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There are plenty of reasons to not want your phone number showing up when you call someone else. Maybe you just don’t like giving it out to strangers, or perhaps you don’t want the person you’re calling realizing you’re ringing from a foreign number. If you have an iPhone, you can block your number from showing up on other people’s caller ID with a simple settings toggle. First, go to to Settings > Phone and select Show My Caller ID....

Halloween is one of those holidays that really brings out the tinkerer in a lot of geeks. There’s a veritable laundry list of things to deploy, modify, and enhance all in search of becoming the spookiest house on the block and throwing the best party. Read on as we highlight how easily you can turn a digital projector into a Swiss Army knife of cool Halloween tricks. Why would you want to do this?...

If you’ve got multiple computers at your desk, you probably know that it’s a pain to use more than one keyboard and mouse. Here’s how to use a single keyboard and mouse on more than one PC using a tool from Microsoft. Most geeks will be familiar with Input Director and Synergy, which do the same thing, but now Microsoft has released an application called Mouse Without Borders, which has some great features—like dragging files from one PC to another....

If you need to quickly extract the year from a date in Microsoft Excel, you can use the YEAR function. This will give you the year value in a separate cell, allowing you to use it in a separate formula. The YEAR function can be especially useful if you’ve converted text to date values in Excel, and you want to extract the year values from your data. RELATED: How to Convert Text to Date Values in Microsoft Excel...

The games will once again be subject to pandemic restrictions, including limited in-person attendance, and NBC’s hosts will be broadcasting remotely from the U.S. But the games will go on, with thousands of athletes participating in dozens of events. Here’s how to stream the 2022 Winter Olympics. How to Stream the 2022 Olympics Opening Ceremony As always, the opening ceremony will kick off the Olympics with an elaborate extravaganza celebrating the Games’ host country and showcasing the athletes who are set to compete....

How the Heck Does MoviePass Make Money, Anyway? If you’re wondering how MoviePass can make money by selling an all-you-can-eat subscription that costs less than an individual movie ticket, you’re asking the right questions. It’s reasonable to assume that there’s a catch. For MoviePass, there are two catches. First, the company expects that you’re not actually going to go to the theater thirty times a month (who has the time, and are there really that many movies worth watching?...

Cell signal is weird. One moment you could have five bars, but walk a few feet and it drops to two. In my house, the signal downstairs is awful, but it’s perfect upstairs. There’s a lot going on with cell reception, so let’s look at some of the main factors that affect it. Your Distance from a Cell Tower Your cell phone communicates using radio waves, which get weaker the more atmosphere they have to move through....

Your various ROM collections, Steam games, and various other Windows games are, at the end of the day, all just games. Wouldn’t it make sense to launch them all from the same place? That’s the idea behind Launchbox, a free program that can launch ROMs with any emulator, DOS games using DOSBox, and even your PC game collection. If you’re the kind of person who hoards games and then forgets to play them, this is for you....

Two factor authentication (2FA) is generally a great security tool. But if you have it enabled on your Apple or Google accounts, this could really come back to bite you in the worst way. Here’s what you need to know. What is Two Factor Authentication? Put simply, 2FA gives you additional security for an account over just using your password. The two factors that the name refer to are generally identified as something you know and something you have....

The Ultimate Ears 2-pack is designed to last with a durable chassis made to survive the elements. With an IP67 rating, which denotes the device’s resistance to solid objects and water, each WONDERBOOM speaker can work under 1 m of water for 30 minutes, making them great for poolside use or basking on the beach (just in case you plan to go somewhere tropical this winter). The specialty design also protects each mini speaker from dust and dirt and promotes crystal-clear audio under most conditions....

High-end graphics cards are in super high demand right now. Not because of a sudden bloom of PC gamers, but because they’re the most efficient way of adding number-crunching power to cryptocurrency mining “rigs.” This makes building a PC very, very expensive. The Problem: Bitcoin Miners Are Buying Too Many GPUs RELATED: What Is Bitcoin, and How Does it Work? Would-be millionaires are snatching up huge numbers of consumer-grade GPUs and cramming them into custom-built PCs that use blockchain software to “make” currencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin....

The term “shell scripting” gets mentioned often in Linux forums, but many users aren’t familiar with it. Learning this easy and powerful programming method can help you save time, learn the command-line better, and banish tedious file management tasks. What Is Shell Scripting? Being a Linux user means you play around with the command-line. Like it or not, there are just some things that are done much more easily via this interface than by pointing and clicking....

1’s and 0’s Thanks to more powerful CPUs, we’ve jumped from barely being able to display an image on a computer screen to Netflix, video chat, streaming, and increasingly lifelike video games. The CPU is a wonder of engineering, but, at its core, it still relies on the basic concept of interpreting binary signals (1’s and 0’s). The difference now is that, instead of reading punch cards or processing instructions with sets of vacuum tubes, modern CPUs use tiny transistors to create TikTok videos or fill out numbers on a spreadsheet....

The Google Pixel 2 has one of the best cameras you can get in a smartphone right now. But generally speaking, these “best camera” sort of ratings only apply to the stock camera app. Google is changing that thanks to the “Pixel Visual Core”—a custom image processing chip. But what does this chip do? First, Let’s Talk About HDR RELATED: What Is HDR Photography, and How Can I Use It?...

The First Unix Epoch Goethe (1749-1832) declared “Every second is of infinite value.” That’s true, we each only have so many seconds here on planet Earth, and we don’t know when our last second will be. But we do know our birthday, and when our mortal countdown started. Unix—like the British Queen—has two birthdays. Or, more accurately, there have been two separate occasions on which it started counting the seconds of its existence....

Android apps on Chromebooks have some great benefits: they expand the device’s capabilities, have an overall small footprint, and they work very well on limited hardware. That said, they’re still in beta, and sometimes things don’t work as they should. RELATED: The Best Android Apps You Should be Using On Your Chromebook The biggest issue I’ve had with Android apps in Chrome OS is touch elements not responding correctly—or even at all—with touch or mouse....

Pretty much every company that dabbles in smarthome technology sells their own smart plug. With so many choices, it can be hard to choose the best one to use with your lamps and other appliances. Luckily, smart plugs are pretty simple devices—you plug stuff into them and control them remotely from your smartphone (or using a voice assistant). So, there are really only a few things you need to keep in mind when shopping around for one....

Each major web browser shares a large number of keyboard shortcuts in common. Whether you’re using Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, or Opera – these keyboard shortcuts will work in your browser. Each browser also has some of its own, browser-specific shortcuts, but learning the ones they have in common will serve you well as you switch between different browsers and computers. This list includes a few mouse actions, too....

Unfortunately, package thieves are out there, and every time you get a package delivered to your home, you run the rink of someone seeing it and taking it. Now, the Ring Pro 2 and Ring Video Doorbell (2020) will alert you when a package shows up, so you can take the steps needed to get it inside. Of course, the big issue Ring doorbells have is the field of view, which this update won’t fix....

Android gamers have been itching to get their hands on Fortnite ever since the game made the jump to iOS back in April. But the developer has now confirmed that to actually play it, they’ll have to go outside Google’s Play Store distribution service. That’s going to create a lot of problems. Fortnite Battle Royale has become a gaming sensation, a smash hit on every major gaming platform and earning an estimated $1 billion despite its free-to-play model....