Author

If you’ve updated to the new version of iOS 11.1 with all 70+ fun new emoji and the triumphant return of the 3D touch multitasking feature along with other various bug fixes and battery life improvements, I’m sure you may have noticed a slightly LESS useful feature. A bug that replaces your “i” character with A and [?] character. It has caused a lot of frustration and confusion and I’m here to try and bring things back to normal for you!

Up until today, Apple’s solution for the bug was to use it’s Text Replacement feature to create a workaround by following these steps:

Open Settings. Navigate to General -> Keyboard Text Replacement.
Tap the Add button in the toolbar.
In the Phrase field, enter the uppercase ‘I’ character.
In the Shortcut field, type the lowercase ‘i’ character.
Add the text replacement.

They were quick to offer that solution to the public but they were also working on a new update to fix the bug without having to use a workaround. Apple has now officially released iOS 11.1.1 for all iPhone and iPad users. The latest software update includes bug fixes and improvements including a fix for the notorious ‘i’ autocorrect bug that resulted in the A and [?] character appearing.

Hard Drives (Hard Disk Drive, HDD for short) is where all your stuff is stored, they’re a terribly boring subject that I’m very passionate about because they’re arguably the most important part of your computer. The hard drive on your computer is where all your stuff is stored, (now SSDs or Solid State Drives on newer computers) it’s where your files live, all that data that basically makes the computer yours. While the internal drive, (the storage mechanism that’s built into the computer) is becoming increasingly more blurred as the primary storage location as more stuff is moving to the cloud and online accounts, there’s still a lot of stuff that lives on the internal hard drive, and for most people it’s worth assuming that not everything is backed up to the cloud.

We sell a lot of external hard drives at Small Dog for backup purposes and a frequent issue is them not being formatted correctly. There’s no such thing as a Mac HDD in terms of physical design or manufacturing, but there are different formats that will make any most any HDD or SSD compatible or incompatible on a Mac. For a great many years (at least a great many years in computer terms) HFS+ has been the file format to Macs, the latest release of macOS 10.13 High Sierra has changed over to the new APFS. Windows uses NTFS, a Microsoft brainchild. Because most computers in the world run Windows, most hard drive manufacturers format their HDDs as NTFS, these can be read on a Mac, but new information can’t be written to them, this means you can plug a drive you’ve been using on a windows machine into a Mac, and you can see all the stuff on it, but you can’t add anything new. A drive formatted as HSF+ or APFS can’t be read on a Windows machine without special drivers, and if you plug a drive you’ve been using on your Mac into a Windows machine, it won’t even show up as a location you can drag and drop files into.