How to See When Apps Access Your Camera and Microphone on Android

Privacy is a big topic when it comes to mobile devices. iPhones and iPads show little orange and green indicator icons when apps access the device’s camera or microphone. Here’s an Android app that can do the same.

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How to Use Outlook’s “My Templates” Add-in For Quick Text Entry

Almost everyone who uses email at work types the same phrases multiple times a day. Save time by using “My Templates,” Microsoft Outlook’s add-in for one-click text entry, to store and add phrases of your choice.

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How to Use Shortcuts Directly From iPhone and iPad Home Screen

There is a myriad of ways to launch a shortcut, including from the shortcuts app, Siri, and widgets. But the fastest way is by using a home screen shortcut. Here’s how to use shortcuts directly from the iPhone and iPad home screen.

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How to Close All Google Chrome Windows at Once

While browsing the web with Google Chrome, it’s easy to get carried away and open dozens of windows filled with hundreds of tabs. Luckily, it’s easy to close multiple Chrome windows at once on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Here’s how.

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How to Get Started With Google TV

The Chromecast with Google TV introduced the company’s vision for its smart TV devices. If you have a streaming device running Google TV, there are some things you should know. We’ll help you get the most out of your experience.

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Your Password Manager Can Do More Than Just Store Passwords

It’s common sense that everyone should be using a good password manager (we hope, at least). It’s also worth noting that password managers have tons of other amazing features that you might not be using. These features are both convenient and security-centric, and they can help you stay safe online and get the most out of your password manager.

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Get an On-Screen Windows Key Shortcut Guide on Windows 10

Windows 10 features a rich collection of Windows key shortcuts that can make using a PC speedy fast—if you remember them. Luckily, thanks to PowerToys, you can quickly see a convenient pop-up guide to many of the most useful ones. Here’s how to use it.

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How to Watch the 2020 Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball Drop

No spectators will be allowed in person to watch the ball drop in New York City’s Times Square to mark the transition from 2020 to 2021. Thankfully, there are still plenty of ways to watch the annual tradition from home.

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Samsung's New HDR10+ TVs Automatically Adapt Picture Quality to Ambient Lighting

HDR is optimized to work in a super dark environment, but most people spend their TV time surrounded by ambient lighting, like sunlight or the light from a lamp. That’s why Samsungs upcoming QLED TVs contain a new feature called HDR10+ Adaptive, which automatically adjusts and optimizes picture quality based on the ambient light in your living room.

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Ekster's Aluminum Cardholder Takes "Minimalist" to the Extreme

When it comes to wallets, I’ve been a fan of Ekster’s line of cardholders for quite some time. My daily carry has been the company’s vegan wallet for the better part of two years and it’s been great. I have the bar set high with the Aluminum Cardholder.

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How to Create a Gantt Chart in Microsoft PowerPoint

A Gantt chart is a bar chart that shows the schedule of a project. Thankfully, Microsoft PowerPoint provides several Gantt chart templates for you to choose from. Here’s how to select a template and customize your Gantt chart.

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How to Add a Watch Face on Apple Watch

A new Apple Watch comes preloaded with a couple of watch faces. There’s also a huge collection of additional watch faces, ranging from stylish to downright fun. Here’s how to add a new watch face on Apple Watch.

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How to Hide or Remove System Preference Panes on Mac

If you use a Mac, you’ve probably configured your machine with System Preferences, which includes individual configuration sections called “preference panes.” But few people know that you can easily hide or even remove those panes. Here’s how to do it.

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How to Turn off or Restart Your Playstation 5

The PlayStation 5’s (PS5) user interface places the power options within a hidden menu, making them somewhat difficult to find. We’ll explain how to find the options, so you can easily turn your console off, put it into Rest Mode, restart it, or turn the system on again as needed.

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How to Make Calls from Windows 10 Using an Android Phone

If your computer runs Windows 10 and you also have an Android phone, you should probably be using Microsoft’s Your Phone app. You can do a lot with it, including making and receiving phone calls on your PC. Let’s do it!

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Calculated Properties in PowerShell Functions

Many times a returned property from an object in PowerShell may not be ideally named, or the value is not quite in the necessary format. For those instances, PowerShell has the calculated properties construct. This useful feature allows for modifying the returned value easily during select operations and quickly and easily return what’s needed in the pipelined output. In practice, what does this look like? How about taking one date format, and changing to a different format?

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Which Streaming Gadget Should You Buy: Roku, Fire TV, or Chromecast?

At this point, the set top box market has settled on three major choices—or rather, two major choices and a dark horse. For most consumers who want something besides their smart TV’s built-in interface, or who are shopping for a new TV and want a widely supported UI baked in, you’ve got a choice between Roku, Fire TV, and Chromecast.

