In order for a variety of Siri features to work, Siri must know who you are, and the more Siri knows about you the better some of those features work when activated from an iPhone or iPad.

For example, if Siri knows your home address then you can ask Siri to “give me directions home” from anywhere, and the virtual assistant will attempt to route a path home. Or if you found an iPhone and want to see who the owner is (and likewise want someone to be able to do the same if you ever lost your iPhone) then you must have your information set with Siri.

This tutorial will walk through the simple steps of informing Siri who you are by using your iPhone or iPad.

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Advanced Mac users may appreciate using the Homebrew package manager, which greatly simplifies the process of installing command line software and tools on a Mac.

For example, if you want to easily install favorite command line tools on a Mac like cask, htop, wget, nmap, tree, irssi, links, colordiff, or virtually any other familiar unix command line utility, you can do so with a simple command. Homebrew downloads and builds the package for you.

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MacOS High Sierra is the last macOS release to support 32-bit apps “without compromise” (presumably meaning without performance degradation, and with maximum compatibility), and betas of macOS 10.13.4 are now notifying users if 32-bit apps are being run. This might suggest that 32-bit Mac apps will run through a compatibility mode like Rosetta or Classic in the near future, and eventually, it seems likely that Apple will drop support for 32-bit apps on the Mac completely in a some future system software release, favoring 64-bit apps.

But there are a fair amount of 32-bit apps which are widely used on many Macs, despite Mac OS itself being 64-bit since Snow Leopard. If you’re not sure what apps are 32-bit or 64-bit, then you’ll be glad to know that Mac OS has a handy tool available within System Information to quickly show you all the apps which are 64-bit or not.

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The iOS Maps app has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, including a settings toggle that allows you to get directions to and from destinations while avoiding highways and freeways. This is particularly helpful for iPhone users that rely on the Maps app for directions and getting around, but it works on iPad as well.

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Apple has released the fourth beta version of iOS 11.3 to users enrolled in the iOS beta testing program, alongside the fourth beta build of macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 for Mac system software testers.

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Need to know the size of a particular file? Or have you ever wondered how large a particular folder is on a Mac? With a simple trick you an quickly get the size of any file, folder, or item as found within the Finder file system of Mac OS.

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iTunes offers a simple way to track down and find duplicate songs in a music library, so if you find yourself hearing the same song every once in a while when listening to iTunes on a Mac or Windows, or after copying music to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, then it’s quite possible duplicate tracks are to blame.

It’s fairly easy for music libraries to contain duplicate songs and tracks, particularly as you build a collection over time. If you’re ripping CDs and importing music into iTunes, downloading songs from SoundCloud and the web, buying albums and songs from multiple sources like iTunes, Amazon, and elsewhere, it’s fairly easy to eventually end up with duplicate versions of the same song.

While iTunes has long has the capability of finding duplicate songs, the feature has been moved in modern versions of iTunes from version 12.0 and later, which has led many users to believe that you can’t find duplicate tracks with the app anymore. But that’s not the case, it has just been relocated.

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Rarely, owners of an iPhone X may discover their screen is unresponsive seemingly at random, where swipes and taps on the screen are either not registered at all, or they have a severe lag and there’s a notable delay before the touch interaction completes. Swipes and gestures suddenly have a huge lag, and taps on the screen either take moments to do anything, or are ignored entirely.

Sometimes, the iPhone X screen freezes completely, becoming entirely unresponsive to any engagement with the device at all.

These are rare issues but when and if they do happen to a user, it’s understandably annoying. Fortunately there’s a simple solution available, so if you discover that your iPhone X is randomly unresponsive and the screen does not appear to be working, you can fix the problem fairly quickly.

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Do you have some audio CDs laying around that you’d like to digitize and convert to mp3? Ripping a CD and turning the audio into MP3 or M4A tracks is remarkably simple with iTunes or Music app, and the process is he same on both a Mac and Windows PC.

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Using file tags can help to arrange, organize, and prioritize documents, files, and data. Now that iOS has a dedicated Files app for the iPhone and iPad, you might find it helpful to know that you can tag any items, files, documents, images, or anything else stored within the Files app of iOS, much like you can tag files in the Mac Finder. And perhaps best of all, if the tagged files are stored in iCloud Drive, they will sync to other iOS devices and Macs as well, with that same tag.

