Did you know that you can tell Siri to “PLAY THE NEWS” and just sit back and listen to the audio version? Another way too cool way to listen to news, long e-mails and Safari webpages is to activate a hidden feature called Speak Screen. You’ll love using this audio speaking feature, which will also save your eyesight.

To activate it, go to Settings, General, Accessibility, Speech and click on Speak Screen. Now open up a News app, and with two fingers, slide them down from the top of your screen, which opens up a black menu called Home Screen that instantly starts speaking the news. To stop it, click on the big X, and to hide it, click on the key starts speaking again, and the }} keys pauses it. Rabbit makes it speak faster and Turtle slows the speech down.

A lot of people don’t use Siri but love using Google to find things. Click on the Google App and say, “OK GOOGLE.” You can then ask her: “Open up Maps and show me an alternate route to get to Lahaina.” Lucky if that doesn’t crash her!!!

If you only have a Mac laptop, you can now use Siri by pressing the Left Command and Space Bar at the same time. To get Siri working with the Left Command/Space Bar, you need to go to Settings, Accessibility and scroll down to Siri; at the bottom is a box that has “Open Siri Preferences.” Click on it, and another box opens up that gives you options for Keyboard Shortcuts, Language and Siri voice. Remember to click Voice Feedback ON and mark the box “Show Siri in Menu Bar.”

Another cool function on the Mac is the Dictation feature, allowing you to dictate a Note or Document without using the keyboard to type in words. Pressing the FN (Function) key twice activates it. This is a perfect way to give your fingers a rest and use your voice to create a document that is pretty close to 100 percent accurate. To activate this, go to Settings, Keyboard, Dictation, click on Dictation ON and click on the box “Use Enhanced Dictation.” Under Language, choose English and Shortcut “Press Fn (Function) Key Twice.”

Here are a couple of interesting websites that sell all the new gadgets and inventions being created by new entrepreneurs. I’ve found some really cool wireless headsets and earphones there that are much cheaper than the Apple iPods. The first one is Digital Trends. Open up Safari and in the address bar type in Newsletter@e.digitaltrends.com. And another better one is called Indiegogo; type in Newsletter@indiegogo.com.

Okay, this is the best app I’ve run across in a long time. We all have video on our iPhones, and if you know how to edit a clip, you can edit out the boring parts and save the rest to a new clip that’s smaller. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could combine all these new smaller clips into one single clip? Well, a new app called Video Merger does this. After merging all the smaller clips into one big clip, you can go back and delete the old long version clips. This saves you a lot of space in the long run.

Send your computer-related questions to mauimist8669@yahoo.com.