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If you browse through your Task Manager in Windows 8 or 10, you’ll probably see several instances of a process named “Device Association Framework Provider Host” running. If you’ve ever wondered what it was, why there are so many, and why it might be spiking your CPU usage, we’ve got the answer for you. RELATED: What Is This Process and Why Is It Running on My PC? This article is part of our ongoing series explaining various processes found in Task Manager, like Runtime Broker, svchost....

Recently, two new icons popped up in the Facebook app on iOS where the old chat icon used to be: a little shopfront and a rocket ship. The little shopfront is a quick link to Facebook Marketplace, and the rocket ship a link to Facebook’s Explore Feed. RELATED: The Best Way to Save Money on Tech: Buy Used Marketplace is pretty self explanatory—it’s Facebook’s attempt to take on the likes of Craigslist—but the Explore Feed caught my eye, so I did a little digging....

Can’t sign into your iPhone or iPad anymore? If you’ve forgotten the PIN and haven’t set up Touch ID on a modern iPhone or iPad, you’ll need to reset your phone or tablet to regain access. You’ll lose everything stored on the device itself, although you can restore from backups. If you’ve synced your iPhone or iPad with iTunes, you can even make a fresh backup first to ensure you won’t lose anything....

What Affects VPN Speed? Though some providers like to claim that their VPN can boost your internet speed, the fact is that VPNs will always cause some loss of speed, the question is only how much. When a VPN is said to be fast, it just means that it loses less speed than its competitors do. There are three main reasons why VPNs slow down your connection, here they are in descending order....

If you’ve ever watched a movie on Netflix, YouTube, or some other streaming service, you might notice that any time there’s a rainy scene, the video quality completely falls apart. Even if you’re streaming over the best internet connection, the video will look like crap. This happens because all video streams are compressed, and particles like rain, snow, and confetti completely destroy compressed streams. How Modern Video Is Compressed to Fit Bitrate Limitations To understand why rain and other particles can mess up a video quality, we need to understand how bitrate works....

Landscape Mode for Face ID Apple has said that “supported iPhone models” will be able to use Face ID in landscape mode with the release of iOS 16. This is a feature that has been a long-time coming, with the feature only currently working on devices that lack a Home button in portrait mode. This means you’ll be able to unlock your iPhone while lying on the sofa or without craning your neck while in bed....

Get Motivated Walking with Pokémon and Pikmin For many, getting up and moving around a bit is the first step to better fitness. Most health experts recommend around 10,000 steps per day as a goal for most people to aim for, or work up to. If you’re already doing 10,000 steps, you might want to up this target. Games like Pokémon GO and Pikmin Bloom are both augmented reality games in which the aim is to move around....

Microsoft added “Windows Sonic” spatial sound to Windows 10 back in the Creators Update. Windows Sonic for Headphones is disabled by default, but you can enable it for virtual surround sound. This option is available on the Xbox One, too. How to Enable Windows Sonic You can easily toggle this feature on or off from the sound icon in your notification area. Right-click the speaker icon, point to Spatial Sound, and select “Windows Sonic for Headphones” to enable it....

It’s not much of a secret that you can get free TV by using an antenna to pull in nearby signals. But if you have an NVIDIA SHIELD, you can supercharge that experience by adding live TV to the SHIELD itself—and, for a small monthly fee, even add a full guide and DVR capabilities. What You’ll Need RELATED: How to Get HD TV Channels for Free (Without Paying for Cable)...

If you’ve got a modern(ish) Samsung device that’s running Nougat (like the Galaxy S7 or S8), then you’ve likely noticed a lot has changed since the Marshmallow builds. One of these things, while small, is still something a lot of people may miss: the lack of a persistent brightness bar. RELATED: The Best (and Worst) Things About the Samsung Galaxy S8 Now, don’t get me wrong here—the brightness bar is still there, but it takes a few steps to actually get to it now....

If you’re an Android TV user, you have to ask yourself one question: how much time do you really spend on the home screen? The odds are you launch the same app every time to turn it on, and now there’s a new app that lets you do that automatically. RELATED: What Is Android TV, and Which Android TV Box Should I Buy? For the sake of simplicity, let’s say you only watch Netflix on your Android TV....

Apple is now using Zsh as the default shell on macOS. We love Zsh, but the trusty old Bash shell is still included with macOS, and you can quickly switch back to Bash if you prefer. Zsh became the default in macOS Catalina. Zsh is only the default shell on newly created user accounts, so any existing accounts you have on an upgraded Mac will still use Bash by default unless you change it....

How to Set Up and Use the Roomba Alexa Skill To control your Roomba with the Echo, you’ll need to enable the Roomba Alexa skill. To do that, head to this link and click Enable. Next, you’ll be prompted to log into your Roomba account. Enter your credentials and click “Log in.” Once the skill is enabled you can use the following commands: “Alexa, ask Roomba to start/stop cleaning. ” This will begin or end a cleaning job whenever you want....

What Is “Sign in With Apple?” “Sign in with Apple” lets you register for or sign up for a service without having to provide a password and go through a registration process. The service requires the use of an Apple ID that uses two-factor authentication, so anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or Mac can take advantage. When you Sign in with Apple, you don’t need to provide a password at all....

While you still can’t create completely custom watch faces on your Apple Watch, you can use any photo you want as your wallpaper, either by using a single photo or rotating through a photo album. Here’s how to do it. RELATED: How to Customize, Add, and Delete Apple Watch Faces Apple calls this “creating a watch face”, but technically, you’re not really “creating” a watch face. Rather, you’re just using the existing “Photos” watch face and picking a photo to use as the wallpaper for that watch face....

Which Emails Do You Actually Need? We’re not here to encourage you to dig through thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of emails one by one. That sounds time-consuming. Instead, we have some helpful tips for sorting the junk emails from the pile. It’s easy to pick out large numbers of emails that just aren’t useful. Search for Common Phrases in Junk Emails Consider searching for common phrases in junk emails. For example, try searching for the following phrases:...

If you use your Echo Spot as a bedside alarm clock, then you might benefit from turning on Night Mode. This feature changes the background to black and dims the screen so that it doesn’t blind you at night while you’re trying to sleep. RELATED: How to Disable the Camera on the Echo Spot Before we get started showing you how to to enable Night Mode, keep in mind that it only dims the screen a certain percentage....

You’re typing on your laptop and, suddenly, some of the keys start registering as numbers and symbols instead of letters. What’s going on? Most likely, the answer lies with your Num Lock key. Here’s why—and how to fix it. What is Num Lock? Num Lock, short for “number lock,” is a feature of PC keyboards dating back to the very first IBM PC in 1981. To save room on the keyboard, IBM decided to make keys on the numeric keypad do double duty as both number keys and cursor keys....

Android apps are a great way to expand the sometimes limited capabilities of Chromebooks, but they can be a problem if you store most of your data on an external medium—like an SD card, for example. RELATED: The Best Android Apps You Should be Using On Your Chromebook Fortunately, with a few commands you can actually “force” Android apps to not only see external storage, but write to it as well....

Windows 10 provides no way to restore Windows 7’s Aero, Windows Media Center, or other much-loved features. But, for some reason, there is a hidden registry setting that will re-enable Windows 7’s old volume control interface on Windows 10. The new volume control has a cool new feature for easily switching audio playback devices, and you’ll be giving that up. But, if you want to make Windows 10 look more like Windows 7 (for some reason), the below registry hack will do it....