I was asked over the weekend to jailbreak a friend's iPhone so they could use the camera flash for alerts. There was a time when hacking your iPhone was the only way to use the camera flash for visual alerts, but times have changed. Now that's just another system setting.

You know those email addresses that you've sent to in the past? The ones that you misspelled or no longer need? Well, you can prevent your iOS 6 device from offering them as suggestions when you're composing, just like you can on your Mac. We're pretty excited about this, as now we can get rid of all of those ".con" addresses we've accidentally emailed over the years. Hey, we never claimed to be rocket scientists.

What if you could just swipe sideways to switch between apps on your iPad?  Well, you can!  John Martellaro shows you how to perform this most innocent of finger gestures.

If you'd like to assign a place to images in iPhoto, there are a few ways you can go about it. One method in particular—copying and pasting the location data—makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The other ways are OK too, we suppose. For all of the details, come on in and read this tip.

You have a Mac and an Apple TV, but sometimes you want to watch your movies and TV shows on your iPad. How do you do that without syncing videos to your iPad? It's pretty easy once you enable Home Sharing.

Ever have a bunch of files you want to rename? Maybe you received a group of documents from your Windows-using friend that have some wonky text in them, or maybe you want to serialize and date some pictures? Automator, built right into your Mac, makes this so easy you'll scratch your head twice; once for not having done this with Automator in the past, and a second time if you've never used Automator before because you'll see how easy and powerful it is.

In addition to 3rd party app data, iCloud also stores data for a few Apple apps and services, and if this data gets corrupted you can wind up with a very unstable iPhone (or iPod or iPad). Unfortunately Apple doesn't provide a way to let you tell iCloud to reset this data. Short of permanently disabling "Documents & Data" syncing with iCloud, the only way to fix this is to delete the offending data from the iCloud (Mobile Documents) folder on your Mac and reboot your iOS device.

Got something to hide? Sure you do. Wanna know how to disguise that fact from anyone who may use your Mac? You can do so easily, so you'll never have to answer pesky questions about what you've hidden and why. And we here at TMO would never judge you for needing to hide files. They're Christmas present ideas, right?

We've mentioned this a few times recently in conjunction with Google shutting down their Reader service, but for those of you who weren't aware, Google offers a service called Google Takeout which allows you to download all your data from every Google service you're using. It's super-easy to use and gives you your data in industry-standard formats, making it easy to view and edit your data almost anywhere.

In this tip, Melissa Holt will tell us about how to disable the screen flash—either temporarily or permanently—and the three-second countdown in Photo Booth. So when you're saving those weird warped images of yourself on the machines in the Apple Store, you'll know how to do it discreetly and quickly. C'mon, we know we're not the only ones who do that.