A lot of people use iCloud to back up their data, like photos, music and documents. To better see what iCloud does, go to System Preferences and click on Apple ID at the top right. A screen pops up, and you’ll see iCloud on the left-hand side.

Click on iCloud, and a graph shows up displaying a bunch of colored rectangles. Well, that’s nice and all… so what does that mean? If you click on a color, it will display something like Photos, Mail or Music, and on the top of the colors shows you the amount of storage that’s available of that color.

If you click Manage on the right side, a screen shows up displaying how many megabytes of storage the Photos, Documents and so forth you are using in iCloud. You can also buy more gigabytes if you’re running out of space.

I mentioned before that with Siri, you can ask questions about the weather, open up apps, schedule an appointment or make reminders, and even have Siri send e-mails. If you click on the colored circle icon on the top right, Siri opens up, and if you immediately click on the colored circle to shut it off, a menu opens up with Siri suggestions.

The reason people don’t use Siri is because they don’t want to slide their mouse to the top right and click on it. But there is a much easier way to activate Siri. Go to System Preferences, click on Siri and click on “Listen for Hey Siri.” There you can also change keyboard shortcuts, language, Siri voice and voice feedback.

Try enabling Siri to respond to “HEY SIRI.” If you have the mayor’s e-mail address in your contacts, you can say, “Hey Siri, send an e-mail to the mayor.” Siri responds by saying, “What do you want to say?”

Respond by saying, “The lower road in Kahana is so bad that I need new shocks.” The mayor will now get this e-mail. Play around with it and have fun.

Now we’re going to have some serious fun, and you’ll love this. Ever hear about Screen Shots? Well, now you will. This is a very powerful tool that enables you to capture what’s on your screen and make a photo of it. So? What’s the big deal, and what can I do with this ?

If you’re a Realtor and need to send 15 photos of the house you’re listing — and cringe knowing you have to go through the process of sending separate photos in your e-mail — I have the ultimate solution to do this using screen shots.

To use screen shots, you need to press three keys: SHIFT, COMMAND, 5, and a small menu appears at the bottom of the screen. The first icon is to capture the whole screen, the second icon captures a selective window of the screen, and the third captures a selective portion of the screen. Now that you know the three options, let’s send out a group picture to your client. Ready? First open up the Photos App displaying all the house photos. Press the three keys: SHIFT, COMMAND, 5. Choose the third icon, and all of a sudden you see a big dotted outline where you can click on the corners and compress the edges around the house photos.

After constricting the dotted line around the house photos, click on Options, choose MAIL, then CAPTURE. Get ready for the mind blower of the century!

Instantly, the Mail App opens up with all the house pictures in it. Just fill out who you want to send it to. Wasn’t that really cool? So every time you want to send out a picture or a group of photos, just press the three keys, select the photos, then press Capture. But if you just want to save screen shots to your desktop, you must again press the three keys, choose OPTION and change the settings from Mail to Desktop.

Send your computer-related questions to MauiMist@aol.com.