The iOS Autocorrect feature is notorious for being very aggressive in correcting certain words, particularly those words with colorful, offensive, or controversial meanings – basically any curse word. If you get fed up with autocorrects persistent mouth (finger?) soap, you can either use shortcuts to automatically replace the words that autocorrect struggles with, try to force learning with word repetition, or, perhaps easiest and new since iOS 7; use the excellent Safari Search trick outlined below to train autocorrect to stop correcting specific words, and to also learn new words:
- Open Safari in iOS (yes, the web browser) and open a new window / tab
- Tap in the topmost “Search” box and type the word you want autocorrect to stop correcting, then tap on “Go” to search for it
- Now go back to any text editor, Messages, etc, to type the originally intended word – no more autocorrecting it!
This is extremely effective if you’ve been struggling with the iPhone / iPad autocorrecting certain names, or the many infamous curse word corrections of duckings, tucks, ducks, shots, ships, bass wholes, and all the rest. (excuse the language)
If you put a typo into the Safari search box and now autocorrect is making things even worse, you can always start over again by resetting the entire autocorrect dictionary within iOS to the defaults, just keep in mind that everything autocorrect related will be cleared out and all of your typing corrections and learning will start from scratch with that approach.
Overall this is probably a better trick than using the shortcuts method because it won’t clutter up the Keyboard Shortcuts and text expansion, which is better used as intended for quickly typing out things like email addresses, long names, and phrases.
Heads up to Gizmodo for the excellent find!
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While Siri is great at pronouncing some common names, Siri can also completely blunder on others, turning a first or last name into an almost unrecognizable mess of noises that barely resembles the way the name actually sounds. Fortunately, iOS now makes it very easy to correct Siri directly and verbally, so the next time Siri messes up you can instantly fix the pronunciation and get her to speak the right way. Or you can preempt any mistake, and with names that you anticipate Siri to mispronounce you can correct before the virtual assistant has a chance to screw it up by teaching her (or he!) the right way to say a name.
FileVault is a security feature that offers full disk encryption for Macs. Identifying Macs that are using FileVault is fairly easy in person for machines that have a logged in user account, all you have to do is check System Preferences to see if has been enabled or not. But what if you the Mac is either not logged into a user account, or what if you need to identify Filevault usage remotely? Both of these situations can call for using the command line to figure out the status of disk encryption.
It’s easy to create a password protected text file by using the command line text editor ‘vi’. This is infinitely useful for privacy purposes, whether the protected file is for containing login details, various passwords, personal information, a private journal, or just about anything else that you want stored securely in a single password protected text file.
All portable Macs in the MacBook Pro and Air lineup have backlit keyboards these days, which not only makes it easier to type in dim lighting, but let’s face it, it also looks really fancy too. Because the backlighting uses very low power LED to illuminate, there isn’t much of any hit to battery life if the brightness is set at a reasonable or low level, so many people choose to have the backlit keyboard showing all the time, even if lighting situation doesn’t call for it to be useful. But sometimes the backlit keyboard doesn’t work at all for seemingly no apparent reason… and even attempting to manually control the backlighting with the keyboard shortcuts suggests the feature isn’t working or is disabled. There’s a few possible reasons for the backlighting to stop working, with most offering simple resolutions.
