Posts

Let’s be honest: Siri for Mac isn’t as exciting as we thought it would be. There’s no really fast way to trigger the virtual assistant, and for some reason she feels slower to respond on a Mac than she does on your phone. It turns out, Siri isn’t the only assistant you can try out on macOS: thanks to MacAssistant, you can also give Google Assistant a try. This unofficial client for Google’s API isn’t perfect, but it can answer questions really quickly....

MagSafe 101 Not to be confused with “MagSafe” MacBook chargers, the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 include a built-in magnetic ring on the back. This can be used for a number of things, including wireless chargers, battery packs, wallets, and more. Despite not being designed for these accessories, some of them work with Android devices. However, the magnetic connection is not nearly as strong as it is with an iPhone. You can buy special cases for some Samsung Galaxy phones, but we’ll show you an even simpler method....

Apple has historically blocked people from watching their events unless they are using the Safari browser, but now you can watch them on any operating system. Update: Apple’s minimum requirements just changed, and now it appears that you can also watch using Chrome or Firefox: So if you want to watch the Apple event on any browser, just head to the official page for today’s event on any device. We obviously have not tested this yet, so if you end up having problems, keep reading for the rest of the details, and we’ll update the VLC stream URL once the event gets started....

OS X makes dealing with startup items really easy — you just head into the preferences and add or remove things from the list. But if you’re a recent convert to Mac, you might not know how to do it. But now you will. Open up System Preferences, and then click on the Users & Groups icon. Once there, find your user account on the left-hand side (although it will always be selected), and then click on the Login Items tab....

If you’ve installed NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software, you’ll see quite a few NVIDIA processes running in the background on your PC. We counted ten separate processes in our Windows Task Manager. But what do they all do? We reached out to NVIDIA for an explanation of these processes, but they wouldn’t provide any additional information. We suppose that’s not surprising—not even Microsoft explains all the processes in Windows itself. But we learned a lot just by poking around....

One look at the Nicholas Cage deepfakes or Jordan Peele’s deepfake PSA makes it clear that we’re dealing with strange new technology. These examples, while relatively harmless, raise questions about the future. Can we trust video and audio? Can we hold people accountable for their onscreen actions? Are we ready for deepfakes? Deepfakes Are New, Easy to Make, and Growing Fast Deepfake technology is only a few years old, but it’s already exploded into something that’s both captivating and unsettling....

You’re browsing the processes on your Mac using Activity Monitor when you notice something you don’t recognize: configd. What is this, and should you be worried? RELATED: What Is This Process and Why Is It Running on My Mac? This article is part of our ongoing series explaining various processes found in Activity Monitor, like kernel_task, hidd, mdsworker, installd, WindowServer, blued, launchd, backup, opendirectoryd, powerd, coreauthd, and many others. Don’t know what those services are?...

You can reinstall Windows from scratch using the product key that came with your PC, but you’ll have to find installation media yourself. Microsoft offers free ISO files for downloading; you just have to know where to look. There are a few ways to do this, but they’re all on the straight and narrow–you won’t have to visit a shady BitTorrent site to download ISOs that may be filled with malware....

If you’re a gamer (or just a PC user) with NVIDIA graphics, NVIDIA’s drivers are probably wasting gigabytes of storage on your hard drive. NVIDIA leaves old installer files buried on your hard drive until you get annoyed and manually delete them…if you even realize you need to. As someone who’s used NVIDIA graphics hardware for years, this has been annoying me for a very long time. I’ve seen these files use over 4 GB of space, and, while that may sound like a small amount of space to some, it’s a lot of wasted space on a smaller SSD....

If you have ever checked the properties of files and folders, you may have noticed that the attributes section sometimes displays an advanced button, but at other times it displays an archive checkbox. Why does it switch back and forth like that? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a curious reader’s question. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites....

The Nautilus file manager included with Ubuntu includes some useful features you may not notice unless you go looking for them. You can create saved searches, mount remote file systems, use tabs in your file manager, and more. Ubuntu’s file manager also includes built-in support for sharing folders on your local network – the Sharing Options dialog creates and configures network shares compatible with both Linux and Windows machines....

It’s an internet cliche: “if you’re not paying for something you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold.” And it’s true, but doesn’t explain why internet companies watch you constantly. Yes, you don’t pay companies like Google and Facebook for search and social networking. The people who pay them—their customers—are the companies that buy ads. But it’s possible to “be the product” and still benefit overall, and it’s also possible for companies you’re paying to violate your privacy in creepy ways....

Bluetooth is everywhere, and so are its security flaws. But how great is the risk? How concerned should you be about Bluejacking, Bluesnarfing, or Bluebugging? Here’s what you need to know to protect your devices. Bluetooth Vulnerabilities Abound At first glance, it might seem like it’s pretty risky to use Bluetooth. At the recent DEF CON 27 security conference, attendees were advised to disable Bluetooth on their devices while they were there....

Facebook has a lot of information about—every post shared, photo uploaded, message sent, item clicked on, and pretty much every other data point you can imagine. And it’s all in the name of serving you better ads and keeping you on Facebook. The thing is, this is still your information. You can’t get access to the weird metrics that Facebook tracks behind the scenes, but you can easily download everything else: messages, posts, photos, and more....

Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, revealed the Chevrolet Blazer EV in a tweet today. There are no details about the car, except the provided photo and the promise of more details coming on July 18. The fine print at the bottom of the photo also confirms the car will be available in the spring of 2023. I can’t wait until July 18, when we share the details with the world....

You disable Wi-Fi on your Android phone to improve battery life, which is great! But how many times have you forgotten to enable it again, ultimately eating up some of your mobile data when you could’ve been on Wi-Fi? With Oreo, that fear is no more. RELATED: How to Use Android’s Wi-Fi Assistant to Safely Connect to Public Wi-Fi Networks (and Save Data) Oreo brings a ton of smaller improvements to Android, and the ability to intelligently enable WI-Fi according to location is one of them....

If you don’t want to worry about clicking through your slideshow, you can set up Google Slides to play your presentation automatically. Plus, you can have the slideshow loop, so it starts over at the beginning when it ends. You might be playing your slideshow at a kiosk, during a conference, or publishing it to the web. These are the ideal times to use AutoPlay and Loop in Google Slides....

By default, WhatsApp has a pretty weird and childish background for your chat messages. The good news is that you can change it. Here’s how. We’re using an iPhone in our example here, but the process is pretty much identical on Android. Open WhatsApp, and then head to Settings > Chats > Chat Wallpaper. You have three options here. Wallpaper Library is a collection of WhatsApp’s built in backgrounds. Solid Colors are the simplest, single color backgrounds....

Whenever an application wants to make itself accessible over the network, it claims a TCP/IP port, which means that port can’t be used by anything else. So how do you check open ports to see what application is already using it? How Do Ports Work? An IP address specifies a computer — or other network device — on a network. When one device sends traffic to another, the IP address is used to route that traffic to the appropriate place....

Some apps require you to run a certain Java version to properly function. You can check which version of Java you have installed using a graphical tool or via the command line. Check Your Java Version Graphically If you prefer to avoid the command line, you can use the About Java utility to find the installed Java version. To use this method, open the “Start” menu, search for “About Java,” then click the first result....