Google recently announced that Assistant would be getting “Routines” that let people execute multiple actions with a single phrase. Routines are now live, and here’s how to use them. Understanding What Routines Can and Can’t Do While we initially presumed you would be able to add any action to a routine, that’s actually not the case. In fact, it’s fairly limited in this initial implementation. In ithe current state, you can only use six, predefined routines:...

Kubernetes has a reputation for complexity but modern releases are relatively straightforward to set up. The official cluster administration tool Kubeadm provides an automated experience for booting your control plane and registering worker nodes. This article will walk you through setting up a simple Kubernetes cluster using the default configuration. This is a “from scratch” guide which should work on a freshly provisioned host. A Debian-based system is assumed but you can adjust most of the commands to match your operating system’s package manager....

Social media makes it easy to keep in touch with people you otherwise wouldn’t see or hear from. If your best friend is travelling in a different country, or you’ve just moved to a new city and left your mates behind, it’s nice to be able keep up to date with what’s going on in everyone’s life. RELATED: How Facebook’s News Feed Sorting Algorithm Works Unfortunately, social media makes it just as easy for people you might not want to stay in touch with, to keep tabs on you and what you’re doing....

A lot of Facebook Pages run competitions. Some of them are legitimate giveaways, while others are total scams designed to collect your personal information. There’s also a grey area where legitimate Pages run competitions on Facebook in a way they shouldn’t. While there’s no one smoking gun you can look for to spot a fake competition, there are a few things you can look for that might mean something shady is going on....

Network issues can be hard to pinpoint, but if you have Chrome installed (or a Chromebook), you can easily run a thorough diagnostic right from your browser that can help you figure out what could be going wrong. To do this, we’re using a Chrome app called—get this—Chrome Connectivity Diagnostics. I like a straightforward app that knows what it is. Go ahead and install it from the Chrome Web Store to get started....

Under “Email alerts, messages, and ads,” click “Advertising preferences.”

There’s nothing quite like reliving your childhood with your favorite retro games, but are emulators and ROMs legal? The internet will give you a lot of answers, but we talked to a lawyer to get a more definitive answer. Emulators are legal to download and use, however, sharing copyrighted ROMs online is illegal. There is no legal precedent for ripping and downloading ROMs for games you own, though an argument could be made for fair use....

Mechanical keyboards are neat! But no one would say they’re sleek or compact. Even the smallest mainstream models, the “60%” boards, are about the size and weight of a paperback book. But that might be changing very soon. RELATED: How to Pick (and Customize) the Best Mechanical Keyboard For You Cherry, the German company famous for creating the original MX switch design that started the modern mechanical revival, revealed a new low profile switch at CES 2018....

Ever been confused by the various colorful icons showing up at the top of your Apple Watch’s screen? We’ve been there, too. To fix that, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of all Apple Watch status icons and what they mean. Green Lightning Icon Apple Watch has two charging icons. The green lightning icon appears when the watch is charging. Red Lightning Icon The red lightning icon appears when the battery is low....

Non-consistent updates on Android devices have plagued the platform since its initial rise to popularity. Project Treble is Google’s plan to help manufacturers streamline the update process for more timely updates. Android Fragmentation is the Problem One of the biggest complaints against Android as an operating system is something generally referred to as “fragmentation.” The traditional definition is “the process of being broken into small or separate parts,” which directly translates to its negative connotation for Android: there are eight different versions of Android currently in the wild, still in use on various types of hardware....

After quite a few unexciting releases, Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” is full of huge changes. Ubuntu Phone is dead, and so is Ubuntu’s dream of a converged desktop. Ubuntu’s developers are no longer working on Unity 8, and Ubuntu 17.10 ditches the old Unity 7 desktop for GNOME Shell. Ubuntu Phone, Unity 8, Mir, and Convergence Are Dead It’s impossible to understand why Ubuntu is so different now without looking at what happened with Ubuntu Phone....

A Bitcoin wallet is basically a software program in which you store Bitcoin. An exchange lets you convert “real money” like US dollars to Bitcoin. Exchanges also provide a wallet—but you don’t necessarily have full control of that wallet. We’re not recommending you invest in Bitcoin. But, if you’re putting money into Bitcoin—or you’re just interested in how it works—you should know this stuff. What Is a Bitcoin Wallet? So, we mentioned before that a Bitcoin wallet is a software program in which you store Bitcoin....

Bluetooth Blues Your Apple Watch and iPhone stay connected using both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networks. Bluetooth, as it’s the more energy-efficient option, is prioritized in most situations. Unfortunately, Bluetooth has quite a low bandwidth when it comes to transferring data. Bluetooth 5, which is in any Apple Watch Series 4 and later, has a maximum data transfer speed of 2 Mbps. Bluetooth 4, which is in the Apple Watch Series 3 and earlier, has a maximum data transfer speed of just 1 Mbps....

If you’re getting into the mechanical keyboard hobby, prepare your wallet for some serious hits. In addition to the hardware itself, the customized keycap sets that you add to the mechanical switches can be shockingly expensive. But why? The answer is complicated. To be fair, the actual materials in all those little plastic pieces aren’t expensive at all, and there are plenty of cheap options to be had. But between limited production capacity, a healthy secondary market, and the relatively niche nature of customized keycaps, expanding your collection is probably going to include a heavy hit to your wallet....

MAC address filtering allows you to define a list of devices and only allow those devices on your Wi-Fi network. That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, this protection is tedious to set up and easy to breach. This is one of the Wi-Fi router features that will give you a false sense of security. Just using WPA2 encryption is enough. Some people like using MAC address filtering, but it’s not a security feature....

“Good artists copy, great artists steal,” Steve Jobs once said. We think Microsoft should take this advice to heart, because there are a few macOS features that Windows could use. Here at How-to Geek, we think the best operating system is whatever works for you, which is why we try to cover every platform. But there are always features I miss when I jump from macOS to Windows 10. I’d like to propose that Microsoft shamelessly steal the following ideas… as any great artist would....

If you’re thinking about replacing the battery in your smartphone yourself, or even switching out that shattered screen, there are several tools you should have to make the job a lot easier. RELATED: How Difficult Is It to Replace an iPhone Battery? Undoubtedly, one of the best places to buy replacement parts is iFixit. And after the whole iPhone battery fiasco, their battery replacement kits have become quite popular. While these kits come with all the tools you’ll need to get the job done, unfortunately it’s the bare minimum, and you’d be surprised at how easier the process is with a few additional tools at your disposal....

When you take a photo with your smartphone (or a modern digital camera), it logs the photo’s GPS coordinates and embeds it in the image metadata, or EXIF. This is how your phone is able to show a map view of your photo library. Now, you can of course turn geotagging off—here’s how to do it on iOS and Android—but does it really matter? There are plenty of scare articles out there saying that the world is going to find your children if you share photos of them on social media, but is their any merit to it?...

Today is the big day for Apple device owners—the company is putting out updates for its devices, including iOS 15 for iPhone, iPadOS 15 for iPad, and watchOS 8 for Apple Watch. If you want to update your Apple hardware (and you should), here’s how to do it. How to Update to iOS 15 on iPhone If you own an iPhone, you’ve probably downloaded an update at one point or another....

While the iPhone X’s design is its biggest talking point, the thing that really caught my eye watching the announcement was the new camera. RELATED: How to Use the iPhone’s Portrait Mode For the past few generations, the camera has been one of the biggest reasons to upgrade your iPhone. Even stuff like 3D Touch, which is surprisingly useful, is a small upgrade compared to the camera improvements each new cycle....