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While SmartThings has its own lineup of sensors and devices, you can connect them with all sorts of third-party devices, giving you unified control from a single app. RELATED: How to Set Up the SmartThings Home Monitoring Kit There are a small handful of SmartThings-branded sensors and devices available to connect to your SmartThings hub, like motion sensors, water leak sensors, open/close sensors, and even a streaming camera, but SmartThings isn’t limited to just those devices....

Keeping your home stereo in a cabinet helps with noise and protects your equipment from pets and kids. Game consoles, receivers, and STBs don’t work well in saunas; so here’s how to keep your entertainment center cool automatically. Heat is one of the quickest ways you can kill electronics. Most home theater equipment is designed to be cooled passively, but being enclosed in a cabinet does not allow for the proper amount of airflow....

Unlike Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel doesn’t enable autosave by default. You can fix that easily as long as you have a Microsoft 365 subscription. We’re going to show you how to autosave Microsoft Excel workbooks to OneDrive. If you keep hitting Control+s (or Command+s on Mac) every few seconds, this method will ensure that you don’t have any unsaved work in your Excel workbooks. It works by automatically saving your workbooks to OneDrive as you keep working on them....

Humans are creatures of habit, and it’s likely that you turn on your TV close to the same time every day after you get home from work, and turn it off close to the same time every night before you go to bed. Here’s how to automate that process by using the Logitech Harmony Hub and an online service called IFTTT. RELATED: How to Control Your Entire Home Theater with a Logitech Harmony Remote...

RELATED: How to Automate Your Favorite Apps with IFTTT For this, we’re going to use a service called IFTTT (If This Then That). If you haven’t used IFTTT before, check out our guide to getting started for info on how to create an account and connect apps. Then, come back here to create the necessary recipe. To get started, head to IFTTT’s home page and log in. Then, click your profile picture....

If you’re worried about local air quality from wildfires, pollen, or environmental pollution, you can check the current Air Quality Index (AQI) using your iPhone or iPad. Currently, Apple only supports checking the AQI in certain countries (including the U.S., U.K., Germany, and India), but it should roll out in more regions in the future. What is an Air Quality Index? An Air Quality Index (AQI) is a numerical indicator of regional outdoor air quality in your area....

Smartphones, smart watches, tablets, fitness trackers, and all our other gadgets leave us burdened with multiple chargers and so much clutter. Liberate your outlets and charge all your devices with a single plug. We all have multiple devices to charge every day, and that number is only going up. If you use the individual charger that comes with each device, you’ll quickly gobble up multiple outlets in your quest to charge your personal phone, work phone, tablet, and other devices....

The Mail app on your Apple Watch makes it possible to view emails and even reply to some. However, if you have several email accounts and get a lot of email, you might want to limit how much email you see at once. Your Apple Watch will show you mail from any inbox or smart mailbox–but only one. You could set it to “All inboxes”, showing mail from all your accounts, but that’s awfully cluttered....

A new feature was introduced in Word 2013 that allows you to collapse parts of your document and expand them when you want to view that content again. This feature makes it easier to find and view only what you want. NOTE: We used Word 2013 to illustrate this feature. To do this, you must use the Heading styles in Word to format the headings in your document. When you move the mouse over the space to the left of a heading, a right arrow displays....

Reinstalling Windows is a good way to fix serious problems with your computer, or just to get a fresh slate. But before you reinstall Windows, you should make a list of programs you currently have installed on your PC so you know what you want to reinstall on the new system. Having a list of installed programs is also useful if you just bought a new computer and you want to install the same programs you had on your old computer....

We all have those times when we have to remember something before we leave the house or return, but always seem to forget. With iOS, though, you set reminders that trigger whenever you get in or out of your car. Setting up situational or location-based reminders work wherever you go and for many things you do. For example, if you need to have Reminders alert you to pick up a gallon of milk when you’re at the grocery store, you can do that....

By default, the plain black circular bullets are used when creating bulleted lists. However, you can customize your bulleted lists. We will show you how to change the symbol used as the bullets on the list and how to change the color of the bullets. NOTE: We used Word 2016 to illustrate this feature. Highlight the bulleted list you want to customize and make sure the “Home” tab is active on the ribbon....

Google Calendar has basically taken over as the go-to calendar for many users—it’s cross-platform, on the web, and tied to your Google account, so it’s super convenient and easy to use. The notification system is also great, but if you’re not into the default notification system, there’s a quick and easy way to change it. RELATED: How to Customize Google Calendar’s Notifications on the Web By default, Calendar uses what Google calls “interruptive alerts,” which basically means it allows calendar to hijack focus by using a popup window to show a notification....

We all understand the concept of extensions by now: by adding features to your OS, phone, or browser, its functionality is extended. OS X too has extensions, here’s what you need to know to make them work better for you. To be fair, extending the Mac OS system is nothing new. As far back as System 7, you could add stuff to it to further enhance and extend its convenience and usefulness....

Macs only enable TRIM for the Apple-provided solid-state drives they come with. If you upgrade your Mac with an aftermarket SSD, your Mac won’t use TRIM with it. This reduces the drive’s performance. Thanks to Mac OS X 10.10.4, it’s now possible to enable TRIM on any SSD in your Mac with a simple command. You no longer have to disable OS X’s security features and modify your system to do this....

You’re trying to find that certain picture someone sent you a while back and you can’t remember who it was. Instead of sifting through all your text messages from everyone who could have sent you the picture, why not extract all images from your text messages? The free “Save MMS” app does exactly that. Go to the Play store and search for “save mms”, install the “Save MMS” app, then go to the App Drawer and run the app....

If you’re a fan of Google’s Picasa picture management program and the iPhone, you’ve likely already discovered the unfortunate state of affairs: with the default settings Picasa can’t import pictures from iOS devices. Read on as we show you how to tweak your workflow and get things importing smoothly. What’s the Problem? If you plug your iOS device into your Windows computer and mount it like a regular removable drive (just like you would with a camera SD card or an Android phone) and then attempt to import your photos and movies from your iPhone, you’ll get the following error....

The Home screen on the Apple Watch is a large, fluid grid of app icons. As you move them around, icons on the outside rim get smaller than the icons in the middle. This can make it hard to tap the icon you want. However, this is easily solved. There is a setting, called “Reduce Motion”, that disables the resizing of the app icons, making all the icons on the Home screen all the same size....

Photos you take on your Android smartphone don’t have to stay digital. You can get physical copies of those photos printed out quickly and easily — using your own printer, at a local store, or sent to you in the mail. You don’t need any fancy hardware to do this. You could use your own photo printer, but that isn’t even an ideal solution — if you just want to print the occasional photo, just pay per-print....

This week, Facebook finally debuted a long awaited feature on their iOS app, dubbed “See First”, which gives users an even greater level of control over who appears on their News Feed, how they’re organized, and who gets kicked to the curb. The options are buried under a few menus though, and sorting the whole mess out in between pages you’ve liked, people you’ve followed, and actual friends on your list isn’t as easy as it sounds....