Tekee Tim's Tips

Taking a screenshot of your device

If you want to capture some information that’s displayed on your screen, such as a receipt, it can often be helpful to take a screenshot.

Luckily this is easy on all devices, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Captioning photos on your iPad and iPhone

One of the new features in the Photos app on iOS 14 for your iPad and iPhone is the ability to caption photos, this makes it much easier to search back and find exactly the photo(s) that you're looking for.

In this tip, we'll show you how to caption and search for your favourite photos.

Private MAC addresses in iOS 14

One of the great new privacy features in iOS 14 is the ability to use a private MAC (media access control) address on your WiFi networks. This helps you avoid being tracked as you hop from one WiFi network to another (for example, as you're walking around a shopping centre). and in this tip, we'll explain why it's a good thing and also why you may not want to use it under certain circumstances.

Stop your laptops connecting to the wrong WiFi

As you travel around with your laptop, you'll end up connecting to all sorts of WiFi networks and this can cause problems if you're back at home or in the office and there's a WiFi hotspot nearby that your device keeps trying to connect instead of your own connection.

Using multiple desktops in Windows 10

Windows 10 has finally introduced the concept of multiple desktops to all Windows users. It can be very helpful to have multiple desktops on your computer as it means you can have applications open full screen on different desktops and switch between them or group applications together depending on what you use together. We'll show you how to use it here.

Creating a playlist in Apple Music on macOS

Apple replaced iTunes in macOS Catalina with the new Apple Music app. A lot of the functions for music are the same but creating playlists and adding songs is slightly different so we thought it was time to revisit how to make a playlist of your favourite music.

Changing your DNS servers

If you find yourself having intermittent problems with websites loading slowly, email not working and seeing out of date websites, you could be having problems with your DNS servers.

All Internet Providers provide DNS as part of the connection and these convert a website name such as bbc.co.uk into the actual address of the website which is something like 63.194.125.69. Unfortunately the DNS Servers that you get with your Internet connection are usually pretty bad. They can be slow and out of date and we always recommend using better ones.

In this tip, we'll show you have to switch over to using faster and safer DNS on your Mac, Windows PC and your home router.

Using iMessage on iOS and Mac OS

If you have an Apple device and need to send a message to someone else using an Apple device, you can send it using iMessage, Apple's own instant messenger built into the messages app on your Mac, iPhone, iPod touch or iPad

Syncing your Office documents across your devices

If you use Microsoft Office (Word, Excel & PowerPoint) then you can use OneDrive to keep your documents in sync between your devices and allow you to work wherever you are. If you have an Office365 subscription then you already have 1TB of OneDrive space or you can sign up for a free account and get 5GB of space.

Turning off smart quotes

If you're working a lot with websites, you need to stick with standard ASCII characters so that they can be displayed properly on the site. By default macOS uses 'smart quotes' in order to make the quotes look better in a document but these can cause problems if you try to copy and paste the text into a website CMS.
Luckily, it's very easy to turn off smart quotes so that you use standard ASCII characters instead.

Saving an email as a PDF on your iPhone or iPad

Lots of information comes in by email these days, payment receipts, holiday bookings, tickets for concerts, flights etc and it can be handy to save these as a PDF so you can file them away and keep them safe. In today's tip, we'll show you how to do that on your iPhone or iPad.

Get Smart with your filing

If you like to keep your files and emails organised, the Mac has great features to help you do this automatically, with Smart Folders and Smart Mailboxes.

Smart Folders allows you to create a folder on your Mac that looks like a normal folder, but instead of you having to move or copy your files into it, it will ask you for a set of rules and automatically display files that match.