If your iPhone 6’s screen is cracked or the home button is broken, you may want to think twice before getting it fixed by anyone other than Apple. Seeking repairs from a third-party repair service could render your device unusable the next time it updates. Anger is mounting as iPhone 6 and 6s users discover that third-party repairs can eventually brick their phones. The problem apparently stems from when these services use non-Apple supplied parts to fix iPhones....

Freemium Apps Aren’t New Freemium software is a form of monetization that withholds certain features behind a paywall, whether it’s a subscription or one-time payment. While use of this term only recently became widespread, this business model as a way to monetize digital goods has been around for a long time. The practice of charging for additional features can be traced back to the rise of shareware and its variations. For example, trialware applications, such as old versions of Adobe Photoshop or Internet Download Manager, only worked for 30 days without a paid license....

It Starts With Leaked Password Databases Attacks against online services are common. Criminals often exploit security flaws in systems to acquire databases of usernames and passwords. Databases of stolen login credentials are often sold online on the dark web, with criminals paying in Bitcoin for the privilege of accessing the database. Let’s say you had an account on the Avast forum, which was breached back in 2014. That account was breached, and criminals may have your username and password on the Avast forum....

A High-Definition Digital Media Standard HDMI stands for “High-Definition Multimedia Interface.” It’s a digital video connection standard that helps you get clean HD video on TV sets and computer monitors. At the moment, it’s typically the way you get the highest-quality video connection between devices such as computers, set-top boxes, game consoles, DVRs, Blu-Ray or DVD players, and monitors or TV sets. HDMI is a standard governed by the HDMI Forum, which is a group of over 80 companies that vote to determine how HDMI works today—and how new extensions of the standard will work in the future....

What Is Natural Language Processing? Whether it’s Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Bixby, or Cortana, everyone with a smartphone or smart speaker has a voice-activated assistant nowadays. Every year, these voice assistants seem to get better at recognizing and executing the things we tell them to do. But have you ever wondered how these assistants process the things we’re saying? They manage to do this thanks to Natural Language Processing, or NLP....

Computational Photography If you’re interested in smartphone photography, you’ve likely heard the term computational photography. It’s essentially the use of algorithms and software to aid in the capture of better photos through smartphones’ tiny cameras. This is how your iPhone can take fantastic pictures without being as big as a DSLR or mirrorless camera. Apple’s Photonic Engine is a computational photography technique that revamps the iPhone’s image processing stack to enhance the photos taken in mid-to-low lighting conditions....

“Over the past year, we’ve been trialing a beta of Raspberry Pi OS in glorious 64-bit. Now it’s time to open it up to a wider audience,” said Raspberry Pi’s Gordon Hollingworth. As for why it took Raspberry Pi so long to release the 64-bit version for the masses, the company said it wanted to focus on compatibility between devices, so it stuck with the 32-bit version. “We have continued to build our Raspberry Pi OS releases on the 32-bit Raspbian platform, aiming to maximize compatibility between devices and to avoid customer confusion,” reads Raspberry Pi’s blog post....

Design: Not Much Has Changed If you’ve ever looked at an Apple Watch, you know exactly what to expect here. Instead of a traditional timepiece’s circular design, the Apple Watch SE 2 is square in shape with rounded corners and edges. On the right, you’ll find a rotating digital crown and a side button. On the left, there are cutouts for the watch’s built-in microphone and speaker. Apple also uses a proprietary watch band design that slides into the top and bottom of the wearable....

A device’s MAC address is assigned by the manufacturer, but it’s not to hard to change—or “spoof”—those addresses when you need to. Here’s how do do it, and why you might want to. Each network interface connected to your network—whether it’s your router, wireless device, or network card in your computer—has a unique media access control (MAC) address. These MAC addresses—sometimes referred to as physical or hardware addresses—are assigned in the factory, but you can usually change the addresses in software....

