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UltraViolet is a “digital locker” for your movies designed by the big movie studios. It’s a response to iTunes — studios don’t want all their customers using iTunes with Apple being the single company in control. Most people generally ignore UltraViolet. It doesn’t work all that well. These aren’t just teething pains, or at least they shouldn’t be — UltraViolet launched in 2011. It’s now 2014, so this service has had years to get its act together....

What Is an Air-Gapped Computer? An air-gapped computer system has no physical (or wireless) connection to unsecured systems and networks. For example, let’s say you want to work on sensitive financial and business documents without any risk of ransomware, keyloggers, and other malware. You decide that you’ll just set up an offline computer in your office and not connect it to the internet or any network. Congratulations: You’ve just re-invented the concept of air-gapping a computer, even if you’ve never heard of this term....

Google is now providing integrated parental controls in Chrome, allowing parents to control their kids’ Chrome browser usage. This feature works best on a Chromebook, where it allows you to lock down an entire user account. Chrome calls its parental control solution “Supervised Users.” It works by allowing you to create separate Chrome user profiles for your kids and manage them from a single parent user account. Enable Supervised Users As of Chrome 31, the Supervised Users feature is still marked as beta and isn’t yet activated by default....

Spotify users look forward to Spotify Wrapped every year, as it lets them see what they listened to the most, and they get fun playlists featuring their beloved music. Now, YouTube Music users will have some fun with the new 2021 Recap, which offers similar functionality to Spotify, though it won’t be quite as exciting since the user base is smaller. Using the new 2021 Recap, you can see your top artists, songs, music videos, and playlists from the year that was....

On a Nintendo Switch, you can mark certain friends as your “Best Friends.” These people are your core group of trusted friends. Here’s what a Best Friend is and how to take full advantage of the special status in Settings. What Does the “Best Friends” Feature Do? “Best Friend” status on the Nintendo Switch is partly a way to “favorite” a friend. It’s a way to mark your closest friends on the Switch so that they always appear at the top of your friends list....

What Is Dual-Channel? To explain dual-channel memory, first, we need to explain what random access memory (or RAM) does. RAM is where recently accessed applications and files store short-term data. For example, if you have a web browser open on your device right now, the data for this website is being stored in the RAM modules. Therefore, having more RAM allows you to keep more applications open at the same time without things slowing down....

The IMAX Experience IMAX Enhanced is a certification program developed by IMAX Corporation and DTS. The aim is to work with device makers and content creators to enable consumers to get the best picture and sound experience outside of an actual theater. It has two parts—IMAX Enhanced devices and IMAX Enhanced content. So you’ll see IMAX Enhanced-certified televisions, speakers, and AV receivers (AVRs) on the market, as well as IMAX Enhanced content on Blu-ray and streaming services in 4K HDR....

13 years after the first release, Chrome has finally hit triple digits. Google is celebrating Chrome 100 with a shiny new icon, more tools for web apps, and some feature removals you may not like. Let’s dive into March 28, 2022’s milestone release. Chrome Has a New Icon For the first time since 2014, the Chrome browser has a new icon. As you can see from the image above, it’s not a huge change....

Sometimes, something really odd happens when using our computers that makes no sense at all…such as copying a simple image to the clipboard and the computer freezing up because of it. An image is an image, right? Today’s SuperUser post has the answer to a puzzled reader’s dilemna. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites....

Wireshark has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, from capturing remote traffic to creating firewall rules based on captured packets. Read on for some more advanced tips if you want to use Wireshark like a pro. We’ve already covered basic usage of Wireshark, so be sure to read our original article for an introduction to this powerful network analysis tool. Network Name Resolution While capturing packets, you might be annoyed that Wireshark only displays IP addresses....

If you use Windows 8.1 on the desktop, you can’t ignore the new “Windows 8-style” interface entirely. There are some important options you can only access from the PC Settings app, not the desktop Control Panel. We’ll try to ignore settings that only apply to the “touch-first” interface here and just focus on settings you might want as a desktop user. To be clear, this article is about Microsoft’s oddly-named Windows 8....

There are probably countless streaming media services that you use regularly – YouTube for music videos, and any number of websites for listening to streaming music and live radio. Forget using endless apps and website after website; Tomahawk lets you access everything in the same place. Download a free copy of the application (it’s available for Windows, OS X and Linux), run through the installation and then start to configure the services you would like to use in conjunction with Tomahawk....

We have previously covered how to add the ability to copy the contents of a TXT file to the right-click context menu, however this method would require you to create a separate registry entry for each type of file you wanted the ability to do this with (e.g. JS, BAT, LOG, HTM, CSS, etc.). As an alternate method, you can easily add this functionality to your Windows Send To menu, which enables this feature for any type of file without having to touch the registry....

If you’re disappointed that many of the “multiplayer” games you’ve picked up lately are either multiplayer because of lame mini-game content or require online-play, read on as we help a fellow HTG reader find the couch-based multiplayer content he craves. Man, can we ever relate, Multiplayin’. When we got back into console gaming after a few years ago, we were just as frustrated as you are now. The fundamental problem is that terms which had pretty clear meanings in previous generations of consoles are now fairly muddy....

Do you fill your phone or tablet with stuff to watch before a big trip? If you do, then you know your device can fill up quickly. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do batch conversions of your favorite videos to the ideal size? We recently covered how to do this in Handbrake, where we managed to shrink a large 220MB video down to a svelte 100MB. Theoretically, if all our source files can be shrunk down that much, we’d be able to fit at least twice as much stuff on our devices....

We’ve been complaining for a long time that there’s no safe place to download freeware where the downloads are free of bundled add-ons that usually redirect your browser to something other than what you chose. And even Microsoft is bundling extra installers into their own download site to redirect your browser to Bing if you don’t uncheck the box. Before we get started, we want to point out that we’re not saying that Bing is the worst thing in the world (although there’s a reason that only 1....

If you have ever received a message that your new password is too similar to your old one, then you may be curious as to how your Linux system ‘knows’ they are too much alike. Today’s SuperUser Q&A post provides a peek behind the ‘magic curtain’ at what is going on for a curious reader. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites....

Modern desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac OS X offer built-in tools for calibrating your display‘s brightness, contrast, gamma, and color levels. This can help make text more readable and give images and videos more accurate colors. Sure, digital photography professionals will want to use colorimeters to do this. But, if you don’t have such a tool and just want to make some quick adjustments, you can just do it with your eye....

On Twitter, your username serves as both an expression of your personality and a digital address that allows others to direct messages your way on the service. If you’d like to change your Twitter username, you can do so easily on iPhone, iPad, Android, and on the web. Here’s how. How to Change Your Username Using a Web Browser Changing your Twitter username using a web browser on PC, Mac, Linux, or Chrome is a simple process, but the option is a little buried....

You may have heard about RCS and how it’s a huge upgrade over SMS, the old standard for text messaging. But how do you know if you can actually use RCS? We’ll show you how to easily check. In short, RCS (Rich Communication Service) is the future of text messaging. It brings many features you’ve probably used in instant messaging apps, such as read receipts, typing indicators, and high-quality images, to standard texting....