How to Quickly Start a Preset Timer on Apple Watch Apple Watch’s built-in Timer app comes with quick access to frequently used timer settings. To use them, lift up your Apple Watch and press the Digital Crown. Then, open the Timer app from either the grid or list view on the apps screen. Here, you’ll see eight circles with preset timers ranging from one minute to two hours (Scroll down using the Digital Crown to view more timers....

By default, whenever Spotify reaches the end of the song, album, artist, or playlist you’re listening to, it auto-plays similar songs using its Radio feature. You can see in the screenshot below that I listened to REM’s Bad Day, and then the next thing it played was a Song Radio for Bad Day. RELATED: Press Play and Go: Spotify’s Daily Mixes Are the Best Auto-Playlists Yet Spotify is normally pretty good at picking out music you’ll like, but there are plenty of times you won’t want Spotify to just keep throwing out tunes....

No two people sound exactly alike. Different people have different accents and ways of pronouncing words, and computer voice recognition systems like Siri, Cortana, and Google’s voice search aren’t as good as actual human beings at understanding every voice. Train your voice assistant and it’ll be better at understanding you. Traditionally, computerized voice recognition systems have required some training before they understood you. Modern voice assistants are designed to “just work,” but you can still make them recognize the words you say more often by training them....

Upgrading your laptop’s hard drive is a great way to get some extra life out of an old machine (or resurrect a dead one). Read on as we walk you through the prep work, the installation, and the followup. Why Do I Want To Do This? The most obvious reason you want to upgrade your laptop hard drive is because the old one is dying (or has already died). That’s exactly where we found ourselves, with a dying hard drive throwing up errors left and right, and why we promptly upgraded the drive in our work laptop....

Document Conversion and Docs-as-Code If you have a document in any of pandoc’s many supported file formats, converting it to any of the others is a cinch. That’s a handy tool to have! But the real power of pandoc becomes apparent when you use it as the basis of a simple docs-as-code system. The premise of docs-as-code is to adopt some of the techniques and principles of software development and apply them to writing documentation, especially for software development projects....

Portrait Mode is a great feature for the iPhone’s camera. It can make your selfies look a lot more polished and professional. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could use Portrait Mode on FaceTime? Well, you can. iOS 15 introduced Portrait Mode for FaceTime video calls. It works similarly to the camera mode, blurring the background to highlight your face. The effect works really well in video calls. You’ll probably want to use it all the time....

In the earlier days of the Apple Watch, when you needed to enter text, you had to either use a canned response, an emoji, a doodle, or speak your message aloud and hope the watch would transcribe it correctly. However, that has changed with watchOS 3. Scribble is a new feature in watchOS 3, and is available in apps where you can enter text. No, they haven’t built an entire keyboard into the small watch screen....

The ZIP Compressed Archive File Format Thanks to the dominance of the ZIP format in the Windows realm, ZIP files are probably the most common form of compressed archive in the world. While .tar.gz and tar.bz2 files are common on Linux, Windows users will probably send you an archive in ZIP format. And, if you want to archive some files and send them to a Windows user, the ZIP format will be the easiest, most compatible solution for everyone....

Having spare computer cables on hand is always a good idea, but what do you do when you have suddenly inherited a very large collection of cables that need cleaning? Can you safely clean them using a dishwasher? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answers to a curious, cable-rich reader’s questions. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites....

What Is DirectX 12 Ultimate? The new version of DirectX mostly collects existing technology under one banner and standardizes it for PC gaming and Xbox, which is good news for gamers. Some of the coolest new graphics technologies—like real-time ray tracing—are mostly on NVIDIA graphics cards. When enabled in games, this feature drastically improves visual quality by making light behave much closer to how it does in reality. Future RDNA2-based AMD graphics cards, as well as the Xbox Series X, will also support DX12 Ultimate....

RELATED: What’s New in iOS 16 for iPhone Stage Manager A completely new feature to macOS 13 is Stage Manager, a feature that helps to organize your windows and apps a bit like App Exposé and Mission Control. With a click of the Stage Manager button in Control Center at the top of the screen, macOS will organize all your open windows and apps into groups that you can quickly recall using the icons on the edge of the screen....

Microsoft’s DirectX 12 and Apple’s Metal are next-generation graphics platforms. They provide lower-level access to graphics hardware, allowing game programmers to squeeze more performance out of the hardware. Vulkan is the cross-platform answer to Microsoft and Apple’s technologies. As Vulkan is cross-platform, it brings this next-generation graphics technology to Google’s Android, Valve’s SteamOS, Linux, all versions of Windows, and potentially even Nintendo’s next console. Vulkan brings better gaming performance on absolutely any platform that wants to use it, and makes games more portable between different platforms....

Slow Load or Boot Times Computers and laptops are constantly evolving. Every year, new models are released with better specs and features. And with today’s technology, you’re able to boot your system in a matter of seconds and browse your favorite websites at lightning speed. You can surf the web, run applications, and work on documents smoothly, without any hiccups. If you’re on an older computer and you find yourself constantly waiting around for your device to start or to load webpages, then it might be time for an upgrade....

The Essential Toolkit for the Terminal Linux includes a large number of commands, but we’ve chosen 37 of the most important ones to present here. Learn these commands, and you’ll be much more at home at the Linux command prompt. The below list is presented in alphabetical order. A command’s position in the list is not representative of its usefulness or simplicity. For the final word on a command’s usage, refer to its man pages....

Sometimes it can be confusing when a tech specification ‘prohibits’ the use of a particular accessory item, yet everyone seems to think using the item in question is completely fine. Who is correct in the end? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a worried reader’s question. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites....

When it comes to backing up your files, you might find yourself debating which type of “drive” would best suit your needs. Which is better, a regular external hard-drive, an SSD, or a USB flash drive? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post helps a curious reader make the right choice for a backup solution. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites....

When you are busy working in Microsoft Excel, the last thing you need is to have to continuously fix or remove errors. With that in mind, today’s SuperUser Q&A post helps a reader quickly and easily remove pesky number sign errors from his Microsoft Excel sheets. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader M....

Sometimes, documents you’re printing get stuck in the printer’s queue, preventing further documents from being printed. Here’s how to fix it when that happens. Whether you’re using a local or shared network printer, sometimes printing doesn’t go quite right. If you’ve tried troubleshooting obvious printer problems—paper jams, no paper, low ink or toner, or simply restarting the printer—it’s time to turn your attention toward the print queue. Often, simply clearing and restarting the print spooler—the software that prepares and manages printing documents—can fix the problem....

If you want to use your Mac in a different language, or you’re live in a different region, then you can change it in OS X. When you do, it’ll display everything in your preferred language, currency, date format, and more. The language and region settings on OS X are pretty useful in an number of ways, Even if you have no intention of ever changing your language, there are some cool things you can do to your regional formats....

On some remotes, you may also have home control buttons that you can use with devices like Philips Hue lights, a Nest thermostat, or a Belkin WeMo smart outlet. (You can see Logitech’s full list of supported smarthome devices here.) Unlike home theater devices, you cant fully program your remote using the MyHarmony desktop software–you hae to use the Harmony app for iOS or Android to perform some of the setup....