The login screen wallpaper in OS X Mavericks is a pretty boring dark gray linen picture, with the Apple logo in the center. Yawn.

Far better to put in your own image, thereby customizing the login screen for your very own purposes, am I right? It’s not too tricky to do so, though it does require replacing some system files and will get rid of the Apple logo image itself.

If you don’t mind replacing that Apple logo with a much larger image, thereby hiding the linen look but losing the Apple logo, then here’s how to do just that.

PayPal has been making a creep into gift cards lately, announcing just a week ago that it would start accepting prepaid gift cards as a form of payment online. Now it’s going even further, launching a digital gifts store where you can buy iTunes Gift Cards and, for now, only iTunes Gift Cards.

When we talk about Japanese games publisher Square-Enix bringing their games to iPhone, we’re usually talking about their popular Final Fantasy series: in the past few years alone, Square-Enix has brought a number of the games in its world famous CRPG series to the App Store.

The next game Square-Enix is bringing to iPhone isn’t a Final Fantasy game, though. Instead, it’s a title in their other popular RPG series (and a personal favorite game of mine): Dragon Quest VIII.

Some of the best deals you can find on Apple products comes from buying refurbished. Far from second-hand rejects, refurbished Apple units come with a full year’s warranty, steep discounts and a personal once-over from an authorized Apple technician, meaning they are <em>more</em> likely to be technologically sound at a lower price.

If you’ve been interested in picking yourself up a late 2013 27-inch iMac, but were hoping to score a deal, good news: they’re now available refurbished on Apple’s online store.

Everything else in our lives has gone wireless, but here we are, still slurping electricity through wires like a bunch of cavemen. When will it end? Soon, soothes Apple. The mad scientists in their lab at Cupertino have just patented a method to supply wireless charging to a number of nearby devices.

Talk about an Apple for the teacher…

The Sidney Central School District — located in Sidney, New York — has implemented a new 1-to-1 iPad Initiative for the 2013-14 school year, providing every child in the 7th through 12th grade with an iPad to work on.

It’s lacking the iPhone’s speaker slit, but otherwise all sources indicate that Darth Vader is an iOS user, most likely using either an iPhone 4 or iPhone 5.

The above selfie — which just appeared on the official Star Wars Instagram account — is designed to help launch the marketing platform that will be used to help build up to the new batch of sequels, currently being worked on by Disney.

From tantalizing teaser posters, to regulatory approval by China’s version of the FCC, it’s hardly the world’s best kept secret (or even a secret at all) that the iPhone 5c and 5s was coming to China Mobile at some point.

Atoll’s SoundPad is a smart cover for the iPad Air with a set of built-in speakers. It costs $130, and snaps onto the iPad with Magnets. It’s flexible, and it connects to your iDevice via Bluetooth. And that is all the information available, which makes me a little suspicious.

Real-time data released by metrics company Net Applications shows that the latest version of OS X, Mavericks, represents 2.42 percent of the overall desktop operating system market share.

Most people are excited about the new Apple 2 campus because of what will come out of it in the form of next gen products.

56-year old Glenn Cartwright is more enthusiastic about its copper pipes and wiring.

Cupertino sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the Apple 2 site at around 9.30pm on Saturday — responding to reports of a burglary in progress.

Jottacloud, the “Norwegian Dropbox,” has added automatic photo uploads to its iOS apps. This means that you can not only access your desktop files on the go, but you can also backup and browse your mobile photos, too. Better still, it backs up all you pictures, not just your Camera Roll.

It’s official: riding-a fixed-gear-bike-past-some-old-city-warehouses is the new perky-and-quirky-guitar-music in Kickstarter pitch videos, and the latest people to put an Urban Warrior in their video spot are Martin Fredewess and Philip Perera. What are they selling? A pretty cool-looking iPhone keychain carabiner called the TiStand. And spoiler alert, it’s made of titanium.

Great news for Lightroom users who both own iPads and love the Java runtime: The Mosaic app can now do two-way sync with Lightroom on your Mac, letting you load photos onto your computer and then sit down in your favorite easy chair with a cup of coffee to rate and reject your pictures using the iPad.

