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Thanks to a new mobile device charging standard, it’s possible to keep your phone charged up without ever fumbling with the tiny microUSB charging cable again. Read on as we review the RAVPower wireless charger, show you how to set up a phone for wireless charging, and talk about how we went from skeptical to entirely in love with the whole wireless charging process. Wireless Charging? Before we even dive into reviewing the actual unit and showing you how to use it, let’s talk about how it works....

The first Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL have free full-quality photo uploads for the life of the device. Importantly, there’s no check for whether the photos and videos were captured with the Pixel’s own camera — they just have to be present in the camera folder, where the Google Photos app can detect them and upload to the cloud. Images taken on other phones, tablets, and even dedicated DSLR/mirrorless cameras are all compatible, if they are in a file format the Google Photos app can recognize....

Excel stores dates as integers. By default, Excel uses “1” to represent 01/01/1900 and each day after that is one greater. Type in 01/01/2000 and switch the format to “Number” and you’ll see “36526” appear. If you subtract 1 from 36526, you can see that there were 36525 days in the 20th century. Alternatively, you could enter a future date and subtract the result of the TODAY function to see how many days away that date is from today....

Your browser sends its user agent to every website you connect to. We’ve written about changing your browser’s user agent before – but what exactly is a user agent, anyway? A user agent is a “string” – that is, a line of text – identifying the browser and operating system to the web server. This sounds simple, but user agents have become a mess over time. The Basics When your browser connects to a website, it includes a User-Agent field in its HTTP header....

Windows 7 rocks a new method of file and print sharing that’s a departure from the frustrating file and print sharing found in earlier versions of Windows. What is it and how can you benefit from it? Read on as we explain. HomeGroups are a new edition to the Windows ecosystem as of Windows 7. They’re intended to (and succeed at) greatly reducing the frustration experienced by users who want to easily share files between computers as well as share printers with the entire network....

Phones get stolen or lost everyday. With a plethora of data ripe for identity-theft on it, a lost phone can easily make your blood run cold. Take a deep breath, How-To Geek will talk you through this. It happened to me just last week. My iPhone 4 hadn’t left my sight in the year that I had it, but one tiny 5-second window of opportunity was all it took for a thief to snatch it up....

Sound Quality and Noise Isolation Can you recall times when you used a headset that made in-game gunshots sound like they were coming from your left when they were in fact behind you? Or how about a time when the enemy team planted the bomb at one bomb site but you thought it was at other? These are examples of poor sound quality. You need to be able to clearly distinguish what you are hearing and where it’s coming from....

If you’re perennially losing your remote control, phones with IR blasters are extremely handy. But how do they work, and where can you get one? When Infrared Was King Readers of a certain age might remember using infrared to share files and internet connections between their phone, PDA, or computer. This feature (dubbed “IrDA“) was common in the 1990s and early ’00s before Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. At the time, IrDA was revolutionary, but it’s long since ceased to be mainstream....

There’s been a lot of interest in Apple’s HomeKit home automation system and an equal amount of sticker shock over the realization that it requires an investment in new hardware. Why exactly does HomeKit require new hardware? Read on as we investigate. What Is HomeKit? HomeKit is Apple’s entry into the home automation marketplace and is intended to serve as a control system and database that links all of your HomeKit-compatible products with your Apple devices ranging from your iPhone to Apple TV....

Open home Wi-Fi networks are still too common. The situation has improved as wireless router manufacturers began shipping with wireless passwords enabled by default, but there are still too many unsecured Wi-Fi networks out there. Hosting an open Wi-Fi network can cause a number of problems for you, whether you’re trying to do a good deed by sharing your connection or just haven’t set up a password yet. Image Credit: Matt J Newman on Flickr...

The NVIDIA SHIELD TV is the Android TV box. It works well for watching your favorite movies, playing some games, and even as a Plex Server. You’ve been able to control the SHIELD TV with your voice thanks to Google Assistant, but NVIDIA is giving users one more option when it comes to voice commands. How do you link Alexa to your SHIELD TV? Start by downloading the NVIDIA SHIELD TV Alexa skill....

Apple revealed a suite of new lock screen features for iOS 16 today at WWDC, mostly focused on customization. The lock screen on iOS and iPadOS today mostly looks the same on everyone’s devices, but with iOS 16 later this year, you’ll be able to switch between different fonts and colors for the text. Apple will also have a built-in collection of pre-made lock screen styles, if you want a fun look without tweaking everything yourself....

Websites can store small files called “cookies” on your computer to remember your preferences and login state. Cookies can also be used to track you across websites to better target ads. But think twice before you just disable them. Cookies do a lot more than just track you, and while clearing them is easy—and sometimes beneficial—doing so can make browsing the web more obnoxious. This is similar to the problem with clearing your cache....

Instagram is a pretty well designed app. The majority of features are where you’d expect them to be, though some of them are a little hidden. One feature that’s inexplicably hard to find is how to add line breaks or paragraphs to your Instagram captions on iOS. Luckily for Android fans, things are normal: just press Return. On iOS, when you go to add a caption to a photo you’ll see something that looks like this....

If you work a lot in the command line, you probably keep more than one Terminal window open at once. However, instead of having separate windows, you can condense all your Terminal sessions onto one window using tabs. RELATED: How to Enable Local Menus in Ubuntu We’ll show you how to open multiple Terminal sessions as tabs in Ubuntu. To begin, open a Terminal window and select “Preferences” from the “Terminal” menu....

You never know when you’re going to need to reference an old text message with an important bit of info, and the easiest way to make sure you never lose anything is by backing up. Fortunately, pushing all of your Android phone’s text messages to the cloud is super easy. RELATED: How to Back Up Your Text Messages to Your Gmail Account This all hinges on an Android app called SMS Backup & Restore, which you can get for free from Google Play....

A critical exploit in widespread Java library has been found, disrupting much of the internet as server admins scramble to fix it. The vulnerable component, log4j, is used everywhere as an included library, so you will need to check your servers and make sure they’re updated. How Does This Exploit Work? As far as exploits go, the log4j ulnerability is by far one of the worst in the last few years, scoring a rare 10/10 on the CVSS scale, and is going to haunt the entire internet for many years to come....

Copying a file with the Linux command line is easy. However, what if you want to copy the same file to several different locations? That’s easy, too, and we’ll show you how to do that with one command. Normally, to copy one file, you would use the cp command, linking to the source file and the destination directory: To copy it to two more directories, many people would just run the command two more times, with different destinations:...

Say you have a folder full of files, and you want to save or print a list of those files. With a couple of quick Registry edits, you can add a right-click command for copying a folder’s contents to the clipboard. If you’ve ever needed to print or save a list of files in a directory in Windows, you know that there’s no built in command for doing so. Sure, you could try capturing a screenshot of the folder and printing that, but more than likely you won’t get all the files in the shot....

If you work on a computer all day, you might forget to get up now and then to stretch. To avoid your neck seizing up and your eyes bugging out, you can set an alarm to remind yourself to get up every so often. There are all kinds of third-party tools that allow you to set reminders for yourself, but you can also use the Windows built-in Task Scheduler....