If you are anything like me, you hate seeing all the popup notification balloons that Windows shows. These range from computer security alerts, to update alerts, and more. Today we will teach you how to disable these notification balloons in Windows 8, 8.1, and 10. Please note that this tutorial is about disabling system notifications, however, if you want to disable the application specific notifications, otherwise known as Toaster notifications, you will need to read How To Disable Toaster Notifications In Windows 8....

RELATED: What Is DuckDuckGo? Meet the Google Alternative for Privacy What Is DuckDuckGo Email Protection? DuckDuckGo Email Protection is a mail forwarding service with baked-in privacy features. You can sign up for an @duck.com forwarding address, which forwards to a standard mailbox of your choosing. Any email messages sent to your @duck.com address are stripped of known trackers before being forwarded to you. The service also allows you to create random email aliases, just like Apple’s Hide My Email service....

MacBooks attempt to automatically manage your display brightness for you, dimming the display when you step away from an outlet and adjusting the brightness to suit the overall light level nearby. But you can adjust the brightness manually and even disable these features, if you like. The brightness hotkeys on a Mac will only allow you to adjust an external display’s brightness if that external display was made by Apple....

The easiest way to reclaim some screen space on your Mac screen (other than hiding the Dock) is to hide the menu bar itself. Once it’s hidden, you can still access it by moving your cursor to the top of the screen. To enable the automatic menu bar-hiding feature, click the Apple icon, and then choose the “System Preferences” option. If you’re running macOS Big Sur or higher, select the “Dock & Menu Bar” option....

So you’ve set up live TV on your computer with NextPVR, and maybe even set it up to stream to every computer in your house. The only downside? Those pesky commercials in your recorded shows. Here’s how to get rid of them automatically. RELATED: How to Watch and Record Live TV with Kodi and NextPVR Comskip is a free Windows program capable of detecting commercials in recorded TV shows. It will find and skip ads without you having to lift a finger, whether you’re watching in VLC or through a media center program like Kodi....

Facebook. People either love it, begrudgingly accept it, hate it, or they have better things to do, but sometimes a bad relationship is just that, and you need to break up. Here’s how to do it gently, or just get it over with. Social networks have become a necessary evil. Like mobile phones, we just can’t do without them, but there are all kinds of things we haven’t considered about their effect on people....

You can change the default save location from the screenshot tool. Begin by pressing Command+Shift+5 simultaneously on your keyboard. Next, in the screenshot tool, click the “Options” button. At the top of the pop-up menu, under the Save To section, you’ll see the following built-in options: Desktop: The default option, which will save all your screenshots as individual files. Clipboard: Use this option to paste the shot into a different app immediately....

Update the Nintendo Switch The GameCube controller is supported on Nintendo Switch consoles running at least system version 5.0.0, released in March 2018. To ensure that your Nintendo Switch is up to date with the latest system version, double-check that your system is connected to Wi-Fi, and navigate to “System Settings” from the Home menu. Once you’re in System Settings, navigate to “System”, and your current version will be listed under “System Update” to the right....

Android supports mice, keyboards, and even gamepads. On many Android devices, you can connect USB peripherals to your device. On other Android devices, you may need to connect them wirelessly via Bluetooth. Yes, this means you can connect a mouse to your Android tablet and get a mouse cursor, or connect an Xbox 360 controller and play a game, console-style. You can even connect a keyboard and use keyboard shortcuts like Alt+Tab....

If you use VirtualBox to run different operating systems on your computer, you may be wondering how to copy text from your host machine into the guest machine and vice versa. You may have thought that VirtualBox Guest Additions provides this feature, but it doesn’t. RELATED: Install Guest Additions to Windows and Linux VMs in VirtualBox VirtualBox Guest Additions provides several useful features, such as shared folders and improved performance, and we do recommend installing the Guest Additions....

If you use Mail on your iPhone or iPad, then you’ve probably noticed it’s considerably difficult to delete messages — by default, there’s only an Archive button. There is a way, however, to move messages to the trash. It just isn’t very intuitive. Simply put, most of us don’t want to archive every single email message. In fact, a lot of email messages have no business in our inboxes. But if you go to your mail through “Mailboxes”, Apple has hidden that Delete button away, replacing it with a lonely Archive option:...

Handoff is the feature on Apple Watch and iPhone that allows you to start a task on one device and finish it on another. For example, you might check email on your watch and then switch to your phone to compose a reply. You must use your iPhone to enable the Handoff feature on your Apple Watch. Tap the “Watch” app icon on your phone’s Home screen. Make sure the “My Watch” screen is active....

A spelling exclusion list is a list of words you can force Word to flag as misspelled, even when they are listed in the main dictionary as correctly spelled words. We will show you how to add a custom list of words you want to always flag as misspelled. For example, if you tend to type “suing” rather than “using”, or “parent” rather than “patent”, the normal spell check will think “suing” and “parent” are correctly spelled words, when that’s rarely what you meant to type....

If you’ve built up an extensive network of email contacts in Gmail, you may want to export them to another service. To export Gmail contacts, you’ll need to use Google Contacts, which you can access through Gmail itself. Because Gmail contacts are synced across your Google account, your saved contacts may include email addresses, phone numbers from synced mobile devices, and other additional contact information. Contacts are exported as vCard (VCF) or CSV files, allowing you to import them into any other email service, including Outlook....

If you’re installing a new hard drive, or your Mac is completely messed up, you might think it’s time for a fresh installation of macOS. But if you’ve got a Time Machine backup, that’s not necessary: you can fully restore your Mac, and have all your applications and files exactly as you left them. We’ve shown you how to back up and restore macOS from Time Machine, but today we’re going to dive in a little more and show you how restoring from Recovery Mode looks....

Tweetstorms are the new blog posts. Instead of writing a short blog post on Medium or their own website, many bloggers or brands choose to publish long Twitter threads instead. Twitter now makes it really easy to publish multiple tweets together as a thread, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. But when you’re on the other side of the thread, the reading experience for a long Twitter thread isn’t as good....

Microsoft Office lets you encrypt your Office documents and PDF files, allowing no one to even view the file unless they have the password. Modern versions of Office use secure encryption that you can rely on–assuming you set a strong password. The instructions below apply to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access 2016, but the process should be similar in other recent versions of Office. How Secure Is Microsoft Office’s Password Protection?...

When it comes to video playback, the cross-platform application VLC is a veritable Swiss Army knife. It’s been popular on Windows, Mac, and Linux for a long time, but now you can get that same great plays-anything-under-the-sun power on your Apple TV. Like most set-top media players, the Apple TV is super good at playing content provided by its parent company (Apple), but requires a little bit of finesse to play content from other sources (like your personal media collection, the web, or other streaming sources)....

Windows–especially Windows 10–has a bad habit of installing new updates for hardware drivers whether you want them or not. You could go big and simply prevent Windows from downloading updates altogether, or you might have luck blocking or hiding updates. But if you’ve got the Pro or Enterprise version of Windows, you can tailor your actions a little better by using Group Policy Editor to prevent the installation or updating of specific devices....

If you need to capture what’s happening on your iPhone 13’s screen in motion, don’t take a screenshot—grab a screen recording video instead. Luckily, your iPhone 13 (regular, Mini, Pro, or Pro Max) makes it easy with a Control Center shortcut. Here’s how to use it. What Is a Screen Recording? Think of a screen recording like a screenshot in motion: It captures everything you normally see on your screen directly to a file....