Recording voice notes on the Mac is now easier than ever thanks to the appropriately named Voice Memos application in Mac OS. While Mac users have long been able to record sound and audio with QuickTime Player, the latest versions of MacOS system software include a built-in Voice Memos app that aims to make voice memo recording a bit easier and more centralized within a dedicated app for that purpose.

Conveniently, the Voice Memos app for Mac also syncs through iCloud with the accompanying iOS app, so Voice Memos that have been recorded on iPhone or iPad that are using the same Apple ID will also find the recordings available to them. This is particularly great if you have multiple devices within the Apple ecosystem, since all voice memos will be accessible from any of your other Mac, iPhone, or iPad devices too.

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Apple has released the fourth beta versions of iOS 12.1.3 and macOS Mojave 10.14.3 for users engaged in the beta testing programs.

The fourth beta builds of iOS 12.1.3 and macOS 10.14.3 arrive just a few days after Apple released beta 3 of the same system software versions, which could indicate an acceleration towards final releases of stable system software builds to the general public, or perhaps an urgent issue was discovered in beta 3 that has been addressed in the beta 4 builds.

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Knowing the exact size of an available App Store update before beginning the app update and download process can be helpful for many iPhone or iPad users. The iOS App Store offers the size of available app updates, but you must know where to look to find that download size information.

This trick is probably most relevant for iPhone or iPad users with slower internet connections or who are in limited bandwidth situations, but it’s obviously useful to anyone else who simply finds it helpful to know the size of something before they begin to download it.

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Some iPhone and iPad users may rarely discover the Photos app freezes up when attempting to use it, or the Photos app crashes repeatedly or is unusable when trying to open the app. Typically this is associated with an unresponsive screen as well, and the only thing you can do is exit out of the Photos app, being unable to view any pictures, videos, or anything else within Photos app of iOS. Sometimes you can open Photos app, but all of the pictures and videos are blank white thumbnails, and trying to access any of that media freezes the app.

If you’re experiencing the Photos app continuously freezing or crashing on an iPhone or iPad, and just generally not working as expected, the troubleshooting steps below may help to resolve the problem for you.

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Apple has released MacOS Mojave 10.14.3 beta 3 for users enrolled in the beta testing programs for Mac system software. A developer build is usually available first, soon followed by the same build for public beta testers.

Separately, Apple also released iOS 12.1.3 beta 3 along with new betas for tvOS and watchOS.

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Apple has released iOS 12.1.3 beta 3 to developers and public beta testers who are running beta system software on their compatible iPhone or iPad.

The newest iOS beta likely focuses on various bug fixes and security updates, and is unlikely to include any major new features or sweeping changes.

Separately, Apple has also release the third beta version of tvOS 12.1.2 and watchOS 5.1.3. Currently absent from the beta updates is any update to macOS Mojave 10.14.3, which is still at beta 2.

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If you’re a frequent WhatsApp user, you may find that WhatsApp data and cache can take up a considerable amount of storage space on an iPhone, iPad, or Android phones, and thus it’s reasonable if some users will want to clear out WhatsApp cache and data to free up storage space on their device. Separately, some users may want to delete WhatsApp data for privacy purposes.

One way to clear WhatsApp data is to to quite literally delete message threads and conversations completely from the app, but you can also be more specific and see more information including the storage size of each type of data you plan on removing. Deleting WhatsApp data storage and caches is not without consequence however, and by doing a full cleaning you’ll be deleting message threads and all of their contained photos, gifs, videos, voice messages, documents, stickers, and other information contained within WhatsApp and various conversations you’ve had. Fortunately WhatsApp gives you some level of granular controls on what data you can remove, so if you only want to delete photos or videos from a specific thread with a particular contact, you can do that.

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Happy New Year week continues with yet another roundup guide! This roundup collection focuses on some of the most helpful troubleshooting guides from 2018, tackling a variety of potential problems that people may have encountered with a Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Of course troubleshooting guides are rather specific, so if you’re looking for some more general tips and tricks then don’t miss our other year-in-review roundups with collections of our best Terminal tips from 2018, some of the best general tech tips from 2018, a collection of the best iPhone and iPad tips from 2018, and a series on the best Mac tips from 2018.

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The Happy New Year week continues! Here we have another roundup of some of the best tips and tricks for the Terminal from 2018, this time aimed at more advanced Mac users who spend a lot of time at the command line. Many command line tips are just general unix tips, thus a fair amount of these tricks not only work on Mac OS but also on Linux too. If you enjoyed our other roundups for best tips for iPhone and iPad from 2018 and best tips for Mac from 2018, and you’re a Terminal user, you’ll probably enjoy this tip roundup too.

