By Dan Moren

February 16, 2016 11:48 AM PT

Quick Tip: Retrieve a forgotten password for a Wi-Fi network

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Surely this has happened to you¹: You’re on a protected Wi-Fi network and somebody asks you for the password to log on, but you can’t remember what it is. It’d be great if you could just easily look up that password and hand it over, right?

Fortunately, if you’re on your Mac, you can–as long as you’ve stored said password in your keychain by selecting the “Remember this network” option when you joined.² Here’s how.

In the Utilities subfolder of Applications you’ll find a handy app called Keychain Access. Open that sucker up and type the name of the network you’re currently on–which you can find by clicking on the Wi-Fi icon in your menu bar or going to the Network system preference pane–in the search box at the top right. You should see at least one option for an “AirPort network password” pop up³.

Double-click on the entry and you’ll get a little more information. Click the checkbox next to “Show password” and you’ll be prompted to enter the password for the keychain (which is likely the same as your user account’s password). Once you’ve done that, the network password will appear as plaintext in that field. Copy and paste it, write it on a piece of paper, read it to somebody–go nuts.

Alternatively, when you’re in that list of entries, you can also right-click on the entry and choose Copy Password to Clipboard. Once again, you’ll be prompted to enter your keychain password, but you can then go ahead and paste it anywhere.

Alas, you can’t currently do this on iOS, but if your iOS device is using iCloud Keychain and syncs with your Mac, you should still be able to retrieve any network passwords you’ve used on your iPhone or iPad via Keychain Access.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

February 16, 2016 8:07 AM PT

Prompt 2.5 is a terminal multitasker’s dream

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

I may not be a “hardcore” command-line junkie, but I am definitely an enthusiast, and on iOS that enthusiasm is best embodied by Panic’s Prompt, which has just gotten an impressive new update to version 2.5.

iPad users–especially Pro-toting folks–will appreciate Prompt’s new multitasking features, which include split-screen and Slideover support in iOS 9. And iPhone 6s and 6s Plus users can now 3D Touch Prompt’s icon from the home screen to get access to their three most recent servers.

For multitaskers on all devices, Prompt’s addition of tabs will be most welcome. You can now easily switch back and forth between multiple connections–including more than one connection to the same favorite server.

Those who love terminal chic have more options too, including the ability to choose light and dark themes for the app independently of light, dark, or Panic themes for the terminal itself, as well as four different fonts.

There’s a ton more in this update, including better support for SSH keys, servers that show up in Spotlight searches, an improved palette of special keyboard keys, and a whole bunch more. It’s a great app that’s just gotten even better, and it’s well worth the $8.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

February 16, 2016 6:57 AM PT

Quick Tip: Adjust startup sound volume

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

When I visited my parents this weekend, they–as ever–had their fair share of technology questions for me to resolve. In particular, my mom wondered if there was any way to adjust the volume of the startup chime for her iMac, which was quite loud. I was a little puzzled, since she has speakers connected to the Mac and they’re generally off, but she said the sound seemed to be coming from the iMac’s own speakers. Fortunately, a little digging yielded a tip from good old Mac OS X Hints.

Long story short, even if you have external speakers connected to your Mac, OS X still has a volume level for the internal speakers. But, if you go to System Preferences > Sound and select the Output pane, you might not see an option to adjust the internal speaker volume if your external speakers are still plugged in.

So here’s the fix: unplug the speakers and wait until you see the option for internal speakers. Then adjust the volume using the slider at the bottom, which will control how loud the startup chime is–if you don’t want a startup chime at all, just lower the volume all the way or select Mute. Afterwards, you can plug the external speakers back in and, if need be, adjust their output level separately.

And voilà: your Mac’s startup chime will now stay at the level you want it.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

February 12, 2016 8:02 PM PT

Gravitational Waves

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

There are some amazing stories out there about the confirmed discovery of gravitational waves announced yesterday:

• The New York Times
• The Atlantic
• The New Yorker
• one more from The New York Times
• one more from The Atlantic

Yesterday a bunch of people asked me, when I retweeted a bunch of items about the announcement, what this discovery meant and why it mattered.

