Android’s “Do Not Disturb” seems like a simple, self-explanatory setting. But when Google dramatically overhauled Android’s phone silencing with Do Not Disturb in Lollipop, then re-designed it again in Marshmallow, things got a little confusing. But it’s all good—we’re here to make sense of it for you. Do Not Disturb: A History Lesson Travel back in time with me, if you will, to a time before Lollipop. Let’s go back to KitKat (and older!...
Series X and S Embrace Backwards Compatibility Both Xbox Series consoles arrive with an impressive list of compatible titles, with everything that currently works on the Xbox One family also running on the Xbox Series. The only difference between the Series X and S is whether you are running from physical media, as the Series S lacks an optical disc drive. The Xbox Series X and S are backward compatible with almost every native Xbox One game, 568 Xbox 360 games, and 39 original Xbox games....
Google has done an excellent job of baking its own cloud service, Google Drive, into the Chrome OS file manager. If you use Drive for most of your cloud needs, then it feels like native storage on a a Chrome OS device. But if you use something else, like Dropbox or network attached storage, things don’t seem so clean. Here’s how to add those directly to the file manager in Chrome OS so you can navigate them quickly and easily....
Macros in Word and Excel provide the ability to save time on predictable, repetitive tasks. You can record a series of actions into a macro and then simply click a button to run the macro and perform the task. Once you’ve recorded your macro (see our article at the above link), you can add a button to the Quick Access Toolbar so you can quickly run the macro. To do this, click the down arrow button on the right side of the Quick Access Toolbar and select “More Commands” on the popup menu....
Have you tried to schedule a meeting with people in another time zone and gotten the time wrong? It would be helpful if you could view both time zones on the calendar in Outlook so you can quickly see the corresponding time when scheduling meetings. NOTE: We used Outlook 2013 to illustrate this feature. To add a second time zone to your calendar, open Outlook and click the “File” tab....
Warm weather is on its way, which means that air conditioning units are firing up. However, there are some days when the temperature actually drops to a pleasant level. Here’s how to make your Nest Thermostat automatically shut off whenever the outside temperature gets cooler. RELATED: How to Install and Set Up the Nest Thermostat Using a neat online service called IFTTT, you can tell your Nest Thermostat to automatically turn off if the weather ever reaches a specific temperature, that way you can open windows and save money by not running your AC when you don’t need to....
Windows 7 and above are set to automatically enable TRIM on solid-state drives. You shouldn’t need to worry about enabling TRIM yourself. But, if you want to double-check that Windows has enabled TRIM, you can. When TRIM is enabled, Windows will send an instruction to your solid-state drive every time you delete a file. The solid-state drive can then automatically erase that file’s contents. This is important for maintaining speedy solid-state drive performance....
If you’d like to show your PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5‘s activity in your Discord account, link both your Discord and PlayStation Network accounts together. Here’s how to do that on your desktop and mobile device. RELATED: How to Change Your PlayStation 5’s Privacy Settings Link Discord to PlayStation Network on Desktop On your desktop computer, you can use the Discord desktop app or Discord for the web to link your accounts....
Storage on Android can be a bit of a mess, so it’s no surprise that duplicate files can build up without your knowledge. Scrolling through a long list of files and trying to pick out the duplicates manually is not fun. Thankfully, the “Files by Google” app can help. RELATED: How to Free Up Storage Space on Your Android Phone Files by Android is pre-installed on some Android devices. If it’s not on yours, you can download it from the Google Play Store....
Apple’s iMessage is one of the most popular messaging platforms around, and it’s a great way for Apple to lock people into its ecosystem. As great as iMessage is, there may still be times you need to disable or complete deactivate it. Some of those times may be down to good old-fashioned troubleshooting (or perhaps you really did make the jump to Android) Whatever your reasons, you will not only need to turn iMessage off on your iPhone or iPad but potentially tell Apple to remove your number from iMessage on the server-side, too....
By default, Ubuntu checks for system updates every day and prompts you when they are available. At that point, you can choose to download and install the updates immediately or have Ubuntu remind you later. However, you can also choose to have updates downloaded and installed automatically. NOTE: When we say to type something in this article and there are quotes around the text, DO NOT type the quotes, unless we specify otherwise....
Google Chrome 74 offers a built-in dark mode on Windows. Rather than having its own dark mode toggle, Chrome simply follows Windows 10’s overall app mode. That’s how it normally works—but there’s a way to forcibly enable it, too. How to Enable Chrome’s Dark Mode You can simply enable Google Chrome’s built-in dark mode by heading to Settings > Personalization > Colors and choosing “Dark” under “Choose your default app mode....
Microsoft has long offered a “Microsoft Defender Offline” tool you can use to perform malware scans from outside of Windows. With Windows 10’s Anniversary Update, this tool is included with Windows, and even easier to launch. Here’s how to use it, no matter which version of Windows you’re on. Microsoft Defender —formerly known as Windows Defender — may prompt you to download and run Microsoft Defender Offline if it finds malware it can’t remove....
If you’re sharing a document and you want to avoid changes being made to it, you can force Word to prompt the user to open the document as read only when they open the file. We’ll show you how to enable this setting. Open the file you want opened as read only and click the “File” tab. On the backstage screen, click “Save As” in the list of items on the left....
Google Play allows you to easily refund an app — for any reason — within the first two hours after purchasing it. After that, it gets a bit more difficult and situational — but there are still ways you can potentially get a refund. There’s no automated way to request refunds for in-app purchases from within Google Play. You’ll have to contact the developer or Google for help refunding or solving problems with in-app purchases....
You can easily add the current date and time to your Word documents, but what if you only want to add the month or month and year, but no date? It’s easy to manually add a custom date field and we’ll show you how. Adding a date field to your Word document using the Field command on the Insert tab adds the complete date, without an option to only add the month or year....
Siri isn’t all that great to begin with, but here are some ways to at least improve the Siri experience and get her to understand you better when shouting voice commands. RELATED: 26 Actually Useful Things You Can Do with Siri You’re probably better off going with either Alexa or Google Assistant for your voice-control needs, but we get it—if you have an iPhone, using Siri as your main voice assistant just makes sense....
Editing a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation can be time consuming, especially if you’re dealing with multiple slides. If you want to change fonts across your presentation, you’ll need to use the “Replace Fonts” tool or change the Slide Master template. Here’s how. These instructions work for most modern versions of Office on Windows. Mac users will need to change the slide master to change fonts across a presentation instead, but this won’t offer the same blanket change approach as the “Replace Fonts” tool....
As you install apps on your iPhone that have Apple Watch companion apps, the Home screen on your Apple Watch may get a bit disorganized, making it hard to find your apps. It’s easy to rearrange the app icons on your watch’s Home screen. However, you need to use your phone to rearrange the app icons on your watch. So, tap the “Watch” icon on the phone’s Home screen....
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a great game to share with friends and family, but sometimes an in-person player will place a tent in an annoying spot and never play again. Getting rid of their tent or house involves deleting their Animal Crossing player data. Here’s how to do it. The Problem and an Alternative Solution Sometimes, other players on your Animal Crossing island place their tents in inconvenient locations....
