Snapping a screenshot of your iPhone is a great way to preserve exactly what you see on the screen and, thankfully, it’s dead simple to do because the shortcut is built right into every iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. There are all sorts of reasons this might be useful. Need to show the guys in the IT department how the company intranet portal looks weird on your iPhone? Snap a screenshot....

First, Consider Using iPhone Apps Instead Using your iPhone as a webcam requires that you install an app on your iPhone (which must be running for it to function), and a companion app on your Windows PC or Mac. The setup is fairly simple, but there’s an even simpler alternative: native apps. If you want a webcam to make Skype calls, chat with colleagues on Zoom or Slack, or simply catch up with friends via WhatsApp, consider just downloading the relevant iPhone app instead....

Installing a screen protector yourself is one of the worst things ever, possibly worse than stubbing a toe. It’s so bad that I went to an Apple Store and paid them $42.75 to do it for me. I regret nothing. Anyone who has ever tried to install a screen protector knows exactly what I’m talking about—you can never truly get it aligned correctly, and specs of dust always seem to make their way underneath the screen protector right as you go to lay it down....

While we do what we can to protect our laptops, there are times when the keyboards get damaged no matter what precautions we take. Is it better to only replace the keys you need or the entire keyboard? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has some helpful advice regarding a reader’s keyboard woes. 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....

Are you getting notifications about a full Time Machine drive? Do you feel like your backups are taking too long? A bigger, faster hard drive might be the best solution, but you can also help by excluding particular folders from your backups. RELATED: How to Back Up Your Mac and Restore Files With Time Machine We’ve shown you how to back up and restore files with Time Machine, including how to exclude particular folders from being backed up....

What Makes the Best Free Cloud Storage? We’ve put together our picks in no particular order: all of them have something going for them, from Google Drive’s excellent suite of tools to Sync.com’s security features. In each case, we’ll go over what the allotment of free storage is and what extras there are on offer. You may notice that Dropbox is missing from our list, this is because it only offers 2GB of free storage, which isn’t a whole lot....

What Is DuckDuckGo? DuckDuckGo is a search engine focused on privacy. To use it, you just head to duckduckgo.com instead of google.com or bing.com. Then, you search just like you normally would. But DuckDuckGo promises to protect your privacy and not to track you—we’ll explain what that means in more detail. You can also make DuckDuckGo your default search engine in browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Whenever you search from your browser’s location bar or new tab page, you’ll be taken to DuckDuckGo instead of Google....

With a single switch, you can watch a movie (or TV show) as it was intended, disable post-processing effects (like motion smoothing), correct your TV’s color profile, and set the film to its original aspect ratio. Unlike other options (like HDMI-CEC), it’s not called different things on different TVs—the switch for Filmmaker Mode is clearly labeled as such on any TV that has it. What Is Filmmaker Mode? TV manufacturers were showing off Filmmaker Mode at CES 2020....

On modern versions of Windows, you’ll see a “ProgramData” folder on your system drive—usually the C:\ drive. This folder is hidden, so you’ll only see it if you show hidden files in File Explorer. Application Data, the Registry, and Other Places Programs Store Data RELATED: How to Show Hidden Files and Folders in Windows Programs store data in a number of different places in Windows. It depends on how the developers coded the program....

If you dig deep enough into Windows, sooner or later you will likely see some folders with unusual names comprised of seemingly random numbers and letters. What is the significance of these names? Are they special? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a curious reader’s 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....

In one word, it’s piracy. Torrents are the number one way in which copyrighted material is distributed among people who haven’t paid for it. No matter if it’s movies, TV shows, or games, if it was ripped off, you can get it on a torrent site. Let’s take a closer look at torrents and how they work. What Is Torrenting? Before we can talk about the issues associated with torrenting, we need to understand a little better how it works....

Any screen protector you choose takes the damage your screen would have otherwise. Tempered glass is the strongest, but it’s not the only option. Film screen protectors (often PET plastic) are cheaper and easier to apply, and some people prefer the feel. In addition to protecting your screen from physical damage, a screen protector protects the oleophobic coating on your iPhone. This helps keep your screen fingerprint-free, but can wear down over time from use....

The computing landscape is full of vestigial bits and pieces from the history of computer development. Today we take a peek at the print screen button and answer one reader’s burning question: did it ever actually print the screen and, if so, can it print it once again? Perish the thought that your question is goofy. We really love answering questions just like the one you posed here; curious questions about computers asked for the sake of curiosity (with perhaps, as you admit, a dash of laziness to boot)....

LED bulbs are bit a more expensive than other types of light bulbs, but they claim to last a lot longer. But do LED bulbs actually last the 10 years that many manufacturers claim? RELATED: The Different Types of Light Bulbs You Can Buy, and How to Choose The 10-Year Lifespan Assumes a Lot About Your Usage Even the cheapest LED light bulbs (Philips sells some for as low as $2 per bulb) claim to have a 10-year lifespan, but it’s important to know that’s actually based on some pretty modest assumptions....

When it comes to hard drives, everyone seems to have a horror story about one brand or another that failed them. But are some brands really more reliable than others? Sort of…but there’s more to it than that. The Best Brands, According to Backblaze There’s no surefire way to avoid buying a hard drive that will fail, any more than there’s a surefire way to avoid buying another type of electronics component that will fail....

The tilt-shift effect is a weird optical illusion where a regular photo looks like a photo of a toy model. By creatively blurring different parts of the image, you trick people’s eyes into interpreting everything in it as really tiny. A tilt-shift lens is the simplest way to do this, but they cost several thousand dollars. Instead, we’re going to mimic the effect using Photoshop. Step One: Pick a Photo This effect will only work with certain kinds of photos....

Why Would I Want to Do This? In addition to simple ease-of-use, the web interface also has the benefit of working anywhere you have Internet access: whether your Echo is across the room or across the city. If you own an Echo and you haven’t taken a peek at the Echo’s web portal, you’re missing out. How to Access Your Echo Remotely There, instead of squished into a little smartphone screen, you’ll find the a nice expansive GUI: so much room for activities....

With the arrival of Windows 10’s Bash shell, you can now create and run Bash shell scripts on Windows 10. You can also incorporate Bash commands into a Windows batch file or PowerShell script. Even if you know what you’re doing, this isn’t necessarily as simple as it seems. Windows and UNIX use different end-of-line characters, and the Windows file system is accessible in a different location in the Bash environment....

When you first start getting into photography, it’s very easy to fall into a habit of converting almost every image you take to black and white. I know I did it. The thing is, while black and white images can look classy or cool, they’re not always strong images. Removing all the color can take away from a photo if you don’t do it right. So with that in mind, let’s look at how to take good black and white photos....

App Platform is a new DigitalOcean service which offers fully managed app deployment from source control or a container image. Here’s how you can get a container live in the cloud using an image in your DigitalOcean Container Registry. Setup Your Container Registry You’ll first need to create your container registry. Login to your DigitalOcean control panel and click the “Container Registry” link from the left sidebar. Give your new registry a name....