HCS Blog

Normally, when you rotate an iPad, the screen happily flips from portrait (vertical) to landscape (horizontal) orientation as appropriate. Rotating an iPhone has the same effect in some apps, though many are written to work only in one orientation. If you ever end up in a situation where your device’s screen doesn’t rotate when you think it should, the reason is likely that Rotation Lock has been turned on in Control Center. Swipe down from the top-right corner of your screen (or up from the bottom of the screen on a Touch ID iPhone) and disable the Rotation Lock button. You can turn it on again later if you ever want to prevent the screen from rotating temporarily.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Jacephoto)

We’ve become accustomed to our iPhones and iPads switching into Low Power Mode to preserve battery life, and you can enable it manually if you want to reduce power usage for a day. New in macOS 12 Monterey for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is a similar feature, though you must enable it manually. Open System Preferences > Battery, click Battery in the sidebar, and select Low Power Mode. It reduces the screen brightness automatically and may decrease CPU performance. Make sure to turn it off once you don’t need it anymore.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Pascal Kiszon)

Over the past few months, there has been a spate of media reports about how people may have been tracked without their knowledge using AirTags, Apple’s elegant location trackers. Like many mainstream media forays into the tech world, the reports are often short on detail and sometimes unclear on the reality of how the AirTags work. Nor is it clear that there have been many successful cases of AirTag abuse, but the mere fact that people are trying to use AirTags to stalk others is concerning.

Apple put significant effort into preventing such abuses, revolving around three features:

We all have old electronics squirreled away in our drawers and closets. It’s hard to admit that a computer, phone, or peripheral that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars years ago has little or no value. That’s doubly true if it doesn’t work anymore. Once you’ve decided to get rid of that PowerBook 520 from the 1990s or your first digital camera from 2004, resist the urge to toss it in the trash.

In some places, it’s illegal to throw out electronics because they tend to contain heavy metals like mercury, lead, and lithium, plus other hazardous materials that can pollute the air if incinerated or contaminate the ecosystem if buried in landfills. Even if dumping e-waste is not actively illegal in your area, it’s a terrible thing to do. So what can you do instead?

Whether you have guests who want to get on your home Wi-Fi network, customers who need to join your business network, or attendees who want to use your conference network, it’s always fussy to share the network name and password. If an iPhone user has your Apple ID email address in Contacts, their device should automatically prompt you to share your Wi-Fi password, but that won’t work in many situations.

Here’s another option: a QR (Quick Response, if you’re curious) code that, once scanned, lets the person join your network without knowing its name or password. Once you’ve created this QR code, you can print it on a card to share, post it on a bulletin board, or make a custom sign. QR codes are no longer the curiosity they once were, with usage skyrocketing since the pandemic. One estimate suggests that over 83 million US adult smartphone users will scan a QR code in 2022.