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Happy New Year! If you enjoyed our roundup of the best Mac tips from 2018 and the best iPhone and iPad tips from 2018, you might also enjoy this little collection of assorted tech tips that we covered in the past year too. These are truly miscellaneous tech tips, and while a few are specific to a Mac or iOS device, many are more broad than that covering things like webmail configurations, retrieving data from social networks, running different operating systems, some goofier stuff, and other assorted miscellania.

Anyway, browse the list you might learn something new!

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Happy New Year! We’ve rounded up a collection of some interesting and useful tips and tricks for the iPhone and iPad that were covered in the last year. This 2018 tip roundup covers a broad range of iOS topics, so browse around, and you might even learn something new about your portable device(s)!

Onward with the roundup!

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Happy New Year! We’ve put together a collection of some of the best Mac tips and tricks we covered from the past year, 2018. These are certainly not the most popular tips from the year prior, but they are some of the more interesting or useful tips and tricks for Mac users to know, covering a broad range of topics. Some you may know, some you may not.

Anyway, browse around and take a look at the link list below, and perhaps you’ll learn something new!

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If you have attempted to install VirtualBox in macOS Mojave you may have noticed the installation sometimes fails with a generic “The installation failed” error message. Then, when trying to run VirtualBox you may experience another error saying “Kernel driver not installed” and VirtualBox fails to function. We’ll cover two different resolutions to the installation/running VirtualBox problem, one involving a Gatekeeper bypass, and the other using a Gatekeeper exception (for macOS 10.14.5 or later).

The reason for the installation failure and the inability for the kernel module to load successfully is due to security restrictions in MacOS Mojave, and thus to be able to successfully install VirtualBox and run the app you will need to make a relatively simple bypass of those aforementioned security restrictions (alternatively, you can also disable Gatekeeper completely but that is generally not recommended). By the way, while this article is obviously focused on VirtualBox you will find this same general process is necessary for installing other apps that include kernel extensions.

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Have you noticed that some apps will appear automatically in the iPad Dock with a little tiny alarm clock icon on them? You may be wondering why those app icons with the alarm clock badge appear in the right side of iPad Dock at random and what their purpose is, and perhaps you’re even wondering how to get rid of them and remove those alarm clock badged icons from the iPad Dock.

If you assumed apps showing an alarm clock badge on them had something to do with the Clock app that would be a fair guess, but it’s wrong, so don’t bother opening the iPad Clock app and poking around in there.

Instead, the reason why apps with a tiny alarm clock icon badge appear on them in the iPad Dock is due to a relatively new machine learning feature, where iOS and Siri aims to recommend apps to use based on the time of day.

For example, if you have frequently used Safari on the iPad at or near 8pm in the evenings, then Siri will start to recommend and suggest the Safari app by placing it into the right side of iPad Dock at around 8pm. This same learning process happens with all other apps too, and the iPad Dock will continue to recommend and suggest other apps for using for times of day depending on how you use the device.

Some people may like this feature for suggesting apps based on time of day, but other iPad users may not and want to get rid of the the iPad dock icons with the alarm clock badge on them. There are a series of steps you can take to remove those clock badged icons from the iPad Dock.

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Zsh, or z shell, is a popular shell alternative to bash and tcsh, complete with many improvements and customization options offered through the Oh-My-ZSH project.

If you’d like to use zsh as the default shell in Terminal for Mac OS rather than bash, you can do so rather easily with taking the following steps:

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BBEdit, the excellent text editor for Mac, includes some very nice Dark Mode favorable color schemes, each of which compliment the Mac Dark Mode theme quite well.

If you spend a considerable amount of time in a text editor for scripting, programming, development, code review, or writing and editing with a markup language, and you also work on a Mac at night, or in dimly lit areas, or even if you just prefer darker color themes and darker themed syntax highlighting for your text editing, then you’ll almost certainly want to explore and use the various BBEdit dark color schemes.

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Some iPhone users have discovered that their cellular data and cellular connectivity has failed recently, with iPhone no longer working to send or receive calls or access the internet, particularly after installing the iOS 12.1.2 update, iOS 12.1.3, or iOS 12.1.4 updates.

The inability for iPhone to have cell network connections is usually accompanied by a “No Service” message in the upper left corner of the iPhone screen where the carrier or reception signal is typically shown, and often an alert message appears on the iPhone screen saying “Cellular Update Failed – Your iPhone cannot make and receive calls or access cellular data until it has been updated.”

We’re going to show you a few workarounds to try and get cellular data and cell service working again on an iPhone that is experiencing these particular data problems after installing the iOS update.

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If you’re currently using the Dark mode theme in Mac OS, you may wish to change to the Light visual theme.

The Light theme in Mac OS was the default visual option on the Mac for ages, but with MacOS Mojave came the new visual option for enabling the Dark mode theme for the Mac interface. Many users may have chosen the Dark mode theme during the initial setup of MacOS, or another time, but later may want to set their Mac to use the brighter Light mode theme instead. The process of changing from the Dark to Light appearance is quite simple, as you’ll see.

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