As you may have noticed, a prominent microphone button is visible on the iOS keyboard for iPhone and iPad, which when tapped will use voice-to-text to dictate spoken text to the iOS device in lieu of typing. Some users may never use the microphone button, while others may accidentally tap on the mic button, in which case it can be desirable to remove the microphone button from the keyboard on iPhone and iPad completely.

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Apple has scheduled a “special event” for 10 AM PST on Monday, March 25, posting the event notification to their website, and inviting select members of the press to attend.

The tagline accompanying the event press invitation proclaims “It’s show time”, which some are speculating pertains to a rumored video service from the company that could debut at the event.

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Apple has released the fifth beta versions of iOS 12.2 and macOS Mojave 10.14.4 for users enrolled in the beta testing programs. Typically a developer beta rolls out first, soon followed by a public beta of the same build.

Additionally, new beta builds are available for tvOS 12.2 and watchOS 5.2.

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“Help, my AirPods are disconnecting randomly!” AirPods generally work great once they have been setup with an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, but rarely some AirPods users may experience frequent random disconnections. When this is occurring, the AirPods disconnect from the iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, and sometimes get stuck disconnecting and reconnecting with frequency, making them largely unusable. Fortunately some simple troubleshooting of this issue is usually sufficient to resolve the problem and get AirPods to connect reliably and stop disconnecting.

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If you regularly use Bluetooth devices and accessories with an iPhone or iPad, you might occasionally run into situations where you want to remove a Bluetooth accessory from an iOS device. By removing a Bluetooth Device from an iPad or iPhone, the bluetooth accessory is essentially forgotten and will no longer automatically connect to iOS, unless the process is reversed.

Note this is not merely disconnecting a Bluetooth accessory from an iPhone or iPad, which is a quick temporary measure.

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Have an older Mac but want Hey Siri voice commands? With a little effort, you can get ‘Hey Siri’ on unsupported Macs by using a creative workaround. While new Mac models can enable Hey Siri on the Mac as easily as checking a setting in system preferences, older Macs do not support the same Hey Siri feature. This tutorial will show you how you can replicate the exact same “Hey Siri” capability on any Mac that does not support Hey Siri by default, as long as it has regular Siri functionality.

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Resetting AirPods returns AirPods to factory default settings, this procedure can be helpful for troubleshooting various problems with AirPods, but it can also be necessary if you plan on giving used AirPods to someone else, or even to sync and connect the AirPods to another compatible device. Essentially this will be resetting AirPods to factory settings, as if they were brand new.

Some common reasons to reset AirPods for troubleshooting reasons are if the airPods are suddenly not showing up as available, if the AirPods case is not charging the AirPods out of the blue, if there are curious battery issues with the AirPods, amongst other issues that could be experienced. Usually a quick reset to factory settings fixes these type of AirPods issues quickly.

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Wondering how to access AirPlay audio controls in iOS 16, iOS 15, iOS 14, iOS 13, iOS 12, and iOS 11 on an iPhone or iPad? You might not be alone, as accessing the AirPlay controls for audio streaming is tucked away behind another panel in the iOS Control Center, making it very easy to overlook.

If you’re looking for the AirPlay audio streaming controls in Control Center for iOS 16 on iPhone or iPad, we’ll show you how to find them.

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A fair number of iPad users type on their tablet with an external keyboard, and one of the major benefits to that approach is that you gain access to keyboard shortcuts in most apps for iPad. The Files app for iOS is no different, and with a Smart Keyboard or external Bluetooth keyboard connected to the iPad you can use a variety of keystrokes and keyboard shortcuts to navigate and perform helpful functions within the iOS file system app. We’ll show you a variety of excellent keyboard shortcuts for the Files app in iOS when an extneral keyboard has been connected to the iPad, these include keystrokes for copy, paste, duplicate, move, delete, create a new folder, search, select all, show recents, changing view from icon to list, navigating up the file system directory structure, and more.

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Apple has released the fourth beta versions of macOS Mojave 10.14.4, iOS 12.2, tvOS 12.2, and watchOS 5.2 to users participating in the beta testing programs for Apple system software. Typically the developer beta build rolls out first, soon followed by the equivalent as a public beta version.

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Intel Power Gadget for Mac is a processor monitoring tool that allows computer users to monitor the performance of an Intel processor in real-time. Intel Power Gadget will show you power and energy information in watts, the clock speed frequency of the CPU in GHz, the temperature of the CPU, and CPU utilization. It’s a handy utility for many reasons, and some Mac users may even use it as an alternative system monitor sort of like Activity Monitor.

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Apple routinely utilizes some very nice looking wallpapers as the default options available in iOS and macOS, but it turns out that Microsoft has some great wallpaper selections as well.

One such enjoyable wallpaper image comes from the Surface Pro 6, which appears to be an color cloud of paint. While this image may be from a Microsoft product, it looks wonderful as a background wallpaper on a Mac, iPad, and iPhone too!

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Many wireless accessories and peripherals for the Mac connect to the computer with Bluetooth, but what if you no longer need a particular Bluetooth device connected to the Mac and you want to remove it? We’ll show you how to easily remove a Bluetooth accessory like a speaker, headphones, keyboard, mouse, game controller, or similar accessory from MacOS.

By removing a Bluetooth device from the Mac, it will no longer reconnect automatically when they’re both within range of one another or powered on.

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Have you ever wished you could make a phone call with an iPad? If you have both an iPad and an iPhone, you can actually make phone calls from the iPad, with the call being relayed automatically through the iPhone. You can also use the iPad to receive calls too. This is a great feature for many Apple users with multiple devices, and it uses a similar approach that allows you to make phone calls from the Mac with the iPhone too.

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Continuity Camera is a great feature available in the latest versions of MacOS that allow a Mac to instantly use an iPhone or iPad for scanning documents or taking photos using that iOS devices camera. This allows you to use the high resolution camera of an iPhone or iPad directly from the Mac as a seamless part of your workflow, snapping the image right from an application or the Finder itself with an immediate import, without needing to use AirDrop or any other file transfer method to share the image from the iOS device to the Mac.

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The newest iPhone models include a camera feature called Smart HDR which aims to extend the High Dynamic Range feature to bring out even more details in the shadows and highlights of a photo. This is done automatically by iOS by blending together multiple exposures of the picture taken by iPhone camera, which is then saved as that Smart HDR version. While most iPhone users will want to keep Smart HDR enabled on their iPhone, there are some photography situations where it might be desirable to disable Smart HDR on the camera of iPhone too.

Note that disabling Smart HDR will also re-enable the manual HDR controls on iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max, iPhone XS, iPhone XR, and iPhone XS Max, or newer.

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Mac users can enable “Hey Siri” on their computer, allowing for simple voice activation of the virtual assistant. Much like Hey Siri for iPhone and iPad, or Apple Watch, when Hey Siri is enabled on the Mac you can interact with Siri entirely with voice commands and without needing to click or tap on anything to activate it. Just say “Hey Siri” followed by a command, and Siri on the Mac will activate and respond. This walkthrough will show you how to enable Hey Siri on a Mac for voice activation of the digital assistant.

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Advanced Mac users who are interested in the world of Information Security (InfoSec) can easily test out ParrotSec Linux in live boot mode by using a virtual machine.

In this particular walkthrough, we’ll show you how to quickly get ParrotSec running in live mode within the free Parallels Desktop Lite app, but if you want to try this with VirtualBox, VMware, or Parallels, you could do that just as easily too.

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