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Tired of tidying up your office before every team chat? Microsoft’s Teams can now blur the background for you. Teams is Microsoft’s alternative to Slack for team chat, and it includes a video conferencing service. Microsoft announced the blurring feature in a blog post yesterday (via The Next Web). RELATED: The Best Alternatives to Slack for Team Chat The idea is that meetings should focus on the people attending, not the environments they happen to be in....

When you install an app in the Google Play Store, a shortcut icon is automatically added to the Home screen. This can be handy, making it easier to find the app once it’s installed. However, you may not want new shortcuts added to your Home screen. If you don’t want shortcuts automatically added to the Home screen, you can change a setting in the Play Store to turn this feature off....

What Is Cloud Storage? In short, cloud storage is when you store your files and data via the internet rather than on your own computer. Instead of filling up your own hard drive, you sign up to a paid service—Dropbox is probably the best-known example—and put your files on its servers. This means your files are kept on the internet and accessible from anywhere and from any device: just log into the service with your password, and there they are....

GitHub is a website and service that we hear geeks rave about all the time, yet a lot of people don’t really understand what it does. Want to know what all the GitHub hubbub is about? Read on to find out. The “Git” in GitHub RELATED: Version Tracking With Subversion (SVN) For Beginners To understand GitHub, you must first have an understanding of Git. Git is an open-source version control system that was started by Linus Torvalds—the same person who created Linux....

How Does Google Play Pass Work? An easy way to think about Google Play Pass is “Netflix for Android Apps and Games.” Instead of paying for apps and games individually, you pay a monthly—or yearly—price for unlimited access. If you install a lot of paid apps and games, it can be a better deal to pay the monthly price. Google Play Pass covers more than just what it costs to install the game....

CES 2015 was packed with different virtual reality headsets, and it feels like we’ve been on the cusp of consumer VR for years. Oculus Rift hasn’t released their consumer version yet, and other companies are trying to beat them to market. The Oculus Rift Kickstarter campaign launched back in 2012. It’s now 2015, and Oculus is on their third prototype. So, when can us gamers and enthusiasts get our hands on one?...

Valve and Google announced Steam for Chrome OS in 2021. Previously, it was possible to play Steam games on Chromebooks through the “Steam Link” Android app, but that was only streaming games from your PC. As of October 2022, full-fledged Steam is available on select Chromebooks. Steam for Chrome OS is in its early stages, so don’t expect everything to work perfectly. Before you get started, let’s make sure you have a compatible Chromebook....

Have you ever wondered why laptop screens seem to come in such odd sizes? Then you are not alone! Today’s SuperUser Q&A post looks at the reasons for the odd screen sizes you see when comparing laptops. 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. Photo courtesy of Jace Cooke (Flickr). The Question SuperUser reader TheCleaner wants to know why laptop screens come is such odd sizes:...

Windows is all about backwards compatibility, allowing people — especially businesses — to keep using their important applications on new versions of Windows. But there are limits. The older a program is, the more likely it will break. You should generally stay away from old software. Avoid picking up software CDs designed for Windows 95 at garage sales. Ancient software that doesn’t work any longer should probably just be upgraded to a modern, compatible version....

macOS 13 Coming to Intel and Apple Silicon If you haven’t yet upgraded to a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip like the M1 or better, you’ll be pleased to know that macOS 13 Ventura will still make an appearance on the older Intel architecture. This includes the 2017 iMac, 2017 iMac Pro, 2019 Mac Pro, and 2018 Mac mini on the desktop. In terms of portable Mac models, the 2018 MacBook Air, 2017 MacBook Pro, and 2017 MacBook will also receive the update....

Do you use Windows, Mac, or Linux applications? Google wants you to replace them with Chrome apps in the future. Google Chrome is now an app platform, complete with a Chrome app launcher for Windows and Mac. Chrome apps run in their own window, are installed locally, run offline, and come from the Chrome web store. They make the most sense on Chromebooks, where they’re the closest thing to native apps, but have spread to other operating systems....

AMD has been working on updated Ryzen chipsets aimed at Chromebooks for a while now, with reports about new 5000-series CPUs going as far back as 2020. Most high-end Chromebooks use chips like the AMD Ryzen 3 3250C, based on AMD’s Zen+ architecture that is now four years old, or ‘Tiger Lake’ 11th-generation Intel Core i5 and i7 processors (with a few using newer ‘Alder Lake’ chips). Chromebooks have to use hardware designs approved and supported by Google, which sometimes slows down the introduction of new processor designs compared to Windows laptops....

How Do Special Glasses Reduce Blue Light? There are several claims about the benefits of glasses that filter out blue light (which we’ll cover below), but first, let’s take a look at how the lenses filter out blue light. It’s pretty simple: Each blue light-blocking lens is tinted in a way that lets in more red and green light and less blue light. Usually, not all blue light is blocked, and the amount of blue light reduced varies depending on the type and manufacturer of the lens....

If you are new to working with partitions, then you may wonder what the differences between the different types are, and which ones you can install newer Windows systems on. With that in mind, today’s SuperUser Q&A post looks at a curious reader’s partition question. 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. The Question SuperUser reader 09stephenb wants to know if Windows 8 has to be installed on an NTFS partition:...

Google has announced that Google Play Games for PC is now available to users in five countries, those being South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia. This is still a beta, which means it’ll still likely need some work before Google can think about a wider, global release. But the previous, private beta required you to get on a waitlist. If you’re in any of these five countries, you won’t need an invite to try it out anymore....

A handful of Google devices have been notably discounted as an early Black Friday deal on Best Buy. Google’s smart Nest Audio speaker, also a $100 value, has been taken down a notch to $50. If you’d rather go small, the Nest Mini is now just $20, down from $50. And the Nest Hub, which is usually $100, has been discounted to $50, giving you an amazing deal on one of the best smart displays on the market....

Many computers give you the option to set a “hard disk password” along with operating system passwords and BIOS passwords. This is different from encryption — a hard disk password doesn’t actually encrypt your files. Hard disk passwords fall into a weird middle ground. On the one hand, they can disable access to your drive and be inconvenient if you lose them. On the other hand, they don’t protect your files like full-disk encryption would....

A laptop is a marvel of engineering. So much work goes into designing and manufacturing all the individual pieces of hardware before combining them with software that’s taken decades to build. After going through all this work, laptop manufacturers are paid to make their laptops slower and more frustrating to use. The PC ecosystem’s race to the bottom and cut-throat pricing means that many computer manufacturers aren’t focused on providing a good experience — they’re focused on releasing the cheapest laptops possible and making some additional money by loading the laptop with bloatware....

You use Picasa to manage your photos and you do most of your photo sharing with friends on Facebook. Wouldn’t it be great if they played together? Read on as we streamline your sharing workflow so photos organized, edited, tagged, and annotated in Picasa hop right over to Facebook. Why Do I Want to Do This? If you’re already using Google’s free photo organizer/editor Picasa to import, sort, and edit your digital photos and you’re frequently sharing albums of photos on Facebook, there’s really no good reason to not follow along with today’s tutorial and integrate the two together....

There are many ways to accomplish making a backup copy of your files. We wanted to show you a robust, flexible, and reliable way to protect your data. We choose rsync because of its well-respected algorithms that calculate the differences between files in the source directory and the target directory. Only the differences between two versions of a file are transferred, not the whole file if that can be avoided....