Block a phone number or contact iPhone

Block a phone number or contact iPhone

There are a few ways that you can block a phone number or contact.

Phone

If you’re in the Phone app under Recents, tap  next to the phone number or contact that you want to block. Scroll to the bottom of your screen, then tap Block this Caller.

FaceTime

If you’re in the FaceTime app, tap  next to the phone number or contact that you want to block. Scroll to the bottom of your screen, then tap Block this Caller.

Messages

If you’re in Messages, open the conversation, tap , then tap the name or phone number. Scroll to the bottom of the Info screen, then tap Block this Caller.

When you block a phone number or contact, they can still leave a voicemail, but you won’t get a notification. Messages that are sent or received won’t be delivered. Also, the contact won’t get a notification that the call or message was blocked.

Manage your blocked phone numbers and contacts

To see the phone numbers and contacts that you’ve blocked from Phone, FaceTime, or Messages:

Phone

Go to Settings > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification.

FaceTime

Go to Settings > FaceTime > Blocked.

Messages

Go to Settings > Messages > Blocked.

From these screens, you can add or unblock contacts or unblock phone numbers.

To add a contact from Phone, go to Settings > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification > Block Contact. Then tap the contact that you want to block. To add a contact from Messages or FaceTime, go to Settings > Messages or Settings > FaceTime, scroll down and tap Blocked, tap Add New, then select the contact that you want to block. To unblock a contact or phone number, swipe left over the number, then tap Unblock.

Filter iMessages from unknown senders

You can filter iMessages from people who aren’t saved in your Contacts.

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To filter iMessages, go to Settings > Messages and turn on Filter Unknown Senders.

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In Messages, you’ll see a new tab for Unknown Senders but you won’t get notifications for these iMessages.

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Report spam or junk in the Messages app

You can report iMessages that look like spam or junk from the Messages app. If you get an iMessage from someone who’s not saved in your Contacts, you’ll see a Report Junk link under the message. Tap the link to forward the sender’s information and the message to Apple.

To report SMS and MMS messages, contact your carrier.

Improving iPhone Battery Life

First thing to do is make sure there are no iOS updates awaiting installation.

If there are, run those.

Make sure you have more than 35% battery (Preferable to plug your phone into charger).

Tap Settings > General > Software Update.

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Tap Download and Install. If a message asks to temporarily remove apps because iOS needs more space for the update, tap Continue or Cancel. Later, iOS will reinstall apps that it removed.

Next:..

Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and take a look at the list. Do you really need all those apps updating themselves in the background and draining your battery life? Be ruthless and turn off all the apps you don’t need to update automatically. Remember, they’ll still update and work as normal when you fire them up, they just won’t keep running when you’re not using them. If you find that you don’t like the change, you can always head back into this section and toggle the apps back on again.

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Some apps will send you notifications that you don’t really need. Go to Settings > Notification Center and look under Include. Tap on any apps that you don’t need notifications from and choose None under the Alert Style, and then toggle Show in Navigation Center to off and Show on Lock Screen to off.

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You can have your iPhone update Music, Apps, and iOS automatically, but it will eat a lot of battery life. Your iPhone might also choose an inopportune moment to update everything. You can save power and battery life by going into Settings > iTunes & App Store and sliding Use Cellular Data to off, so it only updates on Wi-Fi. You’ll save even more if you just turn the automatic downloads off altogether and update on your own schedule.

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You don’t need AirDrop turned on all the time either, so swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up the Control Center and turn it off until you actually need it.

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Get along without iPad/iPhone Home Button

Home Button not Working on iPhone or iPad?

Here’s how to get along without it.

Extensive usage or actual damage can cause the home button can become unresponsive.

Using your iPod touch, iPhone or iPad without the Home Button CAN still be done via the touch screen.