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What Is “Binning” for Computer Components?

You might not realize it, but every time you purchase a new desktop CPU, you also get a ticket for a giveaway called the “silicon lottery.” Two CPUs of the same model can perform differently when pushed to their limits thanks to something called “CPU binning.”

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LG Will Unveil Its First 8K QNED Mini LED TV Line at CES in 2021

LG is already known for its impressive OLED TVs, and now it’s adding multiple new models to its LCD TV line. The models use Mini LED technology, which LG has dubbed QNED. We’ll get our first real look at the new QNED line at LG’s virtual CES event in January of 2021.

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EA's Excellent 'Star Wars: Squadrons' Game Is on Sale for 40% Off

For a while, EA had a bad rap for expensive games filled with endless microtransactions. Then along came Star Wars: Squadrons, an inexpensive space fighter game with zero microtransactions. If you buy the PC version, you’d even get VR included; no extra purchase necessary. What could be better? A 40% off sale bringing the price from an already reasonable $40 to $23.99.

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How to Use Google Photos as the Screen Saver on Google TV

Devices such as the Chromecast with Google TV can display a Google Photos slideshow as the screen saver. If you’d like to use your TV as a giant photo frame, we’ll show you how to set this up.

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Your Ancient Smartphone Will Stop Working on Sprint Networks January 1st, 2022

T-Mobile and Sprint merged to become one company in April of 2020, but Sprint’s legacy network still exists to support old devices. That may change soon, as a notice sent by T-Mobile to its business customers states that the Sprint CDMA networks will shut down “on or around” January 1st, 2022.

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How to Enable a Firefox Extension in Private Browsing Mode

Private mode in Mozilla Firefox keeps your local browsing history private. But, by default, Firefox turns off extensions while browsing privately to prevent them from leaking data. If you’d like to use a trusted extension while browsing privately, it’s easy to turn it on. Here’s how.

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How to Change The App Layout to a List on Apple Watch

The Apple Watch has a honeycomb-style app screen. While it’s efficient, you might have trouble finding the right app on the small screen. Switch the app layout to list view to see bigger app icons with app names on your Apple Watch.

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Quick Tip: You Can Stream Your PC Games to an Xbox One, Series X, or Series S

Playing PC games on your TV is all the rage these days, with services like Luna and Stadia offering an easy entry to cloud gaming. But if you already have a gaming PC and a huge collection of games, maybe you’d rather not pay for another subscription. If you also happen to have a recent Xbox, it’s a snap.

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Here's the Best Time to See Tonight's Cold Moon

If you missed the Great Convergence or didn’t catch the last meteor shower, there’s still some hope for an astronomical event in 2020. The Cold Moon is happening, and here’s when to catch it.

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How to Stream the Most Acclaimed TV Series of 2020

With so many people stuck at home for most of 2020, TV series captured more of the popular imagination than ever. Here’s how you can stream the most acclaimed TV series of 2020 (as tabulated by review aggregation site Metacritic).

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How to Use Your Phone to Pay for Gas

Thanks to smartphones, it’s no longer necessary to stick your credit card into a grimy machine to pay for gas. There are a couple of different methods you can use to pay with your phone. We’ll show you how.

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The 11 Best Free Games for Your New Xbox, PlayStation, or Switch

When you drop hundreds on a brand new console, either for yourself or your kids, dropping another load of money on games isn’t exactly appealing. Fortunately, there are plenty of great free to play titles available on all the major systems.

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How to Get a System-Wide Color Picker on Windows 10

Need to figure out a color quickly? Using Microsoft’s free PowerToys utility for Windows 10, you can instantly bring up a color picker with a keyboard shortcut and use your mouse cursor to identify any color on screen in hex, RGB, or HSL format. Here’s how to do it.

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Scopes in PowerShell

In many programming languages, there is the concept of scope. Defined as what variables and functions are available in what context. An example is if a variable is available to every function within a PowerShell script, or just a single defined function. PowerShell Scopes encompass several different scopes that can be used such as Global, Local, or Script scopes.

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How to Stop the Spinning Wheel on Your Mac

Your Mac hijacking your cursor and asking you to wait around is never welcome. People call it different things, including the spinning wheel, beachball, or pinwheel of death.

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Space Tourist Smuggled Ashes of 'Star Trek' Engineer "Scotty" Aboard the ISS

Space was truly the final frontier for actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on the original Star Trek series. His ashes have now been on the International Space Station for 12 years after being smuggled aboard in 2008, so he was able to achieve his goal of being aboard the ISS.

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LG's Latest Smart Refrigerators Open With a Voice Command

LG is already well-known for its see-through smart refrigerators. Knock on the door, and you can get a peek of what’s inside. Ahead of CES, the company announced a follow-up that makes the viewing area even bigger so you can see more of your fridge’s innards. But it also adds a new voice command: “open the refrigerator door.”

