There’s nothing quite like the cozy comfort of a crackling fire. However, not everyone has a fireplace in their home—or wants to deal with lugging firewood inside. Here’s how to turn your TV into a fireplace instead. The world of virtual ambiance is pretty interesting. You can easily go down the rabbit hole and find strangely specific experiences such as “Relaxing Kitchen and Cooking Sounds” and “Christmas Music From Another Room....
Before we proceed, you might need to manually reassign the devices to your home or new rooms and relink the speakers to your Google account once they are separated. To separate your Google Assistant smart speakers, first select the pair you’d like to split up in the Google Home app on iPad, iPhone, or Android. From there, tap the gear icon in the top-right corner. Next, scroll down and select the “Speaker Pair” option....
Thunderbird and OpenPGP Version 78.2.1 of the Thunderbird email client has support for end-to-end encryption (e2ee) built right in. This integration means you no longer need add-ons like Enigmail. Thunderbird uses OpenPGP for encryption, which is a free, nonproprietary protocol. Based on the freeware versions of Phil Zimmerman’s Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), it’s now very much its own thing. Thunderbird’s OpenPGP integration allows you to encrypt a message. Then, only the people you want to read your message will be able to do so....
What Are Regular Expressions? Regular expressions (regexes) are a way to find matching character sequences. They use letters and symbols to define a pattern that’s searched for in a file or stream. There are several different flavors off regex. We’re going to look at the version used in common Linux utilities and commands, like grep, the command that prints lines that match a search pattern. This is a little different than using standard regex in the programming context....
It’s a common problem: Some things are just too hard to see. Usually, they’re too far away, too dark, or too small. With a feature called Magnifier, your iPhone can function as a magnifying glass and sight aid. Here’s how to use it. What Is Magnifier? Magnifier is an accessibility feature built into iOS 10 and up that allows you to use your iPhone’s camera as a makeshift magnifying glass or telescope....
Sometimes, you need to login to a website on a different device or browser, but you can’t remember the password. Luckily, if you have previously allowed Safari to save the password on your Mac, you can recover it. Here’s how. First, launch Safari. In the menu bar at the top of the screen, locate the “Safari” menu and click on it. Then click “Preferences.” A Preferences window will pop up that contains a row of icons stretched across the top....
By default, every time you open a Mac application by clicking it on your Dock, the app icon will briefly “hop” in an animated sequence as the app loads. If you find this annoying, Apple makes it easy to turn off. Here’s how. First, click the Apple logo in the upper-left corner of the screen and select “System Preferences.” In System Preferences, click “Dock.” In Dock preferences, uncheck the box beside “Animate Opening Applications....
If you need to install Windows or Linux and you don’t have access to a CD/DVD drive, a bootable USB drive is the solution. You can boot to the USB drive, using it to run the OS setup program, just like a CD or DVD. We have collected some links to free programs that allow you to easily setup a USB drive to install Windows or Linux on a computer....
So, how do you choose the right video doorbell for you? With so many options on the market, it all depends on what you’re looking for. Doorbell cameras come with a wide variety of features, including two-way audio, high-resolution video, motion detection, sending instant alerts to your phone, and night vision. You can find video doorbells with premium features such as 3:4 aspect ratio lenses to see visitors from head-to-toe and compatibility with voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant....
Downtime is a major issue for websites. For SaaS companies that thrive on their services being available, even a few minutes of downtime can mean a direct loss in revenue. Here’s how to track if your website isn’t working. How to Track Downtime The problem with downtime is that it’s hard to track yourself. After all, you’re probably not refreshing your website every 10 seconds waiting for it to go offline....
The Ribbon interface became a feature in the Microsoft Office suite as of version 2007. The Windows 8 Developer Preview introduced the Ribbon interface into Windows Explorer and it’s been improved in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. By default, the Explorer ribbon is now hidden. Use the down arrow button next to the help button in the upper, right corner of the Explorer window to expand the ribbon. There are three core tabs (Home, Share, and View) and the File menu....
What Makes the Internet in China Different? Unlike, for example, the United States or European countries, China has placed its internet behind a strict screen of censorship dubbed the Great Firewall. It’s a highly sophisticated system that can block connections from Chinese IP addresses to ones that are considered harmful to the Chinese public. This includes adult entertainment and gambling sites as well as those featuring particularly violent content. Most striking of all, though, is that so few foreign media sites are accessible to people in the People’s Republic....
Phones like the humble Nokia bricks of yore are still being made. But who’s buying them, and why? The Feature Phone: An Abridged History For much of the 1990s and 2000s, the mobile world fell into two camps: phones and other. The former were mass-market people-pleasers, but they were unsophisticated. They made calls and sent texts. Think of devices like the iconic Nokia 3310 and Motorola StarTAC. As time dragged on, other features crept in, like video and photo messaging, as well as basic web browsing through technologies like Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)....
Lock Screen Gallery and Widgets iOS 16 makes it possible to add widgets to your lock screen. Once you’ve updated, tap and hold the background of your lock screen to view the lock screen gallery. Here you can save multiple lock screen layouts and switch to them at any time, or use Focus to associate a particular lock screen with a specific Focus mode. Click the plus “+” icon to add a new lock screen, pick a wallpaper then choose your widgets....
Why Wrap a Digital Gift? Maybe your recipient doesn’t care about the trappings of the holidays, and it just doesn’t matter if there is anything physical in their hands when the gift is exchanged. If that’s your situation, then it’s easy peasy. Just send your sibling the game they want via Steam, email them the gift card code to their favorite online retailers, or shove a gift card in their hand....
How Wireless Charging Works Many of the most popular electronic gadgets today—from high-end mobile phones to wireless earbuds—feature wireless charging. Apple, Samsung, and LG have implemented this feature across a wide range of their devices. Wireless charging allows people to place their device on a pad that’s plugged into the wall, and then it just starts charging—no cables necessary. Most modern wireless chargers use a process called magnetic induction. This involves transforming magnetic energy from the charging pad to electrical power via a coil inside the device....
You’ve probably heard of sending disappearing messages in popular messaging apps, but did you know you can also set an expiration date for emails sent through Gmail, making the content within the message inaccessible after the set time? Here’s how it’s done. Add an Expiration Date to Gmail (Windows and Mac) You can add expiration dates to emails by using Gmail’s Confidential Mode feature. When you add an expiration date to an email, the recipient can’t access its contents after the set date....
Adding a caption to an image is an effective method for providing additional context of the image or giving proper credits to the image owner. Here is how to insert image captions in Microsoft PowerPoint. Open PowerPoint and insert the image you would like to add a caption to. To insert an image, navigate to the “Insert” tab and select “Pictures,” found in the “Images” group. In the drop-down menu that appears, select where you would like to insert the image from....
The old Windows properties window has been around for a long time. In Windows 8 and 10, it probably would have been a good idea to move some of those settings into the new Settings app, but of course that didn’t happen. To get anything useful done, you’ll need to dive into the good old-fashioned Control Panel. Configure the Main Mouse Settings RELATED: Windows 10’s Settings Are a Mess, and Microsoft Doesn’t Seem to Care...
First things first: be sure that your virtual machine is shut down and powered off. Next, make sure you get rid of any snapshots you have. There isn’t a fool-proof and safe way to do this without getting rid of them, unfortunately. Select your virtual machine and click on the “Snapshots” tab. Select your snapshot and click the delete button. Be prepared to wait a while as VirtualBox merges differences with your machine’s current state....