You may have to restart you device and login freshly to get basic ‘home/start page’

Here’s how:

1. Open Settings.

2. Go to General > Accessibility

3. Scroll down to the section labeled INTERACTION and tap on AssistiveTouch.

4. On the next screen, toggle AssistiveTouch to the green On position.

5. A white circle with a grey box will appear on screen. Tap this circle to expand it to a big box on screen. The square Home button at the bottom of the box functions exactly like the physical home button – you can use it to single tap, double tap, or long press the home button even if there is a hardware problem. The grey box remains visible and usable in all apps.

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This will put a little ‘Circle’ clip_image004 on your screen that when tapped will bring up this menu:

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You will now have a ‘home button’ you can use.

Serious OS-X and iOS Security Vulnerability Completely Opens Up Your ALL Your Secure Communications

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It had been know for MONTHS that there was a serious security flaw in iOS and possibly the latest version of OS X that could allow attackers to surreptitiously circumvent the most prevalent Internet security protocol – TLS/SSL and and Security Certificate validations. The issue is a “fundamental bug in Apple’s SSL implementation,” This can allow attackers to view ANY of your ‘secure’ Web communications. This includes e-mail, banking sites. Facebook etc..

Apple finally released an ‘emergency patch’ to the latest version of iOS last week, but it appears that the flaw affects more than just Apple’s mobile platforms. It actually affects the latest versions of OS X – Apples latest desktop Operating System too!!

If you have an iDevice I’d recommend backing it up; via iTunes or any of the other methods I’ve previously recommended. Then checking for any System Updates. Tap Settings > General > Software Update. Then download and Install to download the update. [Updates might download automatically while your device is connected to Wi-Fi and a power source.]

As for you Desktop computer, well there lies the rub. Apple appears to have at first done the usual – deny, then downplay, then finally admit there is a serious problem and ‘promise a quick fix/patch’. [It’s really crazy that they are able to get away with this so often; I guess those reporting are too busy licking Apple sack….but I digress]

So what to do..

If you use the Desktop Apple Operating System – OS X you should always use the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox for internet browsing to help mitigate some of the possible exposure. [I NEVER use Safari and always recommend to all my clients that they don’t either]. Even if you’ve take the latest update on your iDevice I’d still recommend I’d recommend Chrome for iOS.

Here one of the latest articles I’ve found with a VERY good explanation. You should at least read this! But I’d recommend hitting all my sources.

Be safe folks!

Sources to read 1, 2, 3

Wi-Fi connection issues with Smartphones and devices

Just thought I’d pass this on to those with Smartphone activation or Wi-Fi issues.
About a month ago I had LOADS of problems trying to get two new Samsung Galaxy S4 phones activated.

My Wi-Fi would drop off after just a few moments or minutes at the longest. After a few days, I started to RMA and send back two phones trying to get them to work. Besides some issues with flashing firmware, which I resolved, I could not get the phone(s) to finish setting up because of the data connection problems.

Then I chatted with another geek like me on a tech forum and he said he had problems with his phones on one of his home’s routers.
And, because his Wi-Fi kept disconnecting it caused all kinds of problems during setup. His ‘solution’ was to get a new wireless router.

Since I can’t let things like this beat me I decided to do even more research.
His comment about the router got me to thinking about the routers in my place.
So I turned off the old Linksys with customized DDWRT firmware and tried connecting to my DLink DIR655. Nope. Still had issues with losing connectivity. And I could not finish activating/updating phone.

So, following up on the ‘connection/Wi-Fi’ premise I did some more searching and found two articles.
First one is here.

Key for me in this article was this one line,
"The company suggested that customers using the DIR-655 or the DIR-855 could mitigate the problem in the meantime by logging into the web interface and disabling the Wireless Multimedia Extensions (WME, also known as Wi-Fi Multimedia or WMM)."

I made that one change – disable WMM on the DLink, and the phone stayed connected to WiFi! I was able to finish the carrier/phone activation and commence synching!

The other article, here, mentions upgrading firmware on the DLink:
Haven’t tried the new firmware for the DLink but I probably will soon enough. Here’s to hoping all goes well.

So now here is a catch. iOS 6 (iPhone) supposedly requires WMM compliance. However some are saying that they too get much better speeds and stability by disabling this setting too. You can read about that here. So if you have an iDevice you might want to check into this setting on your router.

