game developers Ethan Witt and Gus Dubetz, this doomsday is not about plagues, oceans of blood or even the walking dead.

This apocalypse pays for college.

Aside from better battery life, a waterproof iPhone has to be one of the most-requested upgrades Apple could make to its smartphones — a feature that H20-defying rivals like the Xperia Z1 haven’t wasted a moment bragging about possessing.

But a new patent application published today suggests a waterproofed iPhone could finally be on the way, thanks to a method for sealing buttons specifically designed for iOS devices.

Anatol Josephwitz passed the time in a Siberian prison camp and ignored the bitter cold by imagining an automated photography machine he had not yet invented.

Nearly 95 years later, the photo booth is as tough a survivor as its inventor.

Photo booth adventurers across many generations have described a magic that takes place when the curtain is drawn and the camera is awakened by placing a few coins in a slot. Inhibitions fall and an authentic inner self emerges on a strip of four photos. Best friends smash their faces together, a girl on a boy’s lap gives him his first kiss, and a wide-eyed college kid proudly mugs for a shot that will get pasted into a first passport.

Many of the so-called dip-and-dunk chemical machines, the kind found in arcades, amusement parks and bus stations, are disappearing, but replacing them are booths with digital cameras and dye-sublimation printers.

The Apple Watch was created under crazy, sleep-deprived conditions, with its first working prototype being an iPhone strapped to the wrist with a Velcro strap, and the Digital Crown represented by a custom dongle plugged into the bottom of the phone via the headphone jack.

Those are a couple of the revelations from a new in-depth article, reporting on the creation of Apple’s eagerly anticipated wearable device.

As of OS X Yosemite, the little green button in the upper left-hand corner of all your apps and windows has recently undergone a change in function. Instead of maximizing or re-sizing the windows, as in all previous versions of OS X, now the green button will take your window or app full screen.

If you’re tired of going full screen every time you click the green button, here’s how to avoid the screen take over.

Apple’s partnership with IBM has birthed eight new enterprise apps that the companies announced today on Apple’s Business apps page. The new MobileFirst apps focus mostly on healthcare by providing hospital techs and nurses new methods to access patients records, log data and track progress.

Along with the four new healthcare apps, IBM and Apple also created apps for insurance agents, flight attendants, retailers and industrial production.

Take a quick tour of the new apps below.

Let me save you a huge headache — don’t set an EFI password on your Mac unless you have the original receipt for that machine.

If you buy your Mac off Craigslist, like I did, and your daughter writes half a novel for her high school class but never backs it up elsewhere (note – always back up your stuff!), and then her MacBook Air suddenly won’t boot up, the EFI password the previous owner put on the laptop will prevent you or Apple from accessing the hard drive or ever using the computer again.

Hypothetically, of course.

If you don’t want to have to tell your daughter she loses her computer and will need to wait a week while you find a way to connect her SSD to another Mac and find her files, disable that EFI password now.

Here’s how.

Apple today announced that all members of its Developer Program can now officially submit Watch apps to the App Store; potentially triggering a gold rush similar to that seen when devs were first able to create iPhone apps early on its lifecycle.

Developers are encouraged to submit their WatchKit app, icon, screenshots, and description for review by Apple’s testers.

With an innovative architectural style that brought elegant living to the masses, real estate developer Joseph Eichler left an indelible mark on California in the 1960s.

His beautifully simple blueprints also had an undeniable impact on Apple’s co-founders — although Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs took very different lessons from his work. Remarkably, Eichler’s design philosophy continues to shape Apple’s products, inside and out, to this day.

“I was very lucky to grow up in an Eichler,” Wozniak told Cult of Mac, referring to his family’s four-bedroom home in Sunnyvale, California. “It greatly influenced my liking of simplicity and open style. I like it whenever I see those attributes in any architecture.”

Tim Cook called the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus the biggest advancements in the history of iPhone. It’s barely been six months since the bigger-than-big devices launched, but we’re already craving some upgrades.

With the first iPhone 6s leaks and rumors starting to hit the Internet, we decided to dream up what Apple could possibly do to make its next smartphone kick more ass than ever.

Here are nine upgrades we hope the iPhone 6s gets this fall:

Apple decided to kill the iPhone C lineup when it debuted the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but the colorful plastic cases could be making a comeback in 2015, based on an alleged leak out of Apple’s supply chain.

A new 4-inch iPhone 6c might debut alongside the iPhone 6s this fall, according to leaked images that show an iPhone rear shell similar in size to the iPhone 5c. But this design may come with a few tweaks.

Check it out:

Apple’s selling more iPhones than at any point in its history, but that doesn’t mean it’s not looking to grow its user base even more.

