From The Tips Box: Magnetic Macs, Slow Downloads

Readers offer their best tips for taking pictures with the iPhone, screening telemarketer calls, and quickly updating iOS.

Give Telemarketers a Silent Ringtone to Easily Avoid Them

Georgecarlinjr shares another great tip for avoiding telemarketers:

After creating a contact entry for all repeat telemarketers, don’t forget to add a silent ringtone to that “Spam” contact so you don’t even hear it ring.

Resort to Torrents When Official Downloads Take Too Long

Misterfuzz recommends using BitTorrent whenever possible to avoid traffic jams:

Was just downloading the new release of Ubuntu and it was lagging a bit, probably due to a pretty large load on the servers. ETA was about 3 hours so I decided to try my luck with the torrent. The whole image was done in less than 10 minutes.

Moral of this story: Get around lagging servers w/ torrent downloads, if available.

This may be obvious to some, but less obvious to others. Also, a lot of times, you can search for a (legal) torrent and find ones you didn’t even know existed.

Use Paper Clips to Store Notes, Reminders on an iMac’s Magnetic Bezel

Daniel makes good use of his iMac’s magnetic monitor:

Here’s one I’ve been using for years, but seems to shock everyone that comes into my office (even longtime Mac users). As you probably know, the current (and past few generations) iMac’s have magnets that surround the screen. These suckers are strong, so they hold multiple paperclips as well as business cards, even a letter sized sheet of office paper. My desk is still a cluttered mess, but this helps me have paperclips and reminders in front of me and not mixed in with the crap underneath.

Hold Option to Fix Booting Problems on Some Macs

Misterfuzz shares his solution for a finicky MacBook:

I don’t know if this has affected other users, but when I updated my MBP to 10.7.2 and restarted I got a weird DOS-like screen saying “No bootable device – Insert boot disk and press any key.” It turns out my startup disk had somehow gotten switched to my (blank) Boot Camp partition.

Problem was solved by booting while holding Option (aka Alt) to get back into OS X, then changing the startup disk back to Macintosh HD in System Preferences.