Over at Finer Things, David Chartier points out that Siri can help you play games of chance. Unfortunately, however, the virtual assistant can’t necessarily help you win at said games. Still, you can use Siri when you need to flip a coin or roll a pair of dice.

Say “Flip a coin,” and Siri will either announce that it’s heads or tails. Ask Siri to “roll the dice,” and you’ll get a pair of numbers between one and six. You can’t ask Siri to roll a single die. Or rather, you can, but you’ll still get two numbers back.

Hardcore role playing game enthusiasts will need a separate app or actual dice hardware to roll dice with more than six sides; Siri’s apparently not into D&D.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Do you love TextEdit for its simplicity and elegance? Have you ever thought that it’d be great to use it in full screen mode? Here’s how to achieve that. Apple has released TextEdit’s source code as an example of an Xcode project; with Xcode installed, you’ll be able to manufacture a version of TextEdit with full screen support.

Open TextEdit.xcodeproj and on the left, find the Interfaces folder and select the file DocumentWindow. Then, select the window; make sure you select the window itself and not one of the objects contained in it. On the right, you can see the different inspectors Xcode provides. You’ll want to select the fourth, the Attributes inspector. There are a lot of changeable attributes of the window available, but what we’re interested in is the full screen support. Change that to “Primary Window”. Build and run the application. Presto, you have full screen support!

To get the finished, executable application, locate “TextEdit.app” in the f …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

iOS 6 introduced Do Not Disturb, but some of us were annoyed by its implementation: Though the feature silenced iOS notification sounds while your iPhone or iPad were sleeping, those noises still blasted out when the device was in use. If that’s not what you want to have happen, iOS 7 has the solution.

Armed with this hint, Do Not Disturb will empower you to use your iOS device in a room with sleeping people, or in a meeting where you’re supposed to be paying attention, without fear that a bleep or bloop will bother those around you.

Head over to the Settings app, and tap on Do Not Disturb. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and set Silence to Always, instead of Only While iPhone Is Locked. From now on, Do Not Disturb works regardless of whether your iPhone is awake and in use, whenever the mode is enabled.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

iOS 7’s new design seemed to cause some spacing issues in Messages, especially on the iPhone. Where you formerly could see the full names of the people you texted, iOS 7 shows only a first name, or perhaps a first name and last initial. When you know as many Dans as I do—even as many Dan M.’s as I do—that just won’t do.

There’s a fix, though the setting isn’t where you might expect.

In the Settings app, tap on Mail, Contacts, Calendars. and then scroll way down to the Contacts section. Under that header, tap on Short Name. For my purposes, I turned off both Short Name and Prefer Nicknames. Now, Messages shows the full names of the contacts I’m sending messages to, shortening the button labels at the top as necessary to make everything fit.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

In iOS 7, Siri can toggle a lot of settings: Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, and more. And the virtual assistant also gives quick access to more granular settings.

Tell Siri something like, “Change the brightness,” and the brightness slider will appear onscreen, ready for you to adjust. Of course, you could always simply drag up Control Center instead, but who doesn’t like a virtual minion to do their brightness-adjusting bidding?

Source: Mac OSX Hints

One powerful new feature in the Settings app lets you see how much data your apps are using over your iPhone’s cellular connection. You can even block specific apps from accessing data over your cellular connection if you prefer, limiting them to Wi-Fi-based data access only.

To find the options, launch Settings, and tap on Cellular.

Scroll down past all the Personal Hotspot, Call Time, Cellular Data Usage, and other options, and you’ll get to a Use Cellular Data For section.

The list is sorted alphabetically, unfortunately, and not by cellular data consumption. But you can see how much data each app has used over your iPhone’s cellular connection, and use the green slider to disable certain apps from using cellular data at all.

You can tap on System Services to see how much cellular data is used by system components that you can’t prevent from using the cellular connection, like DNS services, Time & Location, Siri, mapping, networking, and such.

You can reset …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Ever wanted to remove all events prior to a given date from your calendar? Well, there’s a script for that. This Applescript prompts you for a pivot date and removes all events prior to this date from your Calendar database.

display dialog “Please set the pivot date. (Events earlier than the pivot date will be deleted.)” default answer “01-01-2010” with icon note
set dateLimit to (date the (text returned of the result))
display dialog “This might take a few minutes.” giving up after 2

tell application “Calendar”
set cals to every calendar whose writable is true
set r to {}
repeat with c in cals
set event_list to every event in c
repeat with e in event_list
if start date of e is less than dateLimit then
set r to r end if
end repeat
end repeat
if the number of items in r > 1 then
display dialog “Nothing to delete.”
else
display dialog “Done. Found ” & (n …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

In iOS 6, you could tap the Edit button in Messages to delete or forward one or more messages from a text/iMessage conversation. There’s no Edit button in iOS 7’s version of Messages.

Here’s the work around: Tap and hold on any speech bubble in your conversation. A popover menu appears. Tap on the More button, and now you’re in editing mode. You can check as many messages as you’d like with the round checkboxes (checkcircles?) that appear, and then tap either the trash can icon at the bottom left, or the forward button at the bottom right.

There’s also a Delete All button at the upper left to wipe out the entire conversation history from this editing mode.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

The Messages app in iOS 7 doesn’t introduce much in the way of new functionality from iOS 6—though it does sport a dramatically different look.

While iOS 7 shows timestamps in between conversation breaks, you might sometimes want to do know precisely what time a given message arrived. There’s an easy way to find out:

Simply swipe across a conversation in Messages from right to left. As you drag, you’ll reveal per-message timestamps. They slide away as you release your swiping finger.

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Epson requires the user to download drivers for their printers from Apple. Often, Apple Software Update will report the drivers are not available at this time and send the user to Epson. Finding current drivers is difficult and registering the printer to the newly installed drivers requires one simple step…not covered in any instructions.

First, the user must be have an admin account. Download the drivers from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1398 and open the install package. Follow the instructions to install the drivers.

Second, shut down the system and plug the printer in via USB.

Third, restart and log into an admin account.

Forth, (the simple, overlooked step) DISCONNECT FROM INTERNET

Fifth, If your system offers a dialog to add your printer, follow the instructions. If not, then open System Preferences/Printers & Scanners. Click on the + to add your printer.

OSX, unconnected from the Internet, should find the drivers you installed in the first step.
…

Source: Mac OSX Hints