Backing up your text messages from your Android phone to your Gmail account is so simple, there’s no reason to not back them up and make them search-friendly in the process. Read on to see how you can turn your Gmail account into an SMS vault. What You’ll Need It’s easy to lose your text messages. Everything from switching phones to fumble fingers can drop your messages in front of the digital reaper—just last night I managed to accidentally delete a massive SMS thread when I really only intended to delete a single message that refused to send....

Setting Up a Mother’s Day Video Call The first step in setting up a virtual Mother’s Day celebration is getting mom what she really wants: all of your adorable faces in one digital place with reliable video and audio chat. There are plenty of free apps for this, but simple is better since some mothers are more digitally savvy than others. Also, not every mom owns the same devices, so it’s best to go with what everybody already has access to....

Apple’s Home app offers quick controls for controlling smart lights, doorbells, thermostats, and other smart home devices—right in your iPhone or iPad’s Control Center. Here’s how to set it up and use it. These controls work with HomeKit-enabled devices, which you can configure from within Apple’s Home app on your iPhone or iPad. The Control Center features were added in the iOS 14 update for iPhone and the iPadOS 14 update for iPad, which Apple released in September 2020....

If you have poor or impaired vision, the grayscale feature can be particularly helpful. In this mode, you won’t be distracted by the colorful images on the Retina display, and therefore, have a more focused workspace. Plus, if you pair grayscale with macOS Mojave’s dark mode, it’s even better! You can switch to grayscale mode in System Preferences. Click the Apple button in the menu bar, and then select “System Preferences....

Most people back up their iPhones or iPads to iCloud, but it’s not completely private: Apple always holds the key so it can help if you forget your password. If you want a truly secure device backup and you have a Windows machine, you’ll need iTunes. (Mac users can back up from Finder.) Here’s how. How to Make Encrypted Local Backups in iTunes First, install iTunes for Windows if you don’t have it already....

Apache uses configuration files to change its behavior. It usually stores them at /etc/apache2/ on Unix systems, but the configuration directory can vary, depending on how it was installed and which operating system you’re running it on. The Usual Places The primary way of configuring Apache is by modifying the main configuration file, usually located at: This file can also be named httpd.conf on older installs. If it’s not there, it’s likely in one of the following places:...

The Password Has Been Around for Nearly 60 Years We’ve been proving to computers that we are who we say we are since the mid-1960s, when the password was first introduced. Necessity being the mother of invention, the Compatible Time-Sharing System developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology needed a way to identify different people on the system. It also needed to prevent people from seeing each other’s files. Fernando J....

Adding a bulleted list in an Excel worksheet isn’t straightforward, but it’s possible. Unlike Microsoft Word—or even PowerPoint—there’s not much in the way of visual cues to guide you when adding these lists. Instead, we’ll try some manual trickery to get the task done. Insert Bullet Points From the Symbol Menu First, select any blank cell in your Excel workbook. Make sure you have the “Insert” tab open and click “Symbol” from under the “Symbols” icon....

Killing Processes Occasionally a Linux process can become unresponsive. It may stop operating correctly, or it might continue to work but ignore requests for it to shut down, or start gobbling memory, CPU, or network bandwidth. Whatever your motives, there are ways to kill a process from the Linux command line. The classic method is to use the kill command with the process ID of the process you want to terminate....

If you have kids in the house and are strict about the thermostat, you can lock down your Ecobee with a PIN code so that no one can adjust the temperature except those authorized to do so. RELATED: How to Install and Set Up the Ecobee Smart Thermostat With a non-smart thermostat, you’d usually have to get a locked enclosure to put around it, like you see in most businesses....

What LinkedIn Knows About You LinkedIn is a social networking website that allows you to hunt for jobs, connect with people in your field, and publicly display your professional experience. However, to make full use of the site’s features, you have to divulge a lot of personal and work information to your connections and potential employers. You can manage your LinkedIn profile privacy settings to protect your personal information from people you don’t know....