It’s two things. First, testing theories is one of the most important things about science. While gravitational waves have been assumed for ages, they were thought to be unmeasurable for a very long time. The result announced this week is experimental validation of a 101-year-old scientific theory that has dramatically changed our understanding of the universe. When you see people talking about Einstein being validated, this is what they’re talking about.

But the other thing is even more exciting: This isn’t the end of the story, but the beginning. The LIGO project didn’t just prove a scientific theory, it listened to faint ripples in the universe and observed the collision of two black holes a billion light-years away. (Our entire galaxy is only 100,000 light years across.) We now know details of an event that occurred very long ago and very far away, because we built an instrument that could listen for it.

We learned about the universe from visible light. We learned more when we built telescopes to see the visible light more closely. Then we built other telescopes to view the universe in electromagnetic wavelengths outside of visible light—radio waves, infrared light, ultraviolet, even gamma rays. And we learned much, much more.

Now we have another kind of telescope, one that listens to the very fluctuation of space itself. And we’ll learn even more about our universe because of it. That’s very exciting, because every time we look into a place in the universe we’ve never seen before, we see something unexpected that teaches us something new about how our world works.

By Dan Moren

February 11, 2016 12:44 PM PT

Forbidden Desert comes to the iPad

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Among our favorite games of last year was Forbidden Desert, a cooperative game where you and your cohorts attempt to survive a crash-landing in a desert, while building a flying ship to escape. The board game is super fun, and I recommend checking it out, but good news for those who don’t like punching out cardboard pieces: it’s now on the iPad as well.

The adaptation is the work of Button Mash Games, which previously did the same for Forbidden Desert’s precursor, Forbidden Island¹, and it brings the same attention to detail to Forbidden Desert.

Supporting pass and play for 2-5 players, Forbidden Desert looks great on the iPad–I particularly enjoy the whimsical animations that accompany the use of the gadgets you uncover during the game–and play is faithful to the cardboard version, albeit with fewer pieces to keep track of. You can also save games in progress, which is definitely improvement upon the “don’t touch the dining room table” method of my youth. The only thing sadly lacking is online play, though that’s understandable: as a game, it really thrives on the in-person experience.

Personally, I’m a sucker for a good coop game², and Forbidden Desert ticks all the boxes: it’s definitely beatable, but it’s still a challenge. I’ve certainly lost as many times as I’ve won, if not more, and that’s generally starting on the Normal setting.

If wandering in the desert sounds like fun to you, well, you might want to have your head examined. Or perhaps you’re exactly the kind of person who will also enjoy Forbidden Desert. You can grab it in the App Store for $7.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

February 10, 2016 11:07 AM PT

Taking screenshots of iOS features in motion

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

We tech writers need to think about screenshots more than most people, it’s true. While writing up a story this week, I realized I needed a screenshot of a particularly hard-to-capture feature: swipe typing with SwiftKey. The third-party keyboard lets you enter words by swiping from key to key without ever lifting your finger, and it illustrates this by showing you a trail of where your finger has been. Trouble is that trail “evaporates” quicker than I can take a screenshot. What to do?

Good old QuickTime Player to the rescue! Since Yosemite, you’ve been able to use the app to record the screen of your iOS device. Just plug your iPhone or iPad into your computer with the USB-to-Lighting cable, open up QuickTime Player, and choose File > New Movie Recording. Then from the dropdown menu next to the Record button, choose your phone from under Camera.

Voilà! Now everything you can see on your phone’s screen is mirrored in QuickTime Player; just hit record to create a screencast. For my purposes, I simply selected a frame of my recording that showed the keyboard in mid-swipe and took a screenshot of the QuickTime Player window. But for an animated GIF version of the screen capture, you can just export the screencast and run the resulting movie through GIF Brewery, as I’ve done here. In my experience, it’s by far the easiest way to create screenshots of iOS’s more kinetic features.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]