To achieve this, the company today launched its new smartphone trade-in program at brick-and-mortar Apple Stores — allowing owners of selected Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone handsets to swap their existing devices for credit that can be used toward buying an iPhone.

Among the biggest differences between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook as leaders of Apple is Cook’s willingness to use his platform as CEO to push positive social change.

Having last week shamed Indiana’s controversial “religious freedom” bill — which potentially allows a business to deny service to would-be customers if they disagree with their sexual orientation, based on religious beliefs — Cook elaborated on his thoughts in a weekend editorial for the Washington Post.

Proclaiming that “Apple is open … to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love,” Cook makes a powerful case. Check out his thoughts below.

Keeping your kids safe on your computer is one of the more important things you can focus on as a parent. Mac OS X has a great tool built right in to do just that: Parental Controls.

It’s fairly easy to set up Parental Controls on Mac, but if you need a quick hand at making them work for you, our video will walk you through the process.

Sick of the mountains of paper stacking up in your inbox? You’ve probably heard about the joys of having a paperless office, maybe even thought about setting one up, but didn’t know how.

Well, here’s how. Not only is it easy to set to do, it can totally change your life.

Here’s how to use your Mac and iPhone to effortlessly set up your own idiot-proof paperless office … the right way.

Tim Cook had enormous shoes to fill when he took over as Apple CEO. After Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, doubters questioned whether the Southern engineer could keep Apple relevant. But Cook has led Apple to become the world’s most valuable company — he might be even better at running the company than Jobs ever was.

Now Fortune has named Cook the “world’s greatest leader” and published a profile full of exclusive details about Cook’s journey as Apple CEO. In the interview, Cook reveals how he developed thick skin, why he’s giving all his money to charity, and the real reasons he opened up about his sexuality.

The massive profile is well worth a read, but we’ve picked out the most interesting bits for you below.

Aaron Muderick is grateful to the anonymous pioneering office worker who thought to populate his or her desk with toys.

Muderick was a software engineer when his go-to desk toy, Silly Putty, gave him a whole new career when the tech bubble burst in the late 1990s and the company that employed him went under.

The story behind the unique beginnings of “Crazy Aaron’s Thinking Putty” is even crazier than the chemistry that creates the luminescent and magnetic properties of his product.

One of Steve Jobs’ favorite recordings was The Beatles working on version after version of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

The new Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, is like that recording: It serves up fresh takes on oft-told stories from Apple’s history, this time with more sugarcoating.

New biography Becoming Steve Jobs attempts to answer an important question: What happened to Steve Jobs during his wilderness years outside Apple that turned him from a gifted-but-impossible-to-work-with youngster into the seasoned digital emperor he would be following his return to the company he founded?

It’s a question that’s crucial to understanding Apple’s rise back to prominence from the late 1990s onward — but one that was ignored by previous Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, whose 2011 book Steve Jobs sold a gajillion copies, but is now (perhaps unfairly) being recast as an unqualified failure.

In Isaacson’s book, these crucial years away from Apple take up just five chapters out of 42 — and that section also includes Jobs’ marriage to Laurene Powell and the birth of his children. In Becoming Steve Jobs, the lessons from that era permeate almost every page.

I’ve always found the people who work in Apple Stores to be incredibly helpful and, considering that their job is to sell you on expensive products, honest. One thing that’s never happened to me, however, is having an Apple Store employee suggest that I consider choosing a Samsung handset or Windows Phone over an Apple device.

But that’s exactly what happened the day that YouTube pranksters NelkFilmz dressed up as Apple employees and hit their local Apple Store, with the aim of selling Surfaces instead of iPads. They’re quickly weeded out by the real store employees, of course — at which point things just get awkward.

You can check the video out below.

If you’re like me, you’ve got a ton of unread iMessages on your iPhone and tapping through them all just to get rid of your app badge anxiety seems like a bit too much effort.

Apple has your back, though, with a nicely designed way to mark all your iMessages as read. It might not be apparent at first glance where to find this magic trick. Here’s how.

SAN FRANCISCO — To make its mouse of the future, Logitech looked to the past. The MX Master, a reboot of a classic Logitech mouse that brings back a long-lost feature while adding significant modern upgrades, is perfect for the port-deficient new MacBook.

The MX Master resurrects the nifty scroll wheel that was a killer feature of the MX Revolution, which Logitech released in 2006. The Revolution’s clever scroll wheel seemed to shift gears on the fly, going from slow to speedy and letting you zip through long webpages and documents. The feature helped turned the Revolution into a hit, but the scroll wheel went away in subsequent Logitech mice, causing fans to weep for their loss when their beloved mouse finally crapped out.

The MX Master brings back the innovative scroll wheel with a vengeance.