Well good luck. Hope this helps some of you all.

Add Gmail Contacts to iOS 5

Though many don’t realize it the process for importing your contacts to your iPhone from Gmail Address Book is quite simple. Getting them OUT of your iPhone can, depending on how their configured, be much more complicated. But that is for another post. I know that many supposed Mac techs and BigBox retailers will want to charge you plenty for this simple procedure, please don’t let them.

So here we are going to assume that your entire address book is connected to your Gmail account. To import/sync them we are going to use iPhone’s Microsoft Exchange configuration. So let’s go:

  • On your iPhone or iPad, open the Settings app.
  • Scroll down to Mail, Contacts, Calendars and select it.

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  • Next, add a new account
  • At the add account screen you’re going to want to select the Microsoft Exchange option. This is how we are going to import your Gmail contacts.

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  • Enter your Gmail address in the email field. Leave the Domain field as “Optional” and fill in your Gmail username (without the @gmail.com) and your password. You can leave the description but remember it so you know what it is later.

Form

  • Click next, the form will update and now include a Server field. In the server field enter m.google.com. Click Next or Done.

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  • It will confirm that you want to sync your mail, contacts, and calendars. Slide these to On for Contacts and Off for the others.  Here we were only concerned with Contacts, BUT you can also synchronize your mail and Calendar too!

Happy computing!

 

Edit: after doing this many times for clients and others I’ve found a guy who created a great video on the above steps! You can watch that here:

Sync Gmail Contacts to iPhone

iDevice updates and backups 04

Just thought I’d bump this post. I just had another person tell me about their iDevice backup woes once again.. I was able to recover some stuff thank goodness. But come one people, for your own sanity, backup your data…..

I’ve written previously about backing up and restoring your iDevice.   I’d like to add a short update to that. Having recently dealt with a few people who have ‘lost’ their data (either just photos or all their settings) after updating to iOS 6. I thought I should re-iterate a few things.

First use iTunes to backup your device (including ‘synching purchases) and make SURE you back up to your computer (and then iCloud if you choose) regularly; I’d recommend at least once a week. Read my previous post on how to use Apple’s iTunes method for that.

Second. As I mentioned before, I HIGHLY recommend using a third party application to copy off all your data; photos, contacts, phone logs, messages etc..

My choice to do that is DiskAid. With this application you can copy off all your data AND remove/delete older data such as photos taking up space. You can also copy all your contacts off (they are exported to a vCard format) that will then let import them into other applications like Outlook or other contact management software! I am always amazed that people will spend hundreds of dollars on a device and not spend any money on backing that data up. Folks most of you will spend more on dinner for two that the cost of this application.

I just got done freeing up 4GB of data on a iDevice that would not update because of ‘not enough available space’. There were hundreds if not thousands of pictures on it. To selectively delete them individually would have taken a very long time. Using DiskAid we just copied the entire Camera Roll off to the PC and removed all of them from the device. By default this user has their pictures already uploading to Instagram too.

After freeing up that space we were successfully able to upgrade to the latest version of iOS. BAM dead simple. And now those pictures and files can be backed up from the computer to an external drive for REAL backup and peace of mind.

UPDATE: DiskAid is now iMazing and works even better! So glad to have access to my iDevice!! I can now do most of the ‘stuff’ Apple doesn’t want me to do – delete whole groups of photos, copy off my call and text logs and update my contacts as I see fit. Yay!

Have fun. Peace out.

Cleanup or Refresh an iDevice and Properly Restore it.

I’ve recently had a few people who had some problems with their iPhones and asked for some help. They were all of a sudden unable to receive calls and texts reliably or at all and or were notified they were running out of space. All were instructed by Apple and/or their carrier (in all three cases it was AT&T but could easily have been others) that they needed to reset their phone to factory settings. Problem is that without properly backing up the device(s), settings, applications and files everything is wiped!

