The Tips - Mac Kung Fu - page 15

OS X will automatically insert “curly quotes” but if you specifically want a
noncurly quotation mark, say “backquote.”
Currency symbols, including the dollar, must be followed by “sign” if not used
with numbers: to say “$31” you can simply say “thirty-one dollars” but to
type “We need more $,” you would have to say “We need more dollar sign .”
You can also insert a long dash by saying “em dash.” To insert ellipsis (…),
say either “dot dot dot” or “ellipsis.”
Should you want to use Roman numerals, just say them as you would nor-
mally preceded by NUMERAL : “The year of my birth was numeral MCMLXXII.”
Similarly to inserting an actual number rather than the word for the number
(that is, “5” rather than “five”), say “numeral” beforehand: “He reported there
were numeral five of them" will type “There were 5 of them.”
Inserting Emoticons
What if you want to indicate your vague emotional state via clever use of
punctuation? Apple has thought of that. Simply saying “smiley face,” “winky
face,” and “frowny face” will insert :-) , ;-) , and :-( , respectively.
Navigating Around Text
Although navigating the cursor through text is best done via the keyboard or
mouse, the dictation tool offers two commands to move the cursor: “next line”
will move the cursor to the next line of text, while “next paragraph” will move
it to the next paragraph.
Tip 6
Get Rid of Files—Securely
Whenever you empty the trash, the files are deleted in the standard way; that
is, the OS X filesystem makes the space they occupied available for another
use. However, the actual content of the files sticks around on the disk until
it's overwritten, and it can be recovered using one of the many third-party
file recovery tools available.
To avoid this, you can securely empty the trash, which involves writing over
the data with zeroes so that it can't be recovered (at least outside of a high-tech