If you’ve ever needed to know how late a particular store or restaurant is open, just pull out your iPhone and ask Siri. This should in handy when you’re out and about running errands or need to make a last minute shopping stop, but it’s clearly useful for many purposes. And if you have a new iPhone with Hey Siri enabled for hands free queries, it works great in the car or when you’re out walking around too.

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Enabling Dark menu and Dock mode on the Mac is a subtle user interface change to make which allows both the menu bar and the Mac OS X Dock to appear as black backgrounds with white text or icons overlaid on top. The result is a higher contrast menu bar and Dock, which is also a little less intrusive visually than the default light grey menu bar and Dock, and the dark menu and dark Dock will appeal to some users for a variety of reasons.

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Whether you’re looking at an important email, reading a web page, or doing just about anything else on your iPhone or iPad, perhaps you’d like to be reminded about it again at a later time or date. While Siri has long been able to create reminders for events and based on locations, a new feature available for the latest versions of iOS is the ability for Siri to remind you about what you’re currently looking at on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

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Apple has started to air their annual holiday TV commercial for the 2015 season. This year the advertisement features musical legend Stevie Wonder singing a duet of “Someday At Christmas” with singer Andra Day and a family with their friendly dog, along with subtle but clever displays of various Apple products being put to use.

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Users who have enabled the firewall in Mac OS X may find it useful to be view, read, and monitor the associated logs with the system firewall. As you’d expect, the app firewall logs show you what applications and processes have attempted to connect to the Mac, including accepted and refused connections.

There are several ways to view and watch the firewall in OS X, we’ll show you how to do so with a simple GUI app as well as the command line.

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The latest versions of Mac OS X include a new ability to immediately delete a file or folder from the Mac, bypassing the Trash can. Essentially how the “Delete Immediately” feature works is by circumventing the Trash and rather than waiting for user action to remove the files, it just deletes the file(s) instantaneously from the Mac, making the delete immediately function faster than the typical manner of removing a file in Mac OS X.

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Apple removed the ability to burn disc images from Disk Utility from MacOS High Sierra, Sierra, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, and newer, and while that makes sense for many Macs that no longer have SuperDrives, CDRW, and DVD burners, for those who use an external burner, use disc drive sharing, or who do have hardware with a built-in SuperDrive, may find it frustrating to lose such a feature.

But not to worry, you can still burn disk images and data discs in modern MacOS and Mac OS X releases, and you can start the process either from the Finder or from the command line on the Mac.

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This time around we’re featuring the excellent Mac Pro workstation of director and video editor Joe S., let’s learn more about the hardware and software put to use in this Mac setup!

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You can add a nice vignette effect to any picture, image, or photo kept in the Photos app on the Mac. The vignette tool allows for adjustments and customizations for the strength of the pictures vignetting effect, which is basically a dark soft border along the edges of a picture intended to draw the viewers focus to the center of a picture. The vignette effect is easy to use, but it’s a little hidden in the OS X Photos app, buried within the adjustment settings.

We’ll show you how to add a vignette effect to any image or picture within Photos for Mac.

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The ever helpful and sometimes comical Siri is a rather vocal virtual assistant, defaulting to speaking back a response to directions and commands. But if you want to hush that Siri voice feedback response while still using the feature for commands and queries, you can enable an optional setting that causes Siri to obey the broader iPhone and iPad hardware mute switch.

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As you may know, the Apple Watch can transform into a nightstand clock rather simply, but rather than fumbling around with the buttons or tapping the screen to see the date and time displayed on the screen, you can use a much easier but little known trick to show the time; simply knock on the surface where the Apple Watch is resting.

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Mac users who want a bit more network security can turn on an optional firewall feature in Mac OS X called Stealth Mode. With Stealth Mode enabled, the Mac will not acknowledge or respond to typical network discovery attempts with ICMP ping requests, and will not answer connections attempts made from closed TCP and UDP networks. Essentially, it makes the Mac appear to these requests as if it doesn’t exist at all.

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Apple has released the fourth beta of iOS 9.2 to users participating in the public beta testing and registered developer programs. The new iOS 9.2 beta build arrives as 13C5075 and is compatible with all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch hardware that can run other version of iOS 9. Additionally, Apple has released the third beta build of tvOS 9.1 for the new Apple TV.

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Apple is running several commercials for the new fourth generation Apple TV, demonstrating various games and video streaming services on the television device.

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The latest versions of Safari Mac OS X include a pinned tab feature, which allow you to maintain a particular web sites browser tab consistently across Safari relaunching and rebooting of the Mac. Pinned Tabs kind of work like bookmarks in this sense, except that rather than having to show a bookmarks bar, you can simply visit the pinned site through the pinned tab which appears in the same tab toolbar you’d see in Safari when multiple tabs are open anyway.

The pinned tabs are subtle and not intrusive, making them a great way to keep quick access to sites you visit regularly in Safari on the Mac.

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Apple has released the fourth beta version of OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 for users participating in the beta testing programs. The new version build arrives as 15C47a and is available now both as a public beta and as a developer beta build.

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The iOS Mail app allows users to save various types of attachments directly to the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This is a great feature that is available in the latest versions of iOS, and for most file attachment, you’ll be able to save whatever the file is directly to iCloud Drive in iOS.

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If you adjust DNS settings on a Mac and the changes seemingly haven’t taken effect, or perhaps you discover that a given name server address is not resolving as intended, flushing the DNS cache is often a quick resolution. Flushing DNS cache in OS X El Capitan (10.11 or later) is easily possible with a trip to the command line, though if you’ve been using Mac OS X for a while you’ll notice the syntax is different, again, from some prior releases of Mac OS. This is because Apple has re-adopted mDNSResponder after temporarily ditching it for discoveryd, so the dscacheutil command will likely be familiar to some Mac users.

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