Fortunately it’s pretty easy to back up iDevices and reset them to factory settings then restore the user files and settings such as contacts, call logs and messages. However as I’ve mentioned before Media such as images/videos and other media can sometimes be wiped and lost.

iPhones also have this problem of ‘filling up’ with pictures and videos. The only way to get them off is to manually delete them individually from the phone – a real pain in the anus.

So back to my favorite iDevice backup tool – DiskAid. It has it’s own backup tool that can ‘override’ iTunes backup and works real well. I use it often but some people would rather just use DiskAid to ‘remove’ data from their phone and do their backups in iTunes. So I’ll show that here to show the steps I took.

Get DiskAid and install it on your PC or Mac. And please read my previous post in iDevice backups.

First I used DiskAid to copy all photos and data – Diskaid has the ability to actually ‘SEE’ your data and remove pictures, movies and other items taking up space on your phone.

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This copied off the images and movies to the PC.

Then I deleted a whole bunch of images and movies that were still on the phone to free up loads of space.

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Cleared up to

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The ran the iTunes Backup too.

1. Connect your iOS device to a computer with the latest version of iTunes installed

2. Select your iOS device in iTunes under Devices

3. Right-click (or Control-click) the device and select Back Up

The full iTunes backup can take a while be patient!

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Also make sure you ‘Transfer you purchased items to iTunes:

right-click (Windows or Mac) or Control-click (Mac only) your device in the iTunes Source list, then choose Transfer Purchases from the shortcut menu that appears.

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Then right-click after that is finished and run the ‘Sync “iPhone” one last time for good measure.

Now to ‘clear and restore’ the device.

Click on the ‘Restore’ radio button and choose the last backup you just created. You will be prompted:

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If you have completely backed up, transferred files and synced all should be OK.

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When the restore process has completed, the device restarts and displays the Apple logo while starting up:
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After a restore, the iOS device displays the “Connect to iTunes” screen. Keep your device connected until the “Connect to iTunes” screen goes away or you see “iPhone is activated.”
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Then to restore information from a backup connect your iOS device to the computer with which you normally sync then in iTunes:

Right-click (or Control-click) the device and choose Restore from Backup

Remember some of these steps can take some time – be patient!!

Your device should run much more smoothly after this.

Well hope this helps some. Peace out.

Jailbreak for iOS 5.01 now available

UPDATE #2:

Here is an easy peasy walkthough and video on the iPhone 4s/iPad 2 jailbreak.

They walk through the entire simple process.

I could not imaging owning an iDevice that wasn’t jailbroken. But that is just me. If after doing some research and reading you are fine just doing only what you are told you can do with the device YOU own(Apple’s way or no way) than please keep your device as it is. If you are also terrified of making changes to anything technical then DON”T do anything.

If on the other hand you would like to install applications not available in the iTunes App market, change your phones themes and settings to YOUR liking and have loads more functionality available to you (functioinality actually supported by the Operating System (iOS 5) and hardware). Then I’d recommend the jailbreak.

Please remember to completely back up you device prior to doing anything! Read my other post here for that.

UPDATE
Well that didn’t take long.
The Windows version of ‘Absinthe’ the iOS 5.01 Jailbreak tool from Greenpois0n is now available. The tool works on the iPhone 4S running iOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 and the iPad 2 running iOS 5.0.1. You can read a little more here, or go strait to the download(s):

The New Windows version

The OSX version

[Remember to fully back up your device before using any of these tools. It is very rare that with the great expertise of these developers that anything will go wrong, but as always better to have a backup and not need it than to need it and not have it! Backup backup backup. If you are wondering how read some of my previous posts!]

More detailed news and details from Greenpois0n here.

Looks like the Jailbreak for iOS 5.01 – the operating system on the iPhone 4S and iPad2 is Here now!! The tool is OS X only for now. But a Windows and Linux version are on their way very shortly. The tool works on the iPhone 4S running iOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 and the iPad 2 running iOS 5.0.1. But not any new Beta releases (most of you wouldn’t have that anyways!).

You can read about it here.

A better How-To is here [note the part about the VPN connection at the end!]

What exactly is jailbreaking? Jailbreaking is a hack, or exploit, that brings added functions and features that were not imagined by Apple or restricted. Under recent revisions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act last summer, the process has been legalized in the U.S. on smartphones and tablets.