Popular cross-plaform service WhatsApp has been redesigned for iOS 7. The redesign leaked last month, and it’s finally here.

The app’s entire interface has been simplified, and group messaging has been improved with a new feature called Broadcasts Lists. You can create groups of people such as “classmates” to message all at once.

Here’s the full list of changes:

A couple of weeks ago, FiftyThree started accepting preorders for its new Pencil stylus. Pencil is designed specifically for FiftyThree’s Paper drawing app. The simplistic stylus connects over Bluetooth via on-screen paring in the Paper app and has features like palm rejection, blending, and quick erasing.

The Paper app has been updated with these new software features for Pencil in conjunction with preorders beginning to ship to customers.

Apple has bought Topsy, a San Francisco-based firm that offers Twitter analytics to companies. The deal has closed at over $200 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“It’s unclear how Apple plans to use Topsy,” says the report. “There may be opportunities to link Topsy’s technology with Apple’s iTunes Radio, an online-streaming-music competitor to Pandora Media Inc. and Spotify AB. One possible scenario would use data from Topsy to alert listeners to songs that are trending or artists being discussed on Twitter.”

A report from a few months ago said Apple was beefing up its iAd team prior to the launch of iTunes Radio. Topsy’s expertise in social marketing could certainly come in handy when trying to sell iAds.

Here’s what Topsy is about:

TextExpander, the amazing utility that allows you to type a quick shortcut (or “snippet”) and have it expand into any text you want, has been in a bit of trouble with Apple recently. The maker of TextExpander, Smile Software, was informed a couple of weeks ago by Apple that the iOS version of its app was sharing snippets between apps the wrong way.

Now TextExpander for iOS has been updated with a fix, and it breaks the best thing about the app.

Second Gear, maker of the popular iOS text editor Elements, has announced its next app, Photos+. Pitched as “the best way to manage photos on your phone,” Photos+ looks like it’s trying to take on Apple’s default Photos app.

The app has been submitted for approval in the App Store, and it looks promising. 

When it comes to Christmas shopping, procrastinating is a long standing American tradition. So to let you know how long you’ve got until you absolutely have to place your Christmas orders, Apple has posted a new guide detailing the estimated shipping times on all of its products.

Apple announced that the Online Apple Store will be offering free shipping on all orders from now until December 22nd, but according to the guide many of Apple’s most popular products need to be ordered a full week before the 25th if you want it to be waiting under the tree on Christmas morning.

According to a new report from IBM, the greed consumer-driven shop-fest known as Black Friday.

The report shows a new high for online sales for this 2013 reporting period, as well as a soaring rate of mobile shopping, in which folks used smartphones to browse for deals while people were more likely to complete purchases with tablets.

The most interesting finding, however, was how much more iOS users spent than those on Android. Take that, Google!

We’re big fans of Apple’s Pages app on iOS here, as it allows us to create and edit good-looking documents easily and on the go. Pages’ stunning array of templates, combined with the ease of use associated with an app built by Apple itself for its flagship touchscreen device, make it a must-have app on anyone’s iPad.

Color us excited, then, when we heard about a hidden feature in Pages that lets us delete backgrounds from photos right from within the app itself. Instant Alpha is a super helpful feature when we need to get rid of a large solid color background without dropping the image into an editing program first.

Fingerpainting on an iPad isn’t taken too seriously by most the world but iPad artist Kyle Lambert has blown us away with some us his creations, and now he’s back with one of the most detailed iPad finger paintings we’ve ever seen.

Kyle’s incredible painting of Morgan Freeman took over 200 hours of work and an astonishing 285,000 brushstrokes to complete using just his fingers and the app Procreate. To give you a sense of the amount of detail that went into the project Kyle recorded a time lapse of the creation process so you can see each freckle and grey hair sprout up.

Take a look:

Developer Frogmind has just updated its award-winning iOS game, Badland. The update is the conclusion to the Day II story-based levels, with 10 new levels and 30 new missions to accomplish, along with seven new Game Center achievements.

The final tally, then, of levels in Badland is now 80, fully double what the game started with back in April.