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How to Change Your Default Google Account on the Web

It’s easy to use the web with multiple Google accounts signed in at the same time, but you will always fall back to the “default” account. It’s a little tricky to change this, but it can be done.

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Grab a Gen 5 Fossil Smartwatch for $139 While You Can (53% Off)

If you find it hard to justify a smartwatch due to the cost, you may want to jump on this sale today. Fossil’s Gen 5 smartwatch is one of the best Wear OS options available, and today you can grab it for 53% off. That brings the price down to $139, but it’s rapidly selling out.

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How to Open a PST File in Microsoft Outlook

If you want to retrieve a single email from a backup file, importing that whole file of emails into Outlook is time-consuming overkill. Here’s how to open a PST file in Microsoft Outlook and browse the contents, no importing needed.

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Here's Everything Coming to Netflix the Week of Dec. 28, 2020

You’ve had a holly jolly holiday, and now you’re ready to move on from the Christmas content. Well, good news! Netflix is helping you. It’s the last drop of December, and it coincides with the first few days of January 2021. The streaming service is giving fans a plethora of choices for their post-New Year’s Eve champagne binges.

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How to Check if Your Mac Is Using an Intel or Apple Silicon Processor

In 2020, Apple started selling Macs with its own Apple Silicon chips. But from the outside, the Macs look the same as the old ones. How can you tell if the Mac you’re using runs on an Intel or Apple Silicon processor?

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How to Open Edge’s InPrivate Mode with a Keyboard Shortcut

While using Microsoft Edge, it’s easy to quickly open a new InPrivate window using a keyboard shortcut. InPrivate is a special private browsing mode that doesn’t save your local browsing history. Here’s how to do it.

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Now's the Best Time to Start a Smart Home---Here's How

Smart home technology has been flourishing for years now. Smart home manufacturers have had plenty of time to establish entire ecosystems of products and to perfect each of them. And best of all? Prices for smart home gadgets have decreased, making them more affordable than ever. This makes now the best time to start building up your smart home.

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How to Debug a PowerShell Script

Any script development usually requires troubleshooting which usually results in one of two approaches. Either manually setting variables to values and outputting that data when running the script, or utilizing debugging to set breakpoints to inspect data before continuing or aborting. Built-in to PowerShell ISE and to Visual Studio Code is the ability to perform debugging.

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10 Tips and Tricks for iPadOS 14

Apple’s iPadOS 14 update for the iPad, iPad Air, iPad Mini, and iPad Pro brings the iPad closer to the Mac without losing what makes the iPad unique. Here are the features you should try out on iPadOS 14.

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How to Easily Batch Rename Files on Windows 10

Need a quick but powerful way to rename large groups of files in Windows 10? Using Microsoft’s free PowerToys, all that power is only a right-click away thanks to the PowerRename module. Here’s how to use it.

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Make Your Own Smart Lock with a Raspberry Pi, RFID Badge, and Custom Code

One of the better smart home products you can buy is the smart lock. It’ll help you know who is coming and going, and you can set up routines to lock your door at night or when you leave. But it also often means giving up your data to the company that made your smart lock and any connected smart company like Amazon and Google. If you don’t like that thought, why not make your own?

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A Pro LEGO Builder Just Recreated Hokusai's 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa'

Certified professional LEGO builder, Jumpei Mitsui, just finished building a LEGO replica of one of Japan’s most famous images: Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. And what’s even more impressive is that he went beyond recreating the 2D image and built out an entire 3D landscape—complete with boats and all.

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How to Delete Your Play Activity on the Nintendo Switch

If you’ve been playing some embarrassing games recently on your Nintendo Switch and you don’t want them to show up in your Play Activity where your friends can see it, you can delete your play activity completely. Here’s how to do it.

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Quick Tip: Create a QR Code to Easily Share Your Wi-Fi Password

Typing in your Wi-Fi details on new smartphones and tablets (and on your guests’ phones) can be a total hassle, especially if you have a long complex password. Make life a little simpler for yourself by turning your Wi-Fi password into a handy Wi-Fi QR code, so that anyone can log into your wireless network without bugging you.

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How to Highlight Text in Microsoft Word

If you want to emphasize important text within a Microsoft Word document so that it’s not overlooked by the reader, you can use Word’s highlighting tool. You can also search for highlighted text within the document. Here’s how.

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How to Control Alerts and Notifications on Your Apple Watch

The Apple Watch brings notifications to your wrist. Finally, you can get important notifications without looking at your phone—and you’ll get unimportant notifications, too. Here’s how to control your watch’s alerts.

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