Enable Siri “Raise to Speak” to Hear Command Responses via Ear Speaker
Apr 30, 2013 - Leave a Comment
Siri defaults to speaking responses back through the speakers of the iPhone and iPad, and often quite loudly at that. Though you can control Siri’s volume level independently of general system audio levels, having the voice of Siri be set to a very quiet level isn’t much of a solution if you actually want to hear responses. This is made worse in crowded situations or areas with a lot of background noise, because to hear a response you have to set volume quite high, which has the undesirable side effect of blasting responses to the world and also likely annoying those around you.
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By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, Tips & Tricks - Leave a Comment
The little red badges that appear on app icons stored in the OS X Dock are intended to provide a quick alert and overview of some important notification pertaining to the respective app. Whether it’s the new unread email count, new iMessages, a Calendar event, unfinished Reminders, missed FaceTime calls, or any other number of alerts, the red app badge icon updates with a number and sits atop the apps icon in both the Dock and Launchpad until those given notifications have been addressed. While these can be undeniably useful, there can also be an element of annoyance to those badge icons too, since some alerts and notifications are just reoccurring and therefore we don’t necessarily need a constant red alert sitting atop an icon to notify users of it’s presence. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to toggle those badge alerts on or off, and that’s what we’ll cover.
The delete key on a Mac keyboard functions like a backspace key on a Windows/PC keyboard, deleting a character a time backwards from where the cursor is located. Pretty straightforward, but many newcomers to the Mac platform are confused as to why there isn’t a forward delete key… well it turns out there is forward delete and it’s actually the same button, flipped to remove characters forward by holding a modifier key. While super easy to use, we’ll also show you how to add a physical forward DEL button which won’t require the modifier key, and we’ll also cover a couple extra common Mac delete key functions too.
How many times have you forgotten the password to a website? Don’t feel bad because it happens to the best of us. The good news is that if you use the OS X Keychain feature to keep track of login information for websites through your browser (you know when the browser asks to save/store your login information?), you don’t need to worry, all you need is the websites URL and you’ll be able to retrieve a forgotten password as long as you’re logged into the same user account that you originally saved it with. This will work for all websites that have stored information through Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and it should work for any other browser as well. This is a great alternative to using the “password reset” or forgotten password features that are multi-step processes on many web sites and services since it doesn’t require any internet connectivity.
The iPad and iPhone don’t freeze or crash often, but when they do it can be an epic freeze-up, where the device can either get stuck in an app or, worse, it gets frozen on the dreaded iOS “spinning wheel of death”, the little wait cursor that never goes away. Left on it’s own in that state, that spinning wheel can quite literally spin forever until the battery drains and the device dies out, but that’s obviously not a solution to resolve the rare major iOS crashes. We’ll cover three tricks to fix major iOS crashes, the first will attempt to just exit out of the crashing application, the next will forcibly restart the device, and finally for the worst scenarios, we’ll restore iOS as new, though that really should be a last resort that is rarely applicable to most situations.
If you’re a heavy command line user, you’re probably well aware that the arrow keys can be used to flip through previously executed commands and the tab key can complete them. But both of these functions can be significantly improved upon for searching through past command history by adding a few modifications to your .inputrc file.
