Posts

Choose a Mac If you haven’t already purchased your Mac (or you’re still mulling it over), you should try to decide which computer is right for you. Apple’s lineup is divided into three classes: laptops, consumer home computers, and powerful high-end behemoths. Laptops For portable use, Apple currently offers two laptops: the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The 13-inch MacBook Air (starting at $1,099, at this writing) is a great all-rounder, with a new Retina (high-DPi) display, energy-efficient performance, and the classic “wedge” shape....

If you’re working in Word and you need to total values in a table, you can do so without having to enter the data into Excel and then copy and paste it into Word. Word can do simple calculations such as summing, multiplying, and averaging. NOTE: When you add new rows or columns of values to a table in Word, the formulas will not automatically update. To update a formula, right-click on the formula and choose Update Field from the popup menu....

Using Windows 10’s Disk Cleanup utility, you can get rid of unwanted files and free up your storage space. The tool finds unnecessary files on its own, so you don’t have to manually locate any items. We’ll show you how to use this useful tool on your PC. Generally, the tool only gives you options to delete files that don’t affect your system. However, you can review the files before they’re deleted to make sure they aren’t important, and we’ll give you some advice on making that judgment....

RELATED: 6 Tips for Taking Better Selfies How to Use the Camera Timer on iPhone Make sure you’re ready to take your pictures when you do this. You’ll probably want to mount your iPhone on a tripod or similar object to take your photos. When you’re ready, on your iPhone, launch the Camera app. At the top of your screen, tap the up-arrow icon. You’ll now see the timer icon at the bottom of your screen....

If you’re working on multiple Word documents, it may be helpful to view some or all of them at once. There are a couple of different ways you can view multiple documents and even a way to view different parts of the same document at the same time. To view multiple documents, open the documents you want to view and click the “View” tab. For this example, we opened two documents....

These days, you can share files using all of the different cloud storage providers like Dropbox and OneDrive, but if all you want is a super easy way to share files with people, Jumpshare might be worth a look. Note: Jumpshare is also available for OS X as well. What’s Different About Jumpshare? The primary selling point with Jumpshare is that it can natively handle over 200 file formats in the browser....

Automation is great. Anything that can be done to reduce the amount of effort needed to achieve a goal is to be welcomed with open arms. We have looked at various tools that can be used to automate tasks you might carry out on a regular basis, including using Wappwolf to automate cloud storage and using IFTTT to automate backups. Now we’ll show how IFTTT can be used in conjunction with Yahoo Pipes to create custom news feeds and alerts....

Ubuntu wants to enable TRIM for SSDs by default in Ubuntu 14.04. In other words, Ubuntu isn’t already using TRIM, so your SSD is slowing down over time. But why isn’t Ubuntu already using TRIM? This news will likely come as a surprise to many people, who assumed that Ubuntu and other Linux distributions were already using TRIM. TRIM prevents SSDs from slowing down over time and is a necessary part of SSD maintenance....

The information you send from your computer, be it an email, instant message, or request for a web page, passes through dozens of internet routers. What’s stopping them from sniffing all your traffic? 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 Naughty.Coder wants to know: Now, we’re not saying there’s a correlation between his username and his curiosity about people sniffing his packets, but this is definitely our favorite SuperUser username/question combination to date....

Just another day of being a human: You’re entering information into a website, and it makes you check a box that says “I’m not a robot.” Then you have to pass a visual test. Why is that? We’ll explain. Keeping Bots at Bay One of the side effects of running human society through computers is that many systems become easy to mindlessly automate. That opens the door for exploitation by automated programs called “bots,” short for “robots....

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 Curious SuperUser reader User1301428 wanted to know why disc drives haven’t been getting any faster. He writes: Well, which is it? Are such drives impractical to market or impractical to build? Is this a commercial choice (i.e. manufacturers don’t care about optical discs anymore and focus more on flash memories and SSD drives) or a technical limitation (i....

Windows 8.1 will automatically encrypt the storage on modern Windows PCs. This will help protect your files in case someone steals your laptop and tries to get at them, but it has important ramifications for data recovery. Previously, “BitLocker” was available on Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows, while “Device Encryption” was available on Windows RT and Windows Phone. Device encryption is included with all editions of Windows 8.1 — and it’s on by default....

Mass Effect Legendary Edition Play Video The Mass Effect trilogy needs no introduction, but we’ll give it one anyway. In this remastered sci-fi first-person shooter, you play as Commander Shepard who’s tasked with saving humanity from an invasion of sentient ships known as Reapers. Mass Effect Legendary Edition contains all three main games in the Mass Effect trilogy, plus 40 DLC. This game currently has an 86 Metascore on Metacritic. You can purchase Mass Effect Legendary Edition and add it to your GeForce NOW collection for $24....

Do you know how effective your antivirus programs is? A variety of organizations regularly compare antivirus programs, throwing a large amount of malware samples at them, seeing how they perform, and ranking them in comparison to each other. It would be very time-consuming to test 30 different antivirus programs in virtual machines with a large amount of malware samples yourself, which is why these test results are so useful....

Install a new hard drive and all Windows will do is give you an empty drive letter. If you have a small solid-state drive and a larger mechanical hard drive — or just two large drives — these tips will help you put that additional drive to use. There are many things you can do with additional hard drives in Windows, including combining them with Storage Spaces, moving your user data folders over, and customizing the location of Windows’ system directories....

The Raspberry Pi makes a nice compact platform to attach an indicator light to for all sorts of projects—weather notification, new emails, etc. Read on as we show you how to hook up an LED module to your Pi and set up some basic notifications. Why Do I Want to Do This? Because it’s fun. Unlike many of our tutorials where we include a little blurb at the top outlining exactly what benefit you’ll derive from the project, the blurb is pretty short in this case because the benefit is simply having fun....

Microsoft changed the default font font to 11 point Calibri in Word 2007 after years of 12 point Times New Roman being the default. Although it can be easily overlooked, there are ways in Word to change the default settings to anything you want. Whether you want to change your default to 12 point Calibri or to 48 point Comic Sans…here’s how to change your default font settings in Word 2007 and 2010....

Dark Sky is a popular weather application with hyper-local forecasts, but the Android version was discontinued in 2020 after the service was acquired by Apple. Dark Sky has now been reworked into a service that other apps can use, opening up the door for new third-party apps. Apple recently announced WeatherKit, a new API for apps to access the same weather information that originally powered Dark Sky. WeatherKit data is used by the Weather app on iPhone and iPad (yes, the Weather app is coming to iPad), which is also why the Dark Sky app on Apple devices will be discontinued on December 31....

Protected View can stop viruses from installing onto your computer but comes at the price of clicking a button every time you want to edit a document. Here’s how to permanently disable Protected View for all documents in Microsoft Office. Microsoft added many usability and security features to Office 2010 that help protect end users from embedded plugins and viruses that can crash Office or even install viruses. These features go a long way to keep your computer running smoothly, but there are still options you can tweak to disable Protected View for specific files....

Apple has been frantically removing Google from their operating systems. Siri and Spotlight search with Bing by default, and there are rumors they’ll make Yahoo! or Bing the default search engine in Safari next. For those of us who just think Google is the better search engine, all this deep integration of competing search engines is obnoxious. Here’s how to get Google back. Siri on Your iPhone or iPad Siri prefers searching the web with Microsoft’s Bing search engine, and just speaking a search aloud or saying “search” followed by your search will cause Siri to consult Bing....