Jailbreaking allows you to install apps through Cydia (which is, cleverly, Latin for a kind of worm that eats away at apples), which automatically gets installed when you jailbreak your iPhone. Cydia app store is really where all the real action is when you jailbreak. The simplest way to describe it is to call it an app store for jailbroken devices. Like Apple’s App Store, you will find some free and some paid programs.

Some questions often asked:
Q. Does jailbreaking affect the iCloud Backup?
A. No, it’s still a legit iphone tied to a legit icloud account.

Q. What happens if I DO update from the wireless update?
A. Your jailbreak will go bye bye and you’ll have to wait for them to update absinthe to re-do it. [We’re talking about carier Over The Air updates here.]

About the ‘Bricking your device’ warnings many may read or hear: Without some very heavy-handed screwing up, you will not brick an iOS device. If something screws up along the way, chances are it will just be indefinitely detected as being “in restore mode” and you’ll be prompted to restore your phone through iTunes. The only way you could really brick one of these devices is by flashing the device to the point where iTunes won’t even recognize the device as an iOS device. You would have to try really hard to make that happen.

And if you want any more reasons than those I’ve given previously in my blog posts why you might want to Jailbreak you iPhoneiDevice you can check here.

iDevice Backups

If you have an iPhone or other iDevice, you’ve probably wondered at some point how to backup iPhone data. There’s actually a pretty easy way to backup your entire iPhone using the iTunes software. The procedure requires a few steps, but everyone should be able to do it. Hopefully you did this when you 1st got your phone or other iDevice following Apples instructions. But I wanted to point out a few things and some alternative methods for insuring you can access your data. Especially if you have made many additions to your device; pictures taken, music downloaded apps purchased etcetera.

I have found that iTunes is KNOWN TO WIPE YOUR DATA – APPS, PICTURES AND MUSIC if you have not set up the sync/backup correctly!! I can’t tell you how many calls and emails I get from folks who have synced their iDevice only to find all their information has been wiped! And once wiped it is nearly impossible to retrieve (save for expert data recovery services $$).

So let’s start the Apple way:

To start the iPhone/iDevice backup, connect your iPhone to your computer with your USB cable, then start iTunes. Go to the devices list on the left side of the screen, and select your iPhone. You then need to right click on your iPhone, and select “Back Up”. This will start the backup procedure, and will take some time depending on how much data you have stored on your phone. Once the backup is complete, you will now have a complete collection of all your phone data stored on your computer. If your phone should get destroyed, you’ll be able to restore all of your existing data to a new phone. You can read Apple’s tutorial here for how to back up you iDevice here and here.

One thing I don’t like is that iTunes Store and App Store content on your iOS device may not automatically transfer to your computer as you might think by just doing a ‘sync’ or backup with iTunes. You can use the Transfer Purchases option in iTunes to ensure that all iTunes Store and App Store content is transferred to your iTunes library. Read how here.

I have found that getting pictures off of many iDevices – especially phones seems to be a major source of issues. I have used, with great success, many third party applications to ‘grab’ music, photos and videos from iPhones and iDevices for family and friends. If you have an iDevice I couldn’t recommend any more strongly  that you have at least one of these applications in your toolbox! Spend a little $ and get a real solution.

Now my way(s)!

The application that I have used most is DiskAid. It just works and you can do so very much with it! Check it out. It has the ability to do a complete backup of the ENTIRE iDevice, quicker and more thoroughly than iTunes.

Some others I’ve used are:

iPodAccess Mac version or PC version

CopyTrans

iPodRip

And finally a very good freeware application for getting stuff of iDevices to pc is called SharePod.

As a final note if you have an iDevice a must have application is this – Find My iPhone. It is now free and enables you to:

• Locate your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac on a map
• Display a message on the screen
• Play a sound for two minutes at full volume (even if your device is set to silent)
• Remotely lock your device
• Remotely wipe your device to erase your personal data

OK folks be safe and keep your data backed up!