Tips/How To - Macenstein

How to: Reformat an SD card to get back all the space you lost when you screwed up making your Raspberry Pi RetroPie disk

reformat SD card to reclaim space

Because I’m a good boy who must not be denied, I recently treated myself to a Raspberry Pi 4 with the idea of loading RetroPie on it and making myself a kick-ass gaming system circa 1994. Really, all I wanted to play was Intelligent Qube for the PS1, Populous from the Genesis, and Tetris and Dr. Mario from the SNES. Of course in the process I made a few mistakes, the worst... Read More

HOW TO: Stop your iPhone 7 / 7 Plus’s screen from vibrating when playing audio

iPhone 7 screen vibrate

I’m not going to go into how underwhelmed I’ve been with iOS 10 and the iPhone 7 Plus here, but let’s just say among the more annoying “features” of the latest round of Apple updates is the incredibly annoying vibration of the screen when playing music out of the iPhone’s speakers. You may recall one of the few selling points of the iPhone 7 and... Read More

How To: Get rid of Safari’s Spinning Beach Ball

Fix Safari Beach Ball

There’s dozens of reasons as to why you might be getting a spinning beach ball when visiting certain web pages in Safari, and there are also dozens of solutions you COULD try. I know this because I tried them all while trying to figure out why web pages in general, but Yahoo’s Pro Football Pick ’em and Amazon.com in particular, were giving me more beachballs than... Read More

How To: turn off predictive text in iOS 8

I’m usually pretty good about giving Apple’s “new way” of doing things a chance. Whether it was the dual scroll arrow on the bottom of Finder windows, or the inverse scrolling on the MacBook’s touchpad, my motto has always been, “Well, Apple must have researched this, so let’s see if this is as good, better, or at least not worse than the... Read More

How to: Get your 30-inch Apple Display to work with your new Mac Pro

What’s another $100 when you’ve already spent $10,000 on a Mac Pro, am I right? Here’s another tip from my “this might only affect me but I’ll throw it out there anyway” department (and I suppose this could also be filed under “First-World-Problems” too)… So after over 2 months of waiting, I finally received my super cool Mac... Read More

How to: Put up big numbers in Samurai Siege alliance wars

Samurai Siege

By far the best thing about Samurai Siege is the Alliance wars, where you work alongside your fellow alliance members, trying to put up more war points than your rival alliances. Of course the WORST thing about these wars is the long wait times to rebuild your army so you can attack again. I figured I would take a quick minute to share MY tactic when battling, which allows me to... Read More

How To: Restore your iPhone when you get the Error “Unknown Error 3000” or “An unknown error occurred (4027)”

Here’s another tip that probably will not benefit many of you, but hopefully for the few who run into this problem this post will save you some fraction of the time I wasted figuring this out. So today Apple released the Gold Master (GM) build of iOS 7 to developers, allowing those of us with developer accounts to get the final build a few weeks earlier than the rest of the... Read More

How To: Get your mouse’s right-click back in OS X 10.7.5

Let’s file this tip under the “things that may only help one other person in the world” category, like my “HOW TO FIX “THE DISC CAN’T BE BURNED, BECAUSE THE DEVICE FAILED TO CALIBRATE THE LASER POWER LEVEL FOR THIS MEDIA” ERROR” article (which actually appears to have helped quite a few of you). Today’s problem is as follows: After doing... Read More

Geek up the tree with this paper craft Happy Mac

Paper Craft Happy Mac

Thanks to “The Man” (the Fireman, that is) this year I have finally stopped using candles to light up my Christmas tree. Sure, it takes away from the strict 1800’s traditions I like to follow, but on the plus side it blows wide-open the opportunity for safely covering my tree in flammable paper ornaments. And what could be cuter or more flammable than this vintage... Read More

How to: Get LAN multiplayer working again in Minecraft

Minecraft LAN not working

For many of us, the 1.4.4 Minecraft update broke the ability to host and play games locally on our home network. When choosing to “Start a LAN World”, we would be told our game was being hosted on “0.0.0.0:59922” instead of “192.168.1.7:59922”, and those people attempting to join us received “Connection Refused” errors. Mojang has... Read More

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