If you are performing your first ever RAM upgrade, then watching a small piece suddenly “chip off” of a RAM module can be a very worrisome event. But is it as bad as it looks or is the RAM module still usable? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a worried 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....
Color profiles define the colors we capture with our cameras and see on our displays. They control what colors are used and help provide consistency between devices. Color is a pretty complex subject when it comes to photography. Your eyes can see far more colors than your camera can capture or your monitor (or even a piece of printed paper) can display. This means we need some way to define the subset of colors that cameras can capture and monitors can display....
If you’re in the market for a cellphone, especially a used one, you’ll hear a lot of talk about ESNs with an emphasis on whether or not the phone is “clean”. What exactly does acronym stand for and what does it mean if the phone is clean or not? Let’s start with the basics and then move onto how you can use that knowledge to protect yourself as a consumer....
Modern technology has made photography a lot more accessible. In the early days, photographers had to painstakingly focus their lens by hand before they took a photo. If they missed focus, the image (and the expensive film they were using) would go to waste. Now, almost all cameras, from your smartphone to a high-end DSLR, use autofocus to make it easier to get sharp shots. Unfortunately, when the camera does everything in the background, many photographers don’t really understand what’s going on....
There is certainly no shortage of messaging apps to choose from, but a select few have risen to the top. Telegram is one of the most popular choices—especially for the privacy-conscious. So what’s it all about? At the most basic level, Telegram does many of the things you’d expect from an instant messaging app, including text messages, group chats, voice and video calls, stickers, and file sharing. However, there’s more going on under the surface....
If you’ve ever purchased a computer with a hard disk capacity of 500 GB and opened Windows Explorer only to find that its capacity looked more like 440 GB, you may be wondering where all those gigabytes went. There are several reasons Windows could display the wrong amount of available space, from invisible shadow files, formatting overhead, and hidden recovery partitions to misleading (though technically accurate) storage capacities advertised by hard drive manufacturers....
Shopping for a new computer? Don’t pay too much attention to CPU clock speed. “CPU speed” was once an easy, if not completely accurate, way to compare two computers’ performance — just compare the GHz. But not anymore. Modern CPUs are more than fast enough for most basic tasks, so you’ll also want to look at other things when it comes to comparing performance. For example, does the computer come with an SSD or a slower magnetic hard disk?...
Google, Bing, Yahoo – all the major search engines track your search history and build profiles on you, serving different results based on your search history. Try one of these alternative search engines if you’re tired of being tracked. Google now encrypts your search traffic when you’re logged in, but this only prevents third-parties from snooping on your search traffic – it doesn’t prevent Google from tracking you. DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for the privacy-conscious....
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could scroll up on any dock icon to quickly see all its windows, along with recent documents? A single command adds this otherwise hidden feature to your dock. We’ve shown you how to use your MacBook’s trackpad gestures, including the downward three-finger swipe that shows you all windows open by the current application. It turns out it’s possible to do this for any application, not just the currently open one....
What Does a VPN Do? When you connect to the internet, you access the website you want to visit by going through your ISP’s network. Your ISP knows the domain you’re accessing and where you’re located, as does the website you’re visiting—although it has a rougher idea of your location. This data is stored in log files, which can record data such as your IP address, the time of your connection, and the length of time you were connected for....
What Is Self-Hosting? Before we dive into some of the reasons self-hosting is great, let’s get everyone on the same page just in case they’re unfamiliar with the term and the practice. Self-hosting is when you—either using a computer on your local network at home or a remote “bare metal” server host you’ve purchased—host your own services for various purposes. Instead of using a backup service like Google Photos or iCloud, you host your own backup and viewing platform using Nextcloud Photos, PhotoPrism, or such....
Full screen video gaming on Windows has some hazards: tapping the Window key, using any sort of Windows shortcuts like ALT+TAB, or even clicking the mouse in the wrong spot if you’re using multiple monitors can crash your game. Read on as we highlight solutions for each of those problems. There’s nothing worse than being completely immersed in your game only to have an errant key press rip you out of the moment and dump you unceremoniously back on the desktop....
At any given point, a large selection of recent movies show up on torrent sites, many of which haven’t even been released yet. For anyone who downloaded, streamed, or torrented these yet-to-be-seen-in-theaters selections, you might have noticed one common theme among all of them: they were stuck at DVD quality. This is no mistake, of course. But it’s the result of a problem that has plagued Hollywood since the days of Napster: how is it possible that movies make it onto illegal networks before they’re showing at the local movie theater, and why is it still happening in 2016?...
You’ve probably never even attempted it, but wouldn’t it be a fun experiment? How much could you download from the Internet if you put the pedal down and maxed out your connection for an entire month? This is a fun little question and a question we can solve with some good old fashion math. First, let’s lay down some parameters we can use to begin constructing our calculation. I loved the NES zapper question and answer....
Is there some piece of information you want to keep track of, constantly? For many Mac users, the menu bar is the place to put things like that, but that means collecting individual applications for things like weather, network status, and more. BitBar is a free program that can show basically anything on your menu bar. It does this using simple command prompt outputs, formatted by the use of user-created plugins....
If you use a MacBook, you can add an external display to give yourself more screen real estate. A second display can really help your productivity and make everything feel a little less cramped. Before you can connect your Mac to an external monitor, however, you have to know what kind of cable to use. If you’re unsure, it’s pretty easy to Google it or use the MacTracker app to find out....
If you’ve been browsing the Internet for a while, you probably have accumulated an impressive number of bookmarks. The problem is, you might have forgotten why you saved them in the first place. If you use Safari on macOS Sierra, it now incorporates a handy feature that lets you add descriptions to your bookmarks—so months or years from now, you aren’t puzzling over whether to keep or clean them out, or why you bookmarked them in the first place....
Being able to take the Switch with you is one of the console’s best features. However, the portable screen’s auto-brightness feature leaves a little to be desired. Fortunately, there’s an easier way to adjust your screen’s brightness. When you’re using your Switch in handheld mode, you can access a quick settings menu that lets you put the console to sleep, enable Airplane mode, and—most helpfully—adjust the brightness. This slide-out menu won’t show the brightness slider when docked with the TV since, you know, you can’t see the Switch’s screen then....
Windows 10’s Creators Update has a switch you can flip to only allow apps from the Windows Store. This feature can also be used to whitelist your existing desktop apps, only allowing your currently installed applications to run and blocking new applications until you allow them. It’s similar to Gatekeeper on macOS. RELATED: What’s New in Windows 10’s Creators Update How to Run Only Apps From the Store RELATED: How to Get Windows 10’s April 2018 Update Now...
It’s easy to invest a lot of energy in your Minecraft creations. Thankfully, it’s just as easy to back them up. Read on as we show you how to ensure your Minecraft Realms worlds are safe and sound. Why Do I Want To Do This? RELATED: How to Add Custom Worlds to Your Minecraft Realms Server While the most obvious reason for backing up your Minecraft Realms world is simply to have a safe second copy of it, it’s actually a bit more nuanced than that....
