As you may have noticed by now, Siri’s voice often gets an overhaul in the new iOS versions, adjusted just slightly from the now famous female voice used in countless Apple commercials to a variation that is just slightly different, but a bit more refined. The new voice sounds great, but if for some reason you aren’t thrilled with Siri’s new voice, or you’d just prefer to hear something different for a while, you can actually change Siri’s voice completely by switching the voice gender. Doing this directly is a Settings feature added along with iOS, and here’s how to switch Siri from a guy or girl:

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A few simple settings adjustments can go a long way to improving the overall usability of modern iOS versions, including iOS 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, and anything since the iOS 7 redesign, whether running on an iPhone, iPod touch, or the larger screened iPad models. We’ll show you how to quickly boost the text size which can help to reduce eye strain, enable bolder fonts for easier reading of just about everything, make settings toggles more obvious, improve the general appearance of the home screen, and also how to reduce the likelihood of getting motion sickness from the parallax eyecandy.

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Apple has released OS X Mavericks GM to those registered with the Mac Developer program. The GM (Golden Master) build is the final release version of OS X 10.9, ending the Developer Preview beta process and indicating that a wider public release of Mavericks will arrive shortly in the coming weeks.

Registered developers can download the GM build from the Mac App Store as usual. Those interested in performing a clean install can use a redemption code to download the installer, which can then be made into a Mavericks install drive using a USB stick or external drive.
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A couple of easy to remember keyboard shortcuts will dramatically boost your productivity when navigating around documents and webpages throughout OS X, giving you the ability to instantly jump to the beginning or end of a scrollable document.

These are universal on all Macs and should work regardless of what keyboard you’re using, so whether it’s an official Apple keyboard or a third party Mac keyboard, you’ll be able to quickly get to the beginning of a document or the end of one with a simple keystroke.

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Apple has released two minor software updates for Mac users, OS X 10.8.5 Supplemental Update and iTunes 11.1.1. Users who are currently running OS X Mountain Lion will find the Supplemental Update available in Software Update, and all users with iTunes 11.1 installed will find the 11.1.1 update available there as well.

The two updates are fairly minor but are recommended for all Macs that are eligible for the updates. OS X users can download both of the updates right now from Software Update and the Mac App Store, as accessed through the  Apple menu.
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Finding words and searching for text directly on webpages in Safari post iOS 8 and iOS 7 has changed slightly, and though there seems to be significant confusion about how to use the new find words and phrases feature, rest assured the feature has not been removed from Safari, the find feature is just accessed slightly different than it was before.

To demonstrate how “find on page” works in the new version of Safari, let’s run through a sample search with some screenshots looking right here on osxdaily.com for the phrase “multitouch trick”.

As you’ll see, this is a multiple step process that uses the URL bar to function as a Search bar… it works well once you learn how to use it.

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Mac OS X has always been able to read NTFS drives, but tucked away in Mac OS X is a hidden option to enable write support to drives formatted as NTFS (NTFS stands for New Technology File System and is a proprietary file system format for Microsoft Windows). Enabling NTFS write support on the Mac is fairly technical and it’s not officially supported by Apple, making it an experimental feature that is best left in the hands of advanced users who understand the process and the potential repercussions.

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iTunes Radio is an excellent streaming music service from Apple. We’ve covered a few different tweaks and tips for the service recently, but at the moment the Radio feature is limited to USA-based users. But for international readers, rather than waiting for the rollout to arrive at your location, you can use a simple trick to listen to iTunes Radio from anywhere in the world, without having to rely on a proxy service.
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The Messages app for iOS now gives everyone the ability to see time stamps for any sent message or received message directly in the app. This lets you know exact times of correspondence when any message was sent or received, providing the precise hour and minute for each individual element of dialog. This is a handy trick that is easy to miss on iPhone and iPad, but also just as easy to use once you know it’s there and how it works.

