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Why Do Photographers Want Blurry Backgrounds, Anyway? One of the (supposed) hallmarks of high-quality photography is a blurry background with good “bokeh”—a fancy word that describes the quality of the blur. You especially see it in great sports images and portraits, but also in wedding and street photos, or artsy YouTube videos. While it’s true a blurry background is common in some types of photography, it’s often an accepted tradeoff, rather than a desired effect....

What Does 120Hz Do? In case you’re not completely clear on what a refresh rate is, you can check out our monitor refresh rate explainer for a detailed and simple explanation. If you’re in a hurry, the short answer is that the refresh rate is a measurement of how many times a display can completely redraw what’s on the screen in a second. So a 60Hz screen can complete 60 full refreshes in one second and a 120Hz screen is capable of double that number....

Close Other Apps for Best Performance Before you start your video conference, take some time to save your work and close any apps you won’t need. You especially want to close any programs that contain personal data or use too much CPU power. Too many open apps will slow down your computer while you’re on a video call. This is because the call itself requires a lot of resources, especially if you’re on a lightweight laptop....

It’s great Windows ships with a pile of included apps for everything from taking notes to viewing media files, but they usually aren’t the best options out there. Here are our favorite alternatives to the default Windows applications. Why Change the Built-in Windows Apps? Why move away from using built-in Windows apps? While the apps included with Windows are great for those times, you just need to do something quickly now and then—like record a brief audio clip or look at a picture or two—they often begin to show their limitations as you move into power user territory and really begin to lean on them....

Almost every video conferencing program available has some sort of vulnerability, and Zoom is undoubtedly no exception. However, Zoom users can do a few things to make their next conference call a bit more secure. Take Proactive Measures None of us are entirely immune to cybercrime—even to petty offenses like Zoombombing. But being aware of security risks and taking proactive measures to protect yourself can significantly lower your chances of becoming a victim....

The 10th-generation iPad is positioned as a budget model, with a cheaper price than the iPad Air or iPad Pro. You still get a 10.9-inch screen, Wi-Fi 6, a USB Type-C port (the previous model had Lightning), Touch ID on the power button, and a camera along the landscape edge. That last improvement means the camera is above the screen when the tablet is in landscape/laptop orientation. Apple went with the A14 Bionic for the chipset on this model, which is the same chip that powers the iPhone 12 series and fourth-generation iPad Air....

The bug is in Safari’s IndexedDB implementation on all three of Apple’s operating systems. Apparently, a website can see the names of databases for any domain. Typically, a website should only see the names of databases of its own domain, so this is definitely a security issue. The names of the databases can be used to extract information from a lookup table. With this information, your recent browsing history could surface....

The internet went crazy with excitement when Best Buy released a stock of highly sought-after RTX 3000 graphics cards. That excitement turned to rage quickly when everyone realized they needed a $200 per year subscription to Best Buy Totaltech if they wanted to buy one. This even includes Nvidia’s Founders Edition products. According to Twitter user @CameronRitz, who tracks GPU restocks, this is the first time Best Buy has put GPUs behind the paywall, though the company did hint that it would happen when it first announced the subscription service....

Bookmarks, which Edge calls Favorites, have been a core part of web browsers for decades, but Microsoft Edge introduced a new method of organizing web content called “Collections.” Collections aim to build on the idea of bookmarks as a better way to organize ideas, projects, and more. What Are Bookmarks or Favorites? A bookmark, which Edge calls a favorite, is simply a saved web address, otherwise known as a URL....

On February 1, 1991, John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack officially founded id Software. The group went on to revolutionize the game industry with franchises such as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. Here’s a look back at id Software over the last 30 years, with a little help from those legendary developers. id Software: The House That Keen Built The story of id Software began in the late 1980s, when John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack (no relation to John), and Tom Hall developed games for a mail-order disk magazine company called Softdisk, located in Shreveport, Louisiana....

There are a lot of neat accessories that you can add to your custom Memoji on the iPhone, but if you want to get into the Christmas spirit this year, you can have your Memoji wear a festive Santa hat. RELATED: How to Use Animoji on the iPhone X, XS, and XR To make it happen, all you have to do is go in and edit your custom Memoji by tapping on the ellipsis button when you have your Memoji up in iMessage....

Google TV devices, like the Chromecast with Google TV, are great at surfacing content to watch, but not all of that content is family-friendly. Thankfully, you can set up a specific profile for your kids, complete with parental controls. You can have multiple profiles for everyone in your home on Google TV devices. The Kids profiles have a bunch of extra controls, including bedtimes, viewing limits, app monitoring, and more....

Microsoft Forms is a great tool for creating free, easy-to-use surveys, polls, quizzes, and questionnaires. It includes branching, which allows you to send users to different questions depending on their previous answers. Here’s how to add branching to your form. To use Microsoft Forms, you’ll need a free Microsoft account (or a paid Office 365 account). Once you’re logged in, go to the Forms home page to start. If you haven’t used Forms before, we have a full guide to using it....

Google Calendar was the first truly great web-based calendar, and is the default calendar of millions of people to this day. But if you’re a Mac user, you probably don’t want to manage your calendar in a web browser, using an ugly user interface, like some kind of digital peasant. RELATED: How to Add Your Gmail, Contacts, and Google Calendar to Your iPhone or iPad No, if you’re a Mac user, you want to use the beautiful calendar that comes with macOS, so you can get native Mac notifications for appointments and other integrations....

You can enable the auto-delete feature on a per-chat basis. It works for both one-on-one conversations and group chats. Previously, you needed to use the Secret Chat feature to automatically delete messages after a set time. RELATED: How to Send Disappearing Messages in Telegram At the time of writing, you can choose to automatically delete messages after a day or a week. Telegram starts the timer once they are sent, not after they are read....

Manual Upload: Drag, Drop, and Done If this is your first time ever using the service, you’ll see a blank slate like the one seen below. You can select the “Upload Photos” button to use your operating system’s file explorer to select photos or, more conveniently, simply drag and drop photos right onto the browser pane. Either way, you’ll see an upload meter in the lower left corner. Once it wraps up, you’re free to browse your photos....

How to Change Your Move, Stand, and Exercise Goals To change your Apple Watch activity goals, first launch the “Activity” app on your watch. You can do this either by tapping on the Activity ring complication on your current Watch face or by pressing the Digital Crown and locating the Activity app in the main menu. With the app open, you should see your current goals and targets represented by three colors and three rings....

Outlook plays a chime to alert you to scheduled reminders on email, tasks, or calendar events. Unlike the new mail alert (which you manage in Windows), you manage the reminder alert in Outlook, where you can change the chime to something else or turn it off altogether. Here’s how to get that done. Turn Off the Chime If you don’t want an auditory alert every time a reminder pops up (which can be especially jarring if you’re working with headphones on), then you can tell Outlook not to play a noise at all when a reminder is due....

The Chromecast with Google TV blends the concepts of Chromecast dongles and Android TV devices. That means they have both “Ambient Mode” and screen savers. We’ll show you how to use both, which requires some digging. In order to merge Chromecast and Android TV, Google shifted a lot of stuff around. However, Google TV is built on Android TV, so all of the Android TV settings are still present. One example of this is the screen saver....

How to Connect External Storage to iPhone or iPad If you use a 2018 iPad Pro with a USB-C port and have a USB-C flash drive, all you have to do is plug in the flash drive. If you have any other iPad or iPhone, though, you’ll need an adapter. You can use a Lightning to USB adapter to connect any USB flash drive, and this also works for a USB SD card reader....