Emoji are the smiley-face characters you can add to text and chat messages, and those symbols are included with OS X and iOS. All you need to know is where to look. All we ask is that you use your Emoji responsibly.

If you routinely need to use the same settings when printing documents from your Mac it quickly becomes a pain to make those changes every time. Turns out OS X has had a feature to save your custom print settings for a long time, and it's hiding in plain sight.

Sandro Cuccia shows you how to undock and split your onscreen iPad keyboard – capabilities introduced in iOS 5. Whether or not you are a “thumb typist,” these features will help speed up your typing while making it more comfortable to use the virtual keyboard.

Sometimes you need to add special information into your Contacts program, such as a person's job title, his spouse's name, or his anniversary date. You can put that kind of stuff into the notes, sure, but you can also add new fields into your cards as you need them (and even customize them!). After all, nothing says "totally NOT creepy" quite like remembering every little detail about the people around you, right? On that note, we're going to be sending your niece a birthday card this coming Tuesday.

Photographers can be a picky bunch. "The lighting's all wrong!" "My images have a bluish cast!" "I didn't capture the true essence of my burrito!" OK, that last one may only apply on Twitter. In any case, iPhoto has a nifty way to copy the adjustments you've made to one picture—such as exposure level, saturation, and temperature—and paste them onto other images, so you don't have to click through the same options 47 times. We'll tell you how, but only if you promise not to tweet pictures of your lunch anymore.

The Preview application is included with every Mac. Among other things, this useful utility allows you to annotate your PDF files with highlighted text, shapes, lines, arrows, text boxes, sticky notes and more. Sandro Cuccia shows you how.

In this article, Melissa Holt will cover a few special features you can take advantage of using your Apple TV remote—jumping ahead by chapter, for example, or turning closed captioning on right from within a movie. Also, she'll go over how to set up a third-party remote to control your Apple TV. There's so much info in here, your brain may explode. (TMO is not responsible for brain explosions.)

Java has been showing its security flaws a lot lately, pushing some OS X users to remove the platform from their Macs. Killing Java outright is great for some Mac users, but there are plenty that need it for apps like Photoshop and InDesign, so simply disabling it in your Web browser is a nice compromise, and it's easy to do.

Did you know that you can ask Siri to update you on your route when you're using the turn-by-turn navigation on your iOS device? You can. So if you miss what she said about where your next turn is, you can get her to repeat it without having to look away from the road. Handy and potentially life-saving! These kinds of tips don't come along every day, people.

Mac Geek Gab listener John needs a new external hard drive for his growing iTunes library. Will a cheap USB 2.0 drive be fast enough, or would it be better to go with a FireWire 800 or Thunderbolt drive? We examine the difference between the interfaces so that John can decide what best fits his needs.