Here’s how to see timestamps for conversations on Messages for iOS:

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configd is a system configuration daemon that runs behind Mac OS X, most users will never notice or see the core OS X process running in the background of their Macs. With that said, configd can sometimes act up and cause unusual CPU spikes and fan activity making your Mac sound like a wind tunnel. Odd configd behavior is easily diagnosed by launching Activity Monitor, sorting by the “% CPU” option, and seeing the ‘configd’ root user process sitting at the top taking up somewhere between 20-95% CPU. If that behavior lasts for a minute or so it’s usually not a big deal, temporary spikes can be normal so just let it run and ignore it, but there are times where configd can go inexplicably errant and it’ll sit around 50% CPU utilization or more for hours for no obvious reason – that is what we’re looking to resolve here.

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iOS Notifications can be both extremely useful and persistently obnoxious, depending on what the alerts are for and when they come across your screen. For the times when they’re on the obnoxious end of the spectrum, in your way of doing something on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll be happy to discover that now in modern releases of the iOS system software you have a super-simple method of quickly dismissing notification alerts that you don’t want on the screen any longer.

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Want to convert a color picture to a beautiful black and white version? Believe it or not, you don’t need any fancy apps like Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator, or even iPhoto to convert images into black and white, all you need is Preview, which is the preinstalled basic image viewing Mac app that comes with Mac OS X. That means there is no need to buy any additional apps or plugins, you can do it all for free right with the Macs built in tools, and you’ll get a surprising level of control with some impressive results, giving your images that Ansel Adams look in just a few moments.

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Quitting out of running apps in modern versions of iOS is a bit different than it was before, but once you get the hang of using the new multitasking screen, you’ll find the change is for the better. Not only can you use this to close out of a single app, but with a simple multitouch gesture you can also quit out of multiple apps at the same time.

Regular readers will recall that included this trick as one of the four essential tips for learning some of the major changes made in iOS 7 and iOS 8, but we still get so many questions about it that we think it’s worthy of it’s own post. Let’s get right to it:

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A handy terminal command will show a list of all apps installed on a Mac that have come exclusively from the Mac App Store. This can be helpful for a variety of reasons, like when building a list of apps you may want to replace from outside the official App Store channels if you’re migrating machines, or if you’re working on a remote Mac through SSH and are trying to figure out what apps are missing. You could piece together such a list manually as well by reviewing the Purchase History within the App Store, but that listing also displays items that are not actively installed on a Mac, making it much less useful.

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The Messages app received a significant makeover in iOS, and like many other elements of iOS some of it’s functionality changed as well. Many users have noticed that the behavior to delete messages has changed, leading some to believe the deletion feature was removed from Messages entirely (it wasn’t).

Let’s review how to remove segments of message threads in iOS 12, iOS 11, iOS 10, iOS 9, iOS 8, and iOS 7, and also how to delete an entire message conversation from the app completely.

Removing a message works the same for iMessages, multimedia messages, and for standard SMS text messages. To prevent any mistakes, you may want to adjust the setting to show full names within Messages before modifying or removing them.
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Control Center is one of the better features introduced to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch post iOS 7, but because it is accessed with a swipe up gesture it can be fairly easy to accidentally trigger. This is especially true in games where a lot of swiping goes on (like Fruit Ninja), but it can also show up unexpectedly in some apps where you may be swiping around the screen often to scroll around, including Safari.

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Hard drive failures are never fun but they are a fact of computing life whether you use a Mac or PC. Sometimes drives can truck along for many years before going bad, and other times you wind up with a drive that goes kaput after just a few months of normal use. Regardless of when it happens (and it will), we’re going to focus on the most simple method of retrieving crucial files and data from the failing drive.

At it’s simplest form, you’re essentially performing a standard file transfer, but with time working against you it’s important to move fast and to not make anything worse, thus a simple multiple-step plan of action is recommended for the best results. This isn’t perfect and it’s by no means guaranteed, but if caught in the early stages of failure you can almost certainly get your data off the drive before it’s too late. The focus here is on secondary hard drives; meaning backups, external disks, time machine drives, etc, and because your backups can fail, it’s a good example of why redundant backups are important for some users. Thankfully, backup redundancy is extremely easy to do with Time Machine and only requires two external drives to be connected to the Mac at a time.
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Apple has released iOS 7.0.2 for compatible iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch keyboards, a minor update that apps that is primarily a security release. The update resolves a series of bugs that could have potentially allowed someone to bypass the lock screen passcode on iOS 7 devices, and it also reincludes Greek keyboard support for passcode entry.

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