Wifi assist
So there is a new feature that if your wifi is even a little off, it will switch to your cellular to speed things up, this is great unless you watch movies on your device. A movie will burn through 1 gigabyte of your dataplan every 1-4 hours. So even if you have a lot of gigabytes on your plan, you will most likely get whacked at the end of the month for some overage!
So there are 2 ways to fix this, go turn off 'wi-fi assist' in the cellular tab at the bottom, or carefully turn off any app from using the cellular data that uses a lot of bandwidth like netflix.
http://time.com/money/4050384/iphone-ios-9-wifi-data-overages/
Bird tracking
Cornell has a bird tracking app called Merlin
http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org
And supposedly only works on PC's is there new upload a picture of a bird webpage
http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/photo-id/
Of course the Audubon society has their own app for $10 to help you figure out that bird...
http://www.audubonguides.com/field-guides/bird-identification-app.html
Ipad as a second monitor
Why would you use your ipad as a $700 tiny monitor? Because you probably already have one and you most likely are not using it at the same time your using your mac...
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1029827032
There are a ton of apps that do the same thing, some work over the Wifi, some require to be plugged in. All of them are a little slow and you would never want to play a game on the second monitor.
Hide the menu Bar
El capitan lets you hide the menu bar,
Also if you click and hold on the green dot, it give you the option for split screen.
Dubsmash
dubsmash looked pretty funny
PDF Maps
Tracking and Cookies and Ads, Oh My
IOS 9 lets you add an ad blocker to Safari,
Cookies
So at first there were cookies, and people went to turn off the cookies on all their browsers, and that broke virtually every modern webpage so almost everybody browses with cookies turned on again.
Tracking
Cookies used to be just used for the website you were on, now they follow you around everywhere, most browsers let you 'turn off' tracking, but it only sends the webpage a singal that you would rather not be tracked, it doesn't acutally prevent them from tracking you:
http://lifehacker.com/everywhere-you-can-enable-do-not-track-1006138985
Knowing who is tracking you:
If you care to know that the one webpage you go to is acutally telling 27 webpages that you are visiting this particular webpage, there are programs for that, on IOS there is Ghostery
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ghostery/id472789016?mt=8
How does it get paid? Ghostery actually collects data on all the ads that it blocks for you, and gets paid by the advertisers on how many ads were blocked this month by ghostery....
If that is still too much tracking there are paid services:
For the PC, and mac there is
Discconect me goes one step further and lets you browse from a VPN to hide where you location is.
Ad Blocking
Virtually all ad blockers will also try to stop the tracking, and now that IOS support blocking, there is a list of blockers out there.
If you didn't want to mess with Safari, you can download a browser that acutally blocks the ads, but it does not block much by default, you have to turn it on:
Adblock browser by Eyeo
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock-browser/id1015653330?mt=8
Please go into settings, adblock plus, more blocking options. There you can turn off Tracking if you want to, Tracking blocking is not turned on by default!
The new ad blockers will speed up your browsing a lot, so here is a website that guaged how much each one worked:
http://lifehacker.com/the-ios-ad-blockers-that-speed-up-your-browsing-the-mos-1732345592
Their favorite was 1blocker because it is the fastest, if you want simple, crystal is the easiest.
I picked Purify mostly because it is still easy to use and you can whitelist websites that you need to go to, but don't work with a blocker.
One thing that is a pain is that you have to turn on the adblocker before it will work, and most of them don't have everyting turned on by default. Also if you use more than one, it will slow down safari to the slowest one.
There is a shortcut in Safari, if you click and hold the refresh with your finger it will let you pick Reload without the contect blockers, or reload the desktop site!
Also in the past I have gone over
Ublocker: this one is not as aggressive as some of the other blockers.
Adblock: this trys very hard to block everything!
List of things you can do in order of ease of use:
1 . Turn on 'do not track' that is built in to every web browser http://lifehacker.com/everywhere-you-can-enable-do-not-track-1006138985
2. Try incognito mode, it will delete all the cookies when you are done
3. Try the adblocker, they also try to block trackers
4. Go for the gold, use a program that claims to use TOR, Onion routing, or VPN. These make it look like you are browsing from another computer!
Siri
There are some new cool things you can do in Siri, here are a few:
http://lifehacker.com/all-the-new-stuff-you-can-ask-siri-in-ios-9-1732886608
Upgrading an old mac
The reason a macbook air feels so fast is the SSD, the newest macbook airs (2013 and newer) have excruciatingly expensive SSD's which are wicked fast, but are really expensive.
The only easy way to get more space on your macbook air is if you have an extra usb slot and put a usb thumb drive in
http://lifehacker.com/five-best-usb-3-0-flash-drives-1733112413
The sandisk looks the most interesting, it barely will stick out of your computer!
If you have an older macbook air, you can pop out the chip and put a new one in, but you have to be real carefull yo get the right one.
So if you have the old white macbook, it is really easy to pop out your hard drive and put an SSD, this is the only one that lists it as 'easy'
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Core+2+Duo+Hard+Drive+Replacement/514
If you have an old Macbook Pro these are relativily easy (they say moderate) to crack open an put an SSD instead of your stock hard drive:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Early+2011+Hard+Drive+Replacement/5119
The mac mini looks like more of a pain, but still doable
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+Mini+Mid+2011+Hard+Drive+Replacement/6422
Once you get to a newer IMAC, forget it!
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+SSD+Replacement/15758
They practically have the surgeon general warning that it's hazardous to your health...
You are better off buying an external enclosure, if your mac has usb 3.0, that is the cheapest route, thunderbolt is the fastest, but most expensive. Firewire would be better than USB 2.0.
PC programs that are now on the mac
Unfortunately the mac is getting more of the problems PC's have had for a while, some programs that were good on the pc that are probably good on the mac are
Malwarebytes
https://www.malwarebytes.org/antimalware/mac/
Did a good job of cleaning my sons computer
Ccleaner
https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download
Is just like all the other tools that clean out all the 'stuff'