It’s super easy to play music with your voice on Google Assistant-enabled Nest smart speakers and smart displays. But in order to link your Spotify account to the Google Assistant, you’ll need to connect it with the Google Home app first. Here’s how it’s done. Connecting Spotify to your Google account will allow you to play music with voice commands on speakers, displays, phones, and tablets. It’s as simple as saying “Hey Google, play ‘Run the Jewels” or “Hey Google, play my ‘Running’ playlist....

In addition to a slight redesign, Slack recently introduced the ability to group channels into something the company calls “Sections.” These sections make it easy for you to organize your workspace’s side panel, especially if you are overrun by conversations. Before we begin, note that the Sections feature is only available for those with paid Slack accounts. Additionally, you can only group and organize your channels using the desktop or web clients....

After years of having a dedicated home button and physical navigation keys, Samsung ditched its traditional layout for a more modern, virtual approach on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. As a result, you can now customize the navigation panel along the bottom of the screen. To get started, give the notification bar a tug and tap the gear icon in the upper right corner to open the Settings menu....

The Check Engine light on your car is both useful and infuriating. You know something is wrong (which is good!), but you don’t know what. Rather than taking your car all the way down to your mechanic, you can get a pretty good idea what’s wrong with your car with a simple OBD-II adapter. Every car sold in the US after 1996 has an OBD-II port that you can use to connect your car to your phone....

The Case for Automatic Updates Before you run off to disable automatic updates, let’s talk about why they’re enabled by default in the Play Store. Whether it’s for Android itself or apps, software updates are important for staying on top of the latest security vulnerabilities. Automatic updates ensure that your apps are always up to date with the latest bug fixes and security patches. If you’re going to disable automatic updates, it’s important to make sure you’re still manually updating apps....

Whether you’re a mega modder, someone looking to keep your Minecraft versions and their accompanying worlds in a nice orderly fashion, or you want to totally silo your kids’ Minecraft experience to keep their worlds separate and cut down on the fighting, MultiMC is the solution to your problems. Why Do I Want to Do This? One thing every Minecraft modder quickly realizes is that keeping all the worlds and all their companion mods straight is a huge hassle....

How to Measure Your TV’s Screen TV sets are usually sold by screen size, which is a number in inches. Manufacturers obtain this number by measuring across the diagonal distance from one corner of the viewable screen area to the opposite corner. To measure the diagonal of a TV screen, you will need a tape measure and a helper. With the TV turned off, have your helper hold one end of the tape measure at the top left corner of the screen....

Why You Should (Probably) Skip the Mac App Store The Mac App Store is full of games. These include big-budget $60 releases like Civilization VI, short indie experiences like Oxenfree, and the kind of casual games you’d find on the iPhone like Donut County. To browse the catalog, open up the Mac App Store app then click on the “Play” tab from the sidebar. Unfortunately, the Mac App Store isn’t always the best place to buy your games from....

Gmail offers a feature that categorizes your email in tabs like Primary, Promotions, and Updates. If you enabled it by mistake, or if you prefer to view all your emails together, here’s how to remove tab categories in Gmail. While Gmail syncs customizations (like labels) and settings between all your devices, the tab categories aren’t one of them. If you use Gmail on multiple devices, you’ll have to go in and disable tab categories on each device (and each account) individually....

Although you can set up sleep tracking on your Apple Watch, it’s much easier to do on your iPhone. First, make sure your iPhone is running iOS 14 or higher, and your Apple Watch is running watchOS 7 or higher. If not, the sleep tracking settings won’t be available. To get started, tap and open the “Health” app on your iPhone. You can swipe down on the Home screen, and then use Spotlight Search to find it if necessary....

Google has carefully designed its account system so that it can be at the center of your digital life. But if you need to use multiple Google accounts (say, if you have a personal Gmail and a work Gmail), things get tricky quickly. Fortunately, Google’s login system has been updated with this in mind, so it can take multiple accounts into, well, account. How to Sign Into a Second Google Account To begin, simply log in to your primary Google account (which is probably the Gmail address you use for your personal email)....

If you’ve migrated your operating system from a mechanical hard drive to a solid-state drive, the partitions may not be properly aligned. This could result in slower performance, which you can fix by re-aligning them. What Is Partition Alignment, and Why Should I Care? RELATED: It’s Time: Why You Need to Upgrade to an SSD Right Now A typical mechanical hard drive generally starts its first partition after 63 empty blocks, while a solid-state drive starts its first partition after 64 empty blocks....

Projects on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and other crowdfunding platforms are mostly on the up-and-up, but there are those just trying to make a quick buck. Here’s how you can spot them. If Something Seems Too Good to be True, It Probably Is This is pretty good advice for life in general, but it applies to online crowdfunding in particular. If a new gadget seems like it probably can’t be achieved with current technology, then it probably can’t....

If you purchased a recent iPhone (6S and above), then you may be loving the new Live Photos feature. If you aren’t, then maybe you just haven’t become well acquainted with it. The best way to describe a Live Photo is to compare it to an animated GIF. You take a photo of your subject, which should be moving, and the camera on the iPhone will actually capture a short movie....

Your browser records all your web activity. Therefore, for added privacy, it’s best to regularly clear your browsing history. Safari on your Mac can take care of this for you and automatically wipe your history every once in a while. Here’s how to set it up. Launch Safari on your Mac from the Launchpad or by looking it up on Spotlight. Next, click “Safari” from the left corner of the menu bar and select “Preferences....

Apple’s macOS can read from Windows-formatted NTFS drives, but can’t write to them out of the box. Here are a few solutions for getting full read/write access to NTFS drives. This could be useful if you want to write to a Boot Camp partition on your Mac, as Windows system partitions must use the NTFS file system. However, for external drives, you should probably use exFAT instead. macOS can natively read and write to exFAT drives, just like Windows can....

We have all heard the admonition about safely removing USB devices when we are done with them, but what if an operating system is suspended and you decide to simply unplug the USB device then and there anyway? 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....

We’ll be throwing a lot of technical jargon at you in this list. Processors, RAM, megapixels, refresh rates, and more are mentioned in this list. The good news is you don’t necessarily need to worry about all the tech specifications. There’s not one single “spec” that makes or breaks a phone. The whole smartphone package is what matters, and that’s how we’ve approached this list. Best Android Phone Overall: Samsung Galaxy S22 Samsung releases a lot of phones in a year, but there’s one that usually hits the sweet spot....

You’ve set up parental controls in Netflix, and worked to make YouTube kid-friendly, and your kids already love it. But there are several other channels you can add featuring only kid-friendly content, from Sesame Street to Pokemon to GI Joe—all for free. RELATED: The Best Free Video Channels for Your Roku We’ve shown you the best free Roku video channels, but all of those add-ons focused on content for grown-ups....

If those incredibly masculine pickup truck commercials seem tame to you, if you work at a job with more OSHA inspectors than actual employees, and if you’ve broken more smartphone screens than human bones at your local half pipe, you might be in the market for a rugged phone. These toughened-up models come with extra protection from impacts, water damage, and other otherwise lethal threats to more mortal smartphones....