Tagging files in iOS is a simple process, but it’s easily overlooked. This tutorial will show you how to tag a single file, how to tag multiple files, and how to view tagged files in the iOS Files app.

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If you use the Calendar app on Mac and iOS, your calendar events will seamlessly sync between all Apple devices using the same Apple ID. While the iPhone and iPad have easy ways to display a Calendar in List View from iOS, the Mac doesn’t have the same simple toggle functionality to see a list of all events in the Calendar app. However, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible…

You can show a list of all scheduled Calendar events on the Mac with a little-known trick. While it’s certainly not obvious, it gets the job done and allows you to display a list of calendar events in Mac OS quickly.

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By default, if you sort a directory by name in the Mac OS Finder, you will find that both files and folders are arranged alongside one another based upon an alphabetical sorting of their names. This is great for many users, but if you have a large folder with many subfolders and files, it can make locating folders and differentiating between files and folders a little more challenging. A great solution to this is to use a little-known Finder feature that keeps folders on top of a name sorted directory list.

Maintaining folders at the top of a directory is a commonly used feature in the Windows PC world, but it’s just as useful on the Mac. Once you have enabled the setting, folders will appear first in any directory sorted by name, regardless of how that folder is viewed; list, icon, column, or cover flow.

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Macs no longer have internal DVD and CD-RW drives, but for Mac users who still need to use optical discs the Apple SuperDrive offers an external all-in-one USB solution that can read and write both CD and DVD discs, all you have to do is plug it into a USB port on the Mac and Mac OS will detect the SuperDrive. But that’s Mac OS, not Windows, and many Mac users also use Windows PC or Windows operating systems, so wouldn’t it be nice to use that Apple SuperDrive in Windows too?

But SuperDrive does not always work with Windows PC right away however, and sometimes the Apple SuperDrive either doesn’t function as expected, won’t accept a disc, or is not properly recognized in Windows, whether running natively on PC, or a Mac through Boot Camp, or a virtual machine either.

Whatever the scenario, if you’re trying to use an Apple SuperDrive with Windows and it’s not working as expected, try the steps below to get the SuperDrive functioning in Windows.

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As you likely know by now, Control Center is the customizable action screen on iOS that allows you to quickly adjust brightness, volume, wi-fi, bluetooth, music, AirDrop, access a flash light, Do Not Disturb mode, and much more. But if you have an iPhone X, than accessing Control Center will be different than what gesture you have long become accustomed to with other iPhone and iPads.

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If you’ve been using and creating Animoji on iPhone and sharing them with other people, you may have noticed that Animoji are saved and shared as video files in the .mov file format. But Animated GIF files are exceptionally popular, as they loop endlessly on any device or operating system they are received on, and plus animated GIF files can be easily posted and shared on the web and other social services. Thus you might be interested in converting Animoji into GIF format, which you can do directly on iPhone.

We’re going to focus on using a free iOS app called Shortcuts (Workflow) to convert the Animoji into GIF, because once the initial setup is complete it becomes quite easy to re-use.

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iPhone and iPad users can now customize Control Center to better suit their needs. For example, if you frequently use Voice Memos, Notes app, Stopwatch, Magnifier, or the Alarm feature, you can add those to Control Center for ultra-fast access from anywhere in iOS. Or if you never use the Flashlight feature or Camera via Control Center, you could remove those from Control Center too.

Customizing Control Center is a great way to personalize the quick-access controls which are available from anywhere in iOS, here’s how it works.

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Have you ever wanted to setup an auto-responder eMail message in the Mac Mail app? Autoresponders allow you to set an “out of office” auto-reply that gets sent automatically as a reply to any inbound email to the Mac Mail app. This is great solution for situations where you’re out of the office, away from a desk, or otherwise away from email for a while, whether it’s a vacation or maybe you just hate replying to emails. Whatever the reason, all inbound emails will get an automated response with the message of your choice.

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Apple has released the third beta version of iOS 11.3, macOS 10.13.4, and tvOS 11.3, to users engaged in the operating system beta testing programs.

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