When you’re ready to grant access to your Wi-Fi network, navigating to your handset’s Settings menu. The easiest way to do this is by swiping down from the top of the device’s screen to show the Quick Settings menu. From there, tap on the Gear icon to open the Settings menu. As each Android smartphone is slightly different, you might need to swipe down a second time to locate the Gear icon....
Broadband is the lifeblood of the modern household and it’s incredibly frustrating when your Internet connection is flaky. Read on as we walk you through our tried and true troubleshooting techniques so you can pin down exactly where your connectivity problems are coming from. Why Do I Want To Do This? The obvious answer to why you want to do this is to fix your network problems but actually fixing things in a permanent way involves a bit more troubleshooting than the typical plug and unplug routine....
In Windows 11, File Explorer shows check boxes on file icons whenever you select them by default. It’s handy for touchscreen devices, but if you want a cleaner look and don’t need them, they’re easy to turn off. Here’s how. Selection check boxes first appeared in File Explorer as far back as Windows Vista. They appear when you select a file in a File Explorer window or on the desktop....
If you’re a Mac user and you’ve noticed that Safari sometimes shows you website notifications, you might have wondered how to turn them off, and conversely, on again. It’s very simple and can be accomplished in just a few key presses. You will see these notifications slide out from the top-right corner like other OS X notifications. They will usually inform you when a website has posted a new article or of breaking news....
Have you tried to type an ampersand (&) in a header or footer in Excel and seen it disappear on your printed worksheet? There’s a special trick to typing ampersands in headers and footers in Excel so you don’t lose them. For example, a company with an ampersand in their name–like our fictional “Smith & Jones” law firm–may want to put their name in the header. However, the ampersand is used in Excel headers and footers as a “marker” that indicates a special formatting code follows....
Do you ever go to sleep simply dreading the sound your alarm will make to wake you up in the morning? Well, thanks to Apple Music, now you can wake up to any song or playlist you want on your iOS device. Make the Song Available Offline First, tap into your Apple Music (you must have an active subscription to take advantage of the feature), and find the song you want to use to set as your alarm....
The year 2022 is coming to a close, and one of the biggest tech events of next year is about to kick off: CES 2023. Lenovo is kicking off announcement season earlier, though. The company has just unveiled a handful of new ThinkPads. Lenovo unveiled a total of three new ThinkPad X1 models, including new models of the X1 Carbon, X1 Yoga, and X1 Nano. All of them come with the same utilitarian design you’re used to seeing from Lenovo, and according to the company, they’re environmentally friendly....
For example, while the input lag isn’t significant for every genre of gaming, it can be vital when you’re playing against others online. You want your input lag to be below 30ms, generally believed to be unnoticeable on TVs, and anything below 15ms is more than enough. Variable refresh rate, or VRR, is another important feature as it reduces judder and screen tearing by ensuring that your TV can match its refresh rate with the frame rate of the gameplay....
Numerically based (0-9) 4-digit PIN numbers only allow for a total of 10,000 possible combinations, so it stands to reason that some combinations are going to be far more common than others. The question is whether or not your personal PIN number choices are among the commonly used ones or ‘stand out’ as being more unique. Note 1: Data Genetics used data condensed from released, exposed, & discovered password tables and security breaches to generate the analysis report....
Which VPN Server Should I Pick? There are a few reasons why you’d use a VPN, but the two most important are security and the ability to change your digital location—think of escaping censorship or getting into another country’s Netflix library. There are a few uses that don’t fall neatly into either category, like torrenting, but we’ll talk about that later. Whichever one of these has the priority for you will decide which country you should connect to....
The last few years have seen a marked increase in the availability of SSDs. They’ve also shown a dramatic decrease in price, even though they’re still costlier than traditional drives per gigabyte of storage. What is an SSD? In what ways do you benefit the most from paying the premium for an SSD? What, if anything, do you need to do differently with an SSD? Read on as we cut through haze surrounding Solid State Drives....
A photo’s EXIF data contains a ton of information about your camera, and potentially where the picture was taken (GPS coordinates). That means, if you’re sharing images, there’s a lot of details others can glean from them. EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. Every time you take a picture with your digital camera or phone, a file (typically a JPEG) is written to your device’s storage. In addition to all the bits dedicated to the actual picture, it records a considerable amount of supplemental metadata as well....
Windows 10 (and 8) include a new virtual memory file named swapfile.sys. It’s stored in your system drive, along with the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys. But why does Windows need both a swap file and a page file? Windows swaps out some types of data that aren’t being used to the swap file. Currently, this file is used for those new “universal” apps — formerly known as Metro apps. Windows may do more with it in the future....
The Different Types of Apps The App Store is home to millions of apps, but they aren’t all created equal. To determine whether an iPhone app will work on your iPad, you need to know a little about how apps and the App Store work. There are four types of apps a developer can build: iPhone-only: These apps are built for the iPhone and cannot work on an iPad at all....
YouTube has announced that it’s introducing usernames for users and channels. There will be @name handles used across the platform, making it easy to mention people and channels in descriptions and comments. It should also generally help with finding people and channels on YouTube. Every user handle will be valid for both channels and Shorts, YouTube’s TikTok competitor. Presumably, having user handles will help cut down on impersonation, since they’ll be unique to every user and separate from existing channel names....
We’ve highlighted a few of the common annoyances people have with Samsung phones. They may not all be annoying to you personally, but that’s the beauty of personalization. Even if you’re not crazy about these features, you can take advantage of Samsung’s excellent hardware and get Samsung’s questionable software choices out of the way. RELATED: The Worst Thing About Samsung Phones Is Samsung Software Swap the Nav Button Order Many Android devices now come with gesture navigation as the default, but Samsung is sticking with the three-button layout....
Windows 10: Nearby Sharing If you’re just moving photos or files between two nearby Windows 10 PCs, you don’t need anything extra. Windows 10’s “Nearby Sharing” feature was added back in the April 2018 Update. This feature works a lot like AirDrop for Windows. With this feature enabled on two PCs near each other, you can quickly send anything—even files, by using the Share feature built into Windows 10’s File Explorer....
Many Android tweaking and hacking guides warn that you’ll void your warranty by continuing. But will you actually be denied repair service if you’ve rooted or unlocked your bootloader? RELATED: What’s the Difference Between Jailbreaking, Rooting, and Unlocking? This is a tough question to answer. There’s what manufacturers say in warranty agreements, what’s actually enforceable in court, and what manufacturers actually do when it’s time to get warranty service. We’re no legal experts, but we’ll answer this question from our own experiences and what we’ve heard....
How 360 Degree Cameras Work The invisible selfie stick is sold by Insta360, one of the major 360-degree camera manufacturers. If you attach it to one of the listed Insta360 camera models, then it really is invisible in the resulting footage. Insta360’s marketing material says this is thanks to “advanced algorithms”, but if you understand the basics of how 360-degree cameras work, it’s clear that this isn’t really the whole story....
When you first set up your Apple Watch, you may or may not have a few world clocks on it. You can change the world clocks on your Apple Watch, but you’ll need to use your iPhone to do it. Adding, subtracting, and changing world clocks on the Apple Watch would seem like it would be fairly intuitive, but it is not. In fact, in order to do anything with world clocks on your Watch, you must use your iPhone’s Clock app....
