Yes, Christmas Lights Are a Fire Hazard We love Christmas lights, and even if you don’t celebrate Christmas or any winter holidays for that matter, there’s probably a good chance you like them too. After all, who doesn’t like a bit of brightness and cheer in the dark depths of winter? But loving all those colorful and twinkling holiday lights doesn’t mean they aren’t a bit on the dangerous side when improperly stored and strung haphazardly....

After you send an email, it’s pretty much outside your control. Gmail’s new Confidential Mode tries to give you a bit of control back by offering message expiration dates and making it trickier for email to be forwarded on. Confidential Mode, part of the new Gmail interface, works because it doesn’t technically use standard email protocols to deliver the message. Confidential messages are hosted on Google’s servers, instead. This has its downsides—recipients who aren’t viewing the email in Gmail have to click a link to open messages in a browser, for example....

Let’s say you’re trying to be quiet, browsing the internet at home, work, or a public space. You’re secretly filled with dread that anything you click will open a new tab with an autoplay video or blare an obnoxious audio ad. End that fear forever by keeping all your new tabs muted by default. Nobody likes sudden, unexpected noise when browsing, yet content providers seem to keep adding it. Thankfully, browser providers and extension providers have added some easy ways to keep those annoying sites in their place....

In the expanded menu, under “Your Account,” click “Account.” On the “Your Account” page that opens, click “Gift Cards.” On the page that opens, right next to “Your Gift Card Balance,” you will see the gift card balance currently available in your account. If you’d like to view the values of gift cards that you have redeemed in your account, scroll down the page to see that information. To view the gift cards that you have added to your account so far, then next to “Gift Card Balance,” tap the “Manage” option....

The Plex News feature gives you access to tons of video clips from various news sources. However, if you get your news other ways, you can disable Plex News and prevent it from showing up in your Plex client. RELATED: How to Add IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes Ratings to Your Plex Media Server Plex News appears as its own server of sorts, so when you use your Plex client to connect to a server, you’ll see a “News” option that you can select....

When you paste text from a web page into OneNote, it won’t just paste the text. You’ll also get a link to the web page you got it from. You can disable this feature if you like, forcing OneNote to only paste the text you actually copied. OneNote vs OneNote 2016. Unfortunately, you can only disable this feature in the classic desktop version of OneNote, named “OneNote 2016”. The new, universal app version of OneNote included with Windows 10—just named “OneNote”—doesn’t have many options, and won’t allow you to disable the web links....

Windows 10’s Redstone 5 update adds tabs to nearly every application on your system. You can remove these tabs from any application you like, giving those applications a traditional windows title bar once again. This new tab feature is named “Sets,” and you can’t completely disable it for every application on your system at the moment. Microsoft only lets you disable it for specific applications—but you can disable it for as many applications as you lie....

The Apple Watch doesn’t have many mechanical issues, since it has very few moving parts to begin with. However, the digital crown is one part in particular that can get stuck or feel sticky, making it difficult to spin. Here’s how to fix that. RELATED: How to Setup, Tweak, and Use Your New Apple Watch A stubborn digital crown is likely to get that way due to long-term exposure to dust, dirt and other grime....

Nobody reads every single email, and over time, that unread notification count just grows and grows until all your app icons have a huge number in a red bubble. Here’s how to disable the red notification count badge on iPhone or iPad. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who open and delete unwanted emails, and those who just ignore them, leaving the unread count to grow forever....

Between cable networks putting out fantastic shows, streaming platforms making serialized originals, and broadcast networks trying to keep up, keeping track of all your shows can be a headache. The Trakt.TV service can help. Trakt.TV is tailor made for the TV addict, listing almost every major network and streaming show out there, including schedules and which services offer what in their catalogs. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the amount of shows you want to keep up with (and maybe want to use our rotating subscription technique to save some money), Trakt is definitely worth a look....

By default, when you say “Alexa” near the Echo Show, it displays a blue line on a screen. If you’d prefer something a bit more obvious, you can make your Echo Show play a sound every time you invoke it. Alexa can make a little dinging noise when you start talking to Alexa and once you’ve finished your request. This is handy if you want to make a request of Alexa without looking at your device, like when you’re cooking and need to focus on what you’re doing....

At this point, smartphones are prolific. We use them for calls, text messages, social networking, photos, quick searches, streaming music, watching videos…the list goes on. But each thing you do drains your battery life, and some apps will even continue to drain your battery in the background when you aren’t using them. A free app called Greenify can fix that. How Greenify Works RELATED: The Complete Guide to Improving Android Battery Life...

How to Set Up Your Dash Wand To do this, open the app and tap the menu button in the top left corner, then select Your Account. Next, scroll down and select “Set up a new device” under Dash Buttons & Devices. Next, choose Dash Wand and on the next screen, specify which model you have. If you bought yours recently, it’s probably the second generation. The app will show you a picture of each model wand so you can confirm which one you have....

What Causes a Slow iPhone? A slow iPhone can be caused by a range of issues. The most obvious one is aging, a problem that will affect all smartphones eventually. Since newer iPhone models are faster, with more cores, better GPUs, and more RAM; the latest software is made with performant devices in mind rather than older hardware. Apple will generally support iPhones for around seven years from when the device was first manufactured....

Those new Windows 10 apps have permission to run in the background so they can update their live tiles, fetch new data, and receive notifications. Even if you never even touch them, they may drain some battery power. But you can control which apps are allowed to run in the background. Even if you do use universal apps, you don’t necessarily want them running in the background. For example, by default, apps like the “Get Office” app–which only exists to bug you about purchasing Microsoft Office–have permission to run in the background....

The night sky is breathtaking. If you go somewhere reasonably dark and let your eyes adjust, you can look up and see thousands of pin pricks of light, each one a star or galaxy that’s millions of years old. I find it completely humbling. The night sky also makes a great subject for photography. With long shutter speeds, your camera can capture way more light than your eyes, giving you an even better view....

With the Action Center, Windows 10 finally provides a central place for notifications and quick actions to live. Here’s how to use and customize it. For the longest time, notifications in Windows have been something of a joke. Even in Windows 8, which finally provided toast notifications that could pop up and then expire, there was no way to see expired notifications you might have missed. Windows 10 fixes this with the Action Center, a slide-out pane that groups and displays notifications, and also provides access to quick actions like Wi-Fi, Quiet Hours, and Night Light....

You just got your new iPhone after switching from Android and you want to type something in all caps. How do you use caps lock in iOS 9? We’ll tell you how to type all caps and also how to enable and disable the caps lock feature. To type something in all caps, double tap on the Shift key. A line displays below the up arrow on the Shift key....

Google Home lets you listen to music from Spotify, Pandora, Play Music, and even YouTube Red. You can also share your Google Home with other members of your household. If you don’t have a music subscription, but someone else in your house does, you can set Google Home to use their account for your music needs. Here’s how. We’ve already covered how to pick which music service to use on Google Home....

What You’ll Need You must be a Spotify Premium subscriber to download music for offline playback. Also, unlike the mobile apps, Spotify for desktop only supports downloading playlists. The playlist must be saved to your library first. How to Go Offline in Spotify for Windows and Mac To get started, open the Spotify desktop app for Windows 10 or Mac. You’ll first need to select a playlist to download. Next, the playlist must be added to your library....