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Apple puts a lot of care into making its ecosystem as clean as possible, and this often includes rewarding some of the best and most successful apps and developers in a calendar year. Apple has just handed out awards for the best apps on the App Store in 2022. The very best iPhone app of the year is, probably coming as no surprise, BeReal. This app was 2022’s social media phenomenon, quickly catching on with users thanks to its concept of staying “real” with a notification firing up at a random time of the day for posting — often at inconvenient times....

Sometimes the social aspect of modern game consoles can be great. Other times, it can be annoying—especially if someone is only there to act as a troll. Fortunately, you can easily block people right from your PlayStation 4, leaving you to game in peace. So, what does blocking do? According to Sony, you and the blocked user will be unable to do the following: …so basically everything. There are a couple of different ways to go about blocking someone—both end up in the same place, but it depends on whether or not the person is already on your friends list....

Visit the Netflix website on your computer, log in to your account, and play a TV show or movie you’d like to watch. Once the video loads and starts playing, move your cursor to reveal the player controls at the bottom of the screen. Hover your cursor over the button that looks like a speedometer in the bottom-right corner. A new “Playback Speed” menu window will appear. Pick one of the five different speed presets to easily increase or decrease your Netflix video’s pace....

Every Google account comes with free storage, but if that’s not enough for you, more can be purchased. Regardless of how much you have, you probably want to keep tabs on how much you’re using. We’ll show you how. Google offers two cloud storage options. You can stick with the free 15GB option that every account gets or upgrade to “Google One” and pay for more. Before we check how much storage you have left, it’s important to understand what counts toward it....

You open an app, it immediately force closes. You open it again, it does the same thing. There’s clearly a problem here—but simply clearing your app data and cache might prove to be a pretty easy fix. Just like any other operating system, Android stores certain app data that saves your preferences, logins, and the like. That’s why you can just fire up Facebook or Instagram and not have to log in every time....

Plug It In The first thing you’ll need to do is figure out which connectors you can use. You can do this by checking the output on your laptop and the input on your monitor of choice. If you don’t yet have a monitor, you can choose a model based on what you have available on your laptop. Whatever combination of monitor and connection you choose, the process is the same: connect one end of the cable to your laptop and the other to a suitable input on your monitor....

Microsoft’s Surface Pen, included on most of its first-party Surface machines, is one of the nicer options as far as modern touch screen styluses go. The latter version of the Pen, introduced with the Surface Pro 3 and subsequent models, includes a few customization options that weren’t present before. Here’s how you access them. First: Install the Surface App If, for some reason, your Surface doesn’t have the Surface control app, you’ll want to install it now....

Editing files stored on a remote server doesn’t need to be a clunky mess of shell commands and basic text editors. Visual Studio Code is one of the most popular developer IDEs and an officially supported extension lets you add SSH connections to your workspace. The Remote – SSH extension can connect to network servers, list their directory structure, and open and edit files. Almost all Visual Studio Code features are available including IntelliSense code completion, built-in debugging, and third-party extensions....

Now that voice assistants are becoming extremely popular, many users who want to outfit their living spaces with smarthome products are probably wanting these products to be compatible with their voice assistant, whether it’s Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant (and Google Home). Here’s how to find out whether or not a smarthome device works with these platforms. Look for the Badge on the Product Box Perhaps the easiest and quickest way to see if a smarthome device is compatible with the voice assistant of your choice is to take a look at the product’s packaging and look for the badge that says what it supports....

The moving parts in a hard drive can create a lot of vibration and noise, and when you pack a bunch of hard drives together into an enclosure, that ruckus multiplies. Here’s how to keep it at bay. RELATED: How to Set Up and Get Started with Your Synology NAS The noise from vibrations isn’t just annoying to listen to, but the actual vibration can be unhealthy for hard drives....

Do you measure a Facebook post’s quality not by how many likes (reactions) it receives but the post’s actual impact on people? If so, you can get rid of the like counts in your Facebook news feed. We’ll show you how. Like counts have the potential to negatively affect your mental health. You can hide like counts individually for your own posts and for posts from other users. Know, however, that while like counts will disappear from your feed, Facebook continues to show them in places like Marketplace and reels....

It’s easy to lose individual Microsoft Teams chats—also known as Direct Messages—in the long list of conversations. Here’s how to get control of your chats by hiding, pinning, and filtering messages in Teams. As there’s no way to group chats like Slack, the key elements to organizing Microsoft Teams are the ability to hide a chat (so it disappears from the list), pin a chat (so that important chats are always at the top), and filter the list (so that you can find the chats you want)....

The latest version of NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software brings a new in-game “Share” overlay that replaces the old “ShadowPlay” feature. Install GeForce Experience 3.0, sign in, and you’ll see a “Press Alt+Z to share your gameplay” popup and icons at the bottom right corner of your screen every time you launch a game. What Are the Icons and Notification For? RELATED: How to Set Your PC Games’ Graphics Settings with No Effort...

If you’ve been considering giving your phone new life with a custom ROM, LineageOS is one of the most popular ones available today. Here’s everything you need to know about flashing this ROM onto your phone. Step Zero: Make Sure Your Device (and Computer) are Ready to Go Before you get overzealous and start throwing things at a command line, you’ll first need to make sure you have everything you need to get started—including whether your phone is ready to take on a ROM....

Tethering allows you to get online with your smartphone’s data connection, but you likely have a limited amount of data, and Windows 10 PCs can be very data hungry. You probably won’t want Windows 10 automatically downloading big updates and syncing large amounts of data until you get back to a normal Internet connection. Here’s how to limit that activity when you’re tethering. Set Your Tethered Wi-Fi Hotspot as Metered RELATED: How, When, and Why to Set a Connection as Metered on Windows 10...

If you’re the parent of young child and would like a way to keep them safe when they use their phone, Google Family Link may be the option you’ve been looking for. It’s a way to provide a child with a fully capable smartphone that you can control. If you’ve ever tried to set up a Google account for a child before, you probably already know that Google has a strict age requirement of 13 years old....

If you’re an avid gamer, there’s a good chance you got a gift card for your console for the holidays or as a gift. Being able to use that gift card doesn’t take much work, regardless of your platform. Gift cards give your family something to wrap up or stick inside a hilarious card. The gift cards are available for specific games, downloadable content, online multiplayer, or just as cash for each of the digital stores....

You don’t need a system information utility to find this information. Windows shows it in several different places. To find this information in the Windows 10 or Windows 11 Settings app, navigate to Settings > System > About. Look under “Device specifications.” The name of your computer’s processor and its speed are displayed to the right of “Processor.” You can press Windows+i to open the Settings app quickly. You can also press the Windows key, type “About” to search your Start menu for this Settings screen, and then click the “About This PC” shortcut that appears....

When you picked up your shiny new Android device, you probably thought “yeah, this has plenty of storage. I’ll never fill it up!” But here you are, some number of months later with a full phone and no clue why. No worries: here’s how you can figure out where the space hogs are. You can use built-in features to figure this out, or third-party apps. I find the easiest and most straightforward tools to use are often the ones included in Android itself, so we’ll start with those, before showing you some of your other options....

Two-sided printing is great in theory, because it uses less paper for multi-page documents. It’s also frustrating when you forget to turn the option off when you don’t need it. macOS makes two-sided printing the default for supported printers. It’s the ecologically friendly thing to do, we suppose—at least, in theory. We’ve personally thrown out more than a few documents because of this default. Many of the things we bother to print these days—airline or event tickets, for example—need to be on their own pages....