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Backing up our PCs is something we are all used to. It’s not something many people relish, but once an automated task has been set up, it is something that can be forgotten about until your suffer from hard drive failure or another disaster and need to think about restoring files. But things are not quite so easy when it comes to Android. In theory things should be simple. This is an operating system from Google – a company not exactly unfamiliar with the notion of storing data in the cloud – so you would be forgiven for thinking that everything on your phone or tablet would be automatically, or at least easily, backed up for you....

A Standard for Styluses Although the advent of modern capacitive touchscreen devices, particularly the iPhone, resulted in styluses falling out of favor for a few years, this input device is still going strong. Styluses are seeing support on more devices than ever. After all, they offer a level of precision that is simply not possible with fingers. You will primarily find two types of styluses on the market—active and passive. Passive styluses are basically a finger replacement....

A Brief History of the Computer Mouse The computer mouse was inspired by early trackball devices. Doug Englebart created the first prototype in 1964 at the Standford Research Institute. As you may expect, that first device didn’t look much like the mice we use today. The first computer mouse used wheels that faced opposite directions to track movement. They were housed inside of a wood box with a single button on the top....

Until recently, you needed to spend hundreds of dollars — often $649 or “$199 with a two year contract” — to get a smartphone with good performance that could run the latest apps. Solid smartphones are now much cheaper. If you have the money to spend — or if you’re going to be locked into a long contract anyway — expensive smartphones still have value. They’ll have the sharpest screens, fastest hardware, and newest features....

The Year of Finally The 2020 MacBook Air is the first internal upgrade for this laptop, which was redesigned in 2018. The 2018 model came with a 13.3-inch Retina display, Butterfly keyboard, two USB-C ports, a Touch ID sensor, and the same, wedge-shaped design in an even lighter body, and a gold color option. However, the previous generation was a bit underwhelming. It was so close to being great, but it missed a couple of key aspects....

Tablet sales are slumping at the moment, probably as a result of big smartphones and convertible laptops chip away at a tablet’s usefulness. But if you have one or more tablets at home gathering dust while you happily poke away at your giant smartphone, there are probably some good ways to put them to use rather than selling them or recycling them. Here are a few ideas. Turn It Into Streaming Media Machine RELATED: How to Set Up Your New Chromecast...

Android is open source, so developers can take its code, add features, and build their own operating system images for Android phones and tablets. Many Android geeks install such custom ROMs — but why? “ROM” stands for “read-only memory.” A custom ROM replaces your device’s Android operating system — normally stored in read-only memory — with a new version of the Android operating system. Custom ROMs are different from acquiring root access....

Previously we showed you how to set a Static IP in Windows, and you have a Mac machine on your network, you might want to assign it a Static IP as well. Set Static IP in OS X You will need to open System Preferences, once there open Network It would be a good idea to to edit the Locations so that you can easily change from DHCP to manual IP simply....

By default in Ubuntu 13.10, when deleting files on the command line using the “rm” command, no confirmation displays before the file is deleted. However, you may want that extra layer of protection. You can easily turn on the confirmation for deleting files. To begin, press Ctrl + Alt + T to open a Terminal window. Then, type the following command at the prompt and press Enter. This opens the bashrc file in the text editor gedit....

Power up your team communications with the right keystroke combinations. You can use these to control the Slack interface, format messages, and quickly find the content you need. Become a Slack expert with these familiar, functional hotkeys for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Hotkeys for Slack on Windows and Linux Slack’s keyboard shortcuts for Windows are the same as those for Linux. Here’s a helpful cheat sheet you keep nearby. A few of these are only available in the Windows desktop app, and not Slack’s web application, but most work on both....

Some compromises had to be made for the Surface Pro and Surface RT’s keyboards. As is the case with many portable devices, space is at a premium, and certain non-essential keys had to be shifted to secondary function positions or dropped altogether. One thing that can seem a little strange to start with is the default function of the F keys. The keys F1 to F12 are all present, but these keys’ primary functions range from adjusting volume to calling up the Charms bar....

Each month, Microsoft offers a few games to anyone with an Xbox Live Gold subscription, which is already required to play most online Xbox games. There are four free games for the month of September, including Portal 2. The first free game is Gods Will Fall, which normally costs $14.99 and is free from September 1-30. It’s a dungeon crawler game with an emphasis on difficult battles. There’s also Double Kick Heroes available for free (it’s usually $21....

There’s something special about a printed photo. Sure, you can share thousands of photos on Facebook, but none of them will ever be as special as the one photo you hang on the wall in your living room. Almost every major smartphone comes with a high quality camera, but if you want to print one of those photos, how big can you blow it up? Let’s find out. What High Quality Printing Means As anyone who’s tried to print an image they’ve downloaded from Facebook has discovered, not every photo will print nicely....

Is it necessary to keep your list of startup and running apps lean and mean on Android OS, and if so, how can you put the brakes on an application heavy startup? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of Android Enthusiasts—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question Android Enthusiast reader Scott Severance is curious about taming his Android startup routine:...

If you’ve switched to Ubuntu from Windows, it may take some time to get used to the new and different interface. However, you can easily incorporate a familiar Windows feature, the Taskbar, into Ubuntu to make the transition easier. A tool called Tint2 provides a bar at the bottom of the Ubuntu Desktop that resembles the Windows Taskbar. We will show you how to install it and make it start every time you log into Ubuntu....

Using the Zoom Text feature, you can increase or decrease the default text size on any site. What’s more, Chrome then remembers your preference and will show the designated text size going forward (no need to fiddle with it every time). RELATED: How to Transfer Chrome Tabs Between iPhone, iPad, and Mac To get started, open the “Chrome” app on your iPhone or iPad. Next, visit the web page that you want to increase the text size of (You can also transfer an active tab from another device....

If you have a Synology NAS, you can easily configure it to download large files for you, allowing you to shut down your PC and let the NAS hum away in the background. Let’s look at how to start and schedule those downloads now. Why use your NAS to download files? It frees your computer up so you can shut it down when you’re not using it, instead of leaving it on to wait out the downloads (worrying that an automatic update or the like will screw them up)....

In recent years, 4K content—or Ultra High Definition (UHD)—has become more and more popular. Netflix shoots all of its original shows, like Daredevil and House of Cards, in 4K, giving owners of compatible TVs a viewing experience like never before. Getting 4K to display properly from some services, however, can be tricky. You’ll Need a Second-Gen Fire TV and a TV That Supports HDCP 2.2 Furthermore, 4K might not be available on your TV, depending on its feature set and the other devices you have in the chain....

OS X’s Safari has quite a few advantages over Chrome, but we miss Chrome’s ability to switch tabs using “Command + #”. Thankfully, we’ve found a solution, which will enable Chrome-like tab keyboard shortcuts in Safari. It’s not that Chrome is bad, it’s still right up there with the rest of the browsers that aren’t Internet Explorer, but on OS X, it’s a notorious battery hog. Safari, being native to OS X, doesn’t have this problem....

A lot of the tasks you’ll complete in Microsoft Excel are tedious. Luckily, Excel has several features that make this kind of spreadsheet work bearable. We’ll look at two of them: Flash Fill and Auto Fill. How to Use Flash Fill in Excel Flash Fill can automatically detect patterns in data and help you quickly fill cells. For example, if we start with a list of full names (first and last), but then decide that we should have split them into separate columns, Flash Fill can automate a lot of the work....