Over the last couple of years, Google has been moving towards a unified user experience with its Material Design interface. It started with Android, and we’ve seen many Google Apps—like Drive, Docs, and Sheets—get this clean, modern makeover. Chrome (and, by extension, Chrome OS) has seen touches of Material Design here and there, but many of these design remakes are still in testing. RELATED: The Best Chromebooks You Can Buy, 2017 Edition...
The Lord of the Rings is easily my favorite movie of all time. (Which one, you ask? All three, obviously.) But the latest Blu-Ray collection has one glaring problem. The Blu-Ray version of the Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Edition has a significantly altered color timing, resulting in a green hue across the entire movie. It only exists in Fellowship of the Ring, only in the Extended Edition, and only on Blu-Ray....
Let’s be real here: modern smartphones have limited storage. While they’re coming with a lot more than they used to, it’s easy to fill 32GB without even realizing it. And with today’s high-end cameras, well, pictures and videos can quickly consume a big part of that. RELATED: 18 Things You May Not Have Known Google Photos Can Do That’s where Google Photos can be your best friend: it automatically backs up your pictures and videos, storing an unlimited amount on Google’s servers....
RELATED: 10 Useful Features Hidden in VLC, The Swiss Army Knife of Media Players Use a Keyboard Shortcut to Move Frames in a Video To use a hotkey to play your video frame by frame, then first, open your video file with VLC. When the video opens, on your keyboard, press the E key. If your video is playing, VLC will pause it and let you move one frame at a time....
Smartphones are incredibly personal devices, and they can contain sensitive information. If you’re worried about prying eyes finding something they shouldn’t, you can hide and lock files behind a four-digital pin with Safe Folder in the Files by Google Android app. Safe Folder is a special folder in the Files by Google app that puts files behind a PIN code. Files that are moved to the Safe Folder are not accessible anywhere else on the phone....
If you’re considering leaving your read-it-later application of choice for greener pastures, you don’t have to start from scratch. Here’s how to move everything from Pocket to Instapaper, or vice versa, without missing a beat. RELATED: How to Send Articles to Your Kindle for Later Reading with Tinderizer, Instapaper, or Pocket Why move? Maybe you want to try out a new feature set. Maybe you bought a new ebook reader that has really slick integration with a different service (like Pocket has with Kobo ebook readers, for example)....
Lightroom is almost essential for serious amateur and professional photographers. It’s a filing system for all your photos, a RAW developer, and much more. Lightroom is best when used to manage every step of your post-processing workflow, including the very first step: importing photos to your computer from your camera. RELATED: What Is Adobe Lightroom, and Do I Need It? To start, connect your DSLR to your computer (or insert an SD card, if your computer has an SD card slot or adapter)....
You’ve got a brand new Mac. Congratulations! But all of your files and applications are still on your old Mac. Here’s how to migrate them in just a few clicks. You might be reaching for an external hard drive, and and that’s not a bad idea, but there’s an easier way. Your Mac’s built-in Migration Assistant grabs your documents, applications, and system settings from one Mac and puts them on another....
If you have a DSLR camera with a hot shoe, it’s easy to attach various flashes and other accessories right to your camera. But with a couple of cheap attachments on hand, you can mount your GoPro to your DSLR camera as well. RELATED: How to Cheaply and Safely Clean Your Camera’s DSLR Sensor Why Would I Want to Do This? Granted, mounting a GoPro camera to another camera seems rather redundant, but it can actually be a cool and nifty way of capturing another point of view while you grab pictures or video with your DSLR....
Do you have an external drive connected to your Windows computer and would like to access it from the Taskbar? Here we show you a workaround that will allow you to pin it to Taskbar. We’ll show you how to add an external drive icon to the Taskbar in Windows 10, but this trick will also work in Windows 7 and 8. You would think the process would be as easy as dragging the external drive icon to the Taskbar....
iOS 11 includes a new Screen Recording tool that finally makes it easy to record a video of your iPhone or iPad’s screen. You don’t need a Mac or a third-party Windows application—all you need is your iPhone or iPad itself. How to Record on Your iPhone or iPad RELATED: What’s New in iOS 11 for iPhone and iPad, Available Now The new Screen Recording tool added in iOS 11 can only be accessed via a Control Center shortcut, and that Control Center shortcut isn’t enabled by default....
If you want to remove several subdirectories within another directory using the command line in Linux, generally you have to use the rm command several times. However, there is a faster way to do this. Let’s say we have a directory called htg with five subdirectories within it and we want to delete three of them. In a normal situation, we’d use the rm command three times. However, we can make this process even shorter by combining the three rm commands into one....
With Android Nougat, Google released an oft-requested feature: the ability to run two windows side by side. Instead of some sort of janky workaround like Samsung or LG’s solutions, which only allow certain apps to work in a multi-window scenario, this one is baked into Android. That means it works for essentially all apps, all the time. RELATED: How to Use Android Nougat’s Split-Screen Mode It does, however, have its limitations....
You want to find specific information from a given website, but it doesn’t offer search. Or maybe its internal search feature is just plain awful. What can you do? There’s a simple way to search any website, using any search engine—Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or even Yahoo (which apparently still exists.) It works in every browser as well. Head to your search engine of choice, or the search bar in your browser, then type what you want to find, just like you normally would....
What’s the point of having a house of the future if your family members, roommates, or guests can’t take advantage of all its features? Share the future-is-now vibe by allowing their iCloud account to control your smart lights, thermostat, and more. Why Would I Want to Do This? RELATED: What Is Apple HomeKit? HomeKit is the framework that links together all of the diverse HomeKit accessories in the growing stable of Apple-approved smarthome products....
Tech tutorials that start with 3 minutes of “hey guys what’s up” are the worst. Get to the point! Here’s how you can bypass that nonsense when sharing a video with your friends. Take the following video, for example. I actually find the historic tidbits in that particular buildup fascinating, but maybe you’re not sure your friends will. Happily it’s possible to share this and any other video starting at any moment you like....
If you’re like me, the Applications folder on your Mac is overflowing with apps, most of which you rarely use but still like to keep around. If scrolling through everything to find what you’re looking for is overwhelming, a simple trick lets you sort these applications by categories—like Productivity, Music, Education, and more. To get started, open your Finder and head to the Applications folder. From here, press Command+J on your keyboard to open the View Options window....
It’s easy to accidentally trigger Apple’s voice assistant Siri on your iPhone by pressing and holding either the side button (on newer models), or the Home button (on older ones). Luckily, there’s an easy way to disable it. Here’s how. First, launch “Settings” by tapping the “Gear” icon. In “Settings,” tap “Accessibility.” In “Accessibility,” swipe down until you locate the “Physical and Motor” section. The next step will be different depending on which model of iPhone you have....
With most automation, credentials are needed to authenticate and use secure resources. What has always been a challenge is how best to store those credentials securely. Ansible is an automation system that provides software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployments. As with any automation system, Ansible needs a secure way to store secrets. In the case of Ansible, that system is called Ansible Vault. Ansible Vault provides a cross-platform solution to securely storing credentials....
Your Android phone’s NFC hardware is for more than just transferring content and using mobile payments. You can buy cheap, programmable NFC tags and have your phone automatically perform actions when you touch them. For example, you could place NFC tags on your bedside table, near your front door, in your car, and on your desk at work. Tapping your phone against them or placing it down on them could automatically select device settings that makes sense in that location....
