I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve being sat cross-legged before a cathode ray tube, where I’d watch Picard and the crew save the galaxy from Borg and Romulan hordes. It was—and remains—my favorite TV show. Two decades later, I met my wife. You share a lot in marriage, and one thing I passed on was my love of all things Roddenberry....
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. The Secret Is Microsoft PowerToys With a PowerToys module called Shortcut Guide, you can hold down the Windows key on your keyboard and see an on-screen overlay that shows you partially context-aware windows key shortcuts....
It’s no mystery that Google saves a lot of your web activity. However, the company doesn’t save the recordings of audio when you speak to Google services (anymore). You can opt-in to audio recordings if you want to improve the experience, though. In August 2020, Google stopped storing audio recordings by default. If you’ve ever used your voice to interact with Google Assistant, Google Search, Google Maps, a Google Home speaker, or any other Google service, you’ve created these audio recordings on your account....
Emails can get out of hand very quickly. If you want to keep your Gmail inbox tidy, make sure your emails go to the desired inbox tab by creating rules (called “filters”) for them. Here’s how it’s done. Manually Move Emails to Other Tabs Google does a pretty great job of sorting emails between the auto-sorted inbox tabs (Primary, Social, Promotions). But you may want to have one of your favorite newsletters that keeps getting tucked away in the Promotions tab sent to the Primary tab instead so that you never miss it....
So you’ve selected your parts, double- and triple-checked their compatibility, and waited for economy shipping to bring them all to your door. It’s time to get to the fun part: putting them all together. Before you start, you’ll want to set up a good work area. Get some kind of table with plenty of room and light, preferably somewhere that isn’t carpeted. And you’ll need some time: a couple of hours, maybe more if this is your first time or if you have a lot of extras....
Whether they’re built-in to your computer or webcam (or not), you likely have multiple microphones on your Mac. If you’re unsure which one is capturing audio, it’s time to review the audio input settings. From there, you can choose which microphone you want to use. First, click the Apple menu in the upper-left corner, and then select “System Preferences.” Here, click “Sound.” In the “Sound” preferences window, click “Input.”...
If you have tons of Finder windows open on your Mac and want to close them all quickly without having to individually close each one, there’s a quick way to do it in Finder. Here’s how. RELATED: What Is Finder on a Mac? Let’s say you have too many windows open at once in Finder. Possibly, you selected a group of files and did a “Get Info” on them, and now, dozens of windows have popped up all at once....
Hot Corners are one of macOS’s unheralded features. You may use a Mac every day and not even know hot corners exist, but they’re handy: with them, you can mouse over any corner of your screen to instantly activate routine functions, like the screensaver, launchpad, or showing the desktop. Hot corners might sound familiar to you if you’ve ever set up and used screen savers on your Mac. For some reason, the only way to access this function is in the Screen Saver preference pane, even though you can do much more than activate the screen saver....
Have you ever wanted to change the status bar on your Android phone or tablet? Maybe you wanted to change the position of the clock, add a battery percentage, or just get a different look. Whatever your reason, there’s a simple way to customize your status bar–and it doesn’t even require root access. This is possible thanks to an app called Material Status Bar, which you can download for free from the Google Play Store....
When you first open the Nest app on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device, you might be greeted by a pop-up message giving you more information on the Halloween seasonal theme. Tap the “Browse Themes” button found at the bottom of the screen. If this doesn’t appear, don’t worry! Keep reading, and we’ll guide you there from the Nest app’s Home screen. Now that you’re in the “Doorbell Theme” menu, select “Spooky Sounds....
If perfect spelling is not your area of expertise, professional-looking emails can be something of a minefield. Nobody wants their communications to have spelling errors left in, so let Microsoft Outlook help by automatically spellchecking emails before they’re sent. The best way to deal with spelling errors in an email is not to make them in the first place, and toward that end, Outlook can help. The Microsoft Outlook client has a setting that forces spellcheck to take place after you click the “Send” button....
Make Sure Your Kindle Is Connected to WiFi or Cellular Data When your Kindle is connected to your Wi-Fi network you will see a little Wi-Fi symbol in the top-right of your screen. For Kindles with cellular data, there’s also a 3G or 4G symbol. If you don’t see one, or you see an Airplane symbol instead, your Kindle isn’t connected to the internet. If you see an Airplane symbol it means your Kindle is in Airplane mode....
Your IP address is like your public ID on the internet. Any time you do anything on the internet, your IP address lets servers know where to send back information you’ve requested. Many sites log these addresses, effectively spying on you, usually to deliver you more personalized ads to get you to spend more money. For some people, this is a significant issue, and there are ways to hide your IP address....
Have you been playing some embarrassing Nintendo Switch games? By default, friends on your Switch can see your play activity—that’s the list of games you’ve been playing recently. Luckily, you can hide your play activity from friends with an option in your user profile. Here’s how to do it. Here’s an example of what a Nintendo Switch play activity list looks like on a friend page. We’re going to make sure that your friends can no longer see this play activity list....
If you use Instagram on a shared mobile phone or computer, it’s a good idea to log out of your account when you leave the device. This ensures another person using the device can’t access your account. We’ll show you how to do it. Log Out of Instagram on Mobile To log out of your Instagram account on an iPhone or Android phone, first, open the Instagram app on your phone....
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. First, open Edge. Depending on which platform you’re using, press one of these two keyboard combinations: Windows: Press Ctrl+Shift+N Mac: Press Command+Shift+N As soon as you press the proper keyboard shortcut, a new InPrivate window will open....
Microsoft Teams can quickly become filled with teams, channels, tabs, chats, and meetings. Remembering where you saw something can be tricky, so there is a dedicated, clickable list of the last 12 places you visited. We’ve already shown you how to clean up your Teams sidebar by pinning, muting, and hiding teams, channels, and chats, but that doesn’t help when you can’t even remember where you saw that file or message from 10 minutes ago....
By default, when you print a document on Google Docs, it doesn’t print your document’s comments. But, there’s a workaround to print your comments with your document, and we’ll show you how to use it. This workaround basically downloads your Google Docs document as a Microsoft Word file (.docx). This file contains your comments, and when you print this with Word, your comments are also printed. If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you can use Apache OpenOffice Writer as well for this workaround....
The Diagnostics app was introduced in Chrome OS 90 in April 2020. It’s a big upgrade over the previous method that required viewing an internal system page. There are also some useful tests you can use to make sure everything is running smoothly. RELATED: How to View System Performance Statistics on Your Chromebook How to Open the Diagnostics Apps You won’t find the Diagnostics app in the launcher app drawer, but there are two other ways to launch it....
You can install Stable Diffusion locally on your PC, but the typical process involves a lot of work with the command line to install and use. Fortunately for us, the Stable Diffusion community has solved that problem. Here’s how to install a version of Stable Diffusion that runs locally with a graphical user interface! What Is Stable Diffusion? Stable Diffusion is an AI model that can generate images from text prompts, or modify existing images with a text prompt, much like MidJourney or DALL-E 2....
