Computer^News^FAQ

Stock widget

1. Open the Stocks app from the iPhone home screen, or tap the Stock widget in Notification Center.
2. Tap the ‘i’ information button in the lower right-hand corner.
3. Tap the + button in the upper left-hand corner to add a new stock. You can search for stocks by stock ticker or company name.
4. Tap Done to finish.

Weather widget

1. Open the Weather app from the iPhone home screen, or tap the Weather widget in Notification Center.
2. Tap the ‘i’ information button in the lower right-hand corner.
3. From here, you have the option to either use Local Weather (pulled from location services) or add a location manually. For instructions sake, we’ll add a new location. To add a new location, tap the + button in the upper left-hand corner.
4. Search by City, State or ZIP and input your preferred location.

Update: Re-Spring iPhone 4S with Siri

1. Hold down the Home button
2. Say “Restart”

Restart your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad

1. Hold down the Sleep/Wake button until a red slider appears on the screen.
2. Slide your finger across the slide and the iPhone will turn off.
3. Turn the iPhone back on again by pressing the Sleep / Wake button until the Apple logo appears on screen.

Reset your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad

1. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time for at least 10 seconds.
2. Ignore the red slider that appears on the screen and keep holding both buttons until the Apple logo appears.

First: Assess your usage!

Fixing Battery Life

• Restart/reset your device. If you haven’t rebooted in a while, give it a try. There could be a rogue process or something else doing what it shouldn’t be doing, and a restart can often fix that. (Here’s how to reboot)
• Power cycle. About once a month, and certainly if you’re having problems, you should completely drain your iPhone or iPad’s battery — drain it until it shuts down on its own — and then charge it back up to full.
• Restore your device as new. The single biggest cause of battery life problems with iOS 5 occurs when they are restored from backup and not set up as new devices. Whether it’s cruft or corruption, a clean install as a new device — incredible pain in the butt though it may be — is usually the best fix for any battery life issues. This is the nuclear option. You will have to set up absolutely everything again, and you will lose all your saved data like game levels, but in most cases your battery life will be better than ever.
• Go to the Apple Store. Sometimes you do get a lemon, or your iPhone or iPad develops a real problem that only Apple can solve by either swapping it for another device or otherwise figuring out a fix.

Saving battery life

• Turn off Siri’s Raise to Speak. Go to Settings, General, Siri. Readers keep telling us this has helped them with battery life due to accelerometer issues.
• Turn of Ping. Go to Settings, General, Restrictions, (Enable Restrictions). Again, readers say this prevents undue push. And who uses Ping anyway?
• Turn off Location Services. Go to Settings, Location Services, and turn off any app you really don’t need tracking or using your location. You can also turn off system settings, and location based time seems popular with our readers as a battery suck.
• Turn off Push Notifications. Likewise, go to Settings, Notifications, and turn off any app you don’t care to be alerted about.
• Turn of Notification Center widgets. Stocks, and particularly weather in Notification Center seem to be causing our readers some battery grief. Since weather can be location-based now, the potential is there for more battery abuse.
• Kill power hungry apps. Double-click the Home Button to activate the multitasking dock, hold your finger on an app to enter “jiggly” mode, and kill any apps that might be running in the background, especially VoIP (like Skype), streaming audio (like Pandora), or navigation (like TomTom).)

• Set Auto-Lock to 1 minute
• Turn off any extra sounds, like keyboard clicks
• Turn off the iPod EQ
• Use headphones instead of the speaker if you have to listen to audio or music
• Turn down the screen brightness
• Turn off Bluetooth when not using it
• Turn off Wi-Fi when not using it
• Turn off 3G when not using it (Not possible on iPhone 4S)
• Set all email, calendar, and contacts accounts to “Fetch” (turn off Push)

Plug in your device

        It was previously very difficult and even unreliable to password protect Time Machine backups in older versions of Mac OS X. In Lion, however, Apple has made encrypting backups as easy as checking a single box.
        Most Mac users have no need to encrypt their Time Machine backups, but those who are extra careful or have sensitive information on their computers will appreciate the peace of mind. After all, if someone got their hands on your external hard drive and plugged it into their Mac, they could easily grab all the files from your Time Machine backup. It’s literally that easy – no hacks or workarounds necessary. That’s why encryption might be worth taking a look at, if you’re concerned about security.
        Both new and existing Time Machine backups can be set up with encryption. There are a couple important things to keep in mind before password protecting your backup, though. First, Time Machine uses FileVault 2 to encrypt the disk, so it will only be readable on Macs using Lion. Older Macs won’t be able to access the data. Second, encryption is only available for directly connected backup drives. That’s USB and FireWire only, not Time Capsule or other wireless drives.


       To password protect your backup, follow these easy steps:


Launch System Preferences, then click on the Time Machine icon.


Go to Select Disk and select the disk you’re using for your Time Machine backup.


Check the box next to “Encrypt backup disk” and click the Use Backup Disk button.


Type in a password of your choice. Make sure it’s difficult for others to crack, but easy for you to remember. If you need to restore from your backup in the future and forget this password, you’re going to be out of luck.


        Time Machine will now start encrypting the disk, which will likely take quite a bit of time on the first run. It might be a few hours or even up to a full day, depending on how much data is on the disk. Make sure you can leave your Mac connected to the drive for an extended period of time – you cannot interrupt the process once it starts.

            The second coming of the iPhone 4? Sure enough, Tim Cook just pulled the covers off of the hotly-anticipated iPhone 4S here in Cupertino, making 2011 the first year in the company's current stint in the smartphone business that it chose to launch three new handsets (Verizon's CDMA iPhone 4 included, of course). On the outside the 4S looks exactly like its predecessor, but on the inside it's "all new." Apple has jammed a dual-core A5 CPU inside alongside a new dual-core GPU that supposedly boosts graphics performance by up to 7x.