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We all know it’s important to back up your Mac with Time Machine, but remembering to plug in your external drive can be a hassle, especially if you’re a MacBook user. So networked backups come in handy: you don’t have to remember to do anything. But there aren’t many easy ways to back up your Mac over the network. This feature used to be offered by the Airport Time Capsule, a router with a built-in hard drive for Time Machine backups, but Apple isn’t planning on making new versions....

Sometimes you need to say what’s on your mind using colorful language. But right out of the box, Android can hamper that, making your swear words duller (or just plain wrong). Here’s how to put a stop to that nonsense. First of all, we should mention that there are many, many choices for keyboards on Android and we can’t possibly cover them all here. Instead, we’re going to talk about the three most popular: Gboard, SwiftKey, and the default Samsung keyboard....

Blizzard’s team-based first-person shooter Overwatch has quickly become one of the most popular multiplayer games on the planet. There are a lot of reasons for this: fantastic character design, tight balancing, excellent gameplay variety. But one of the nicer perks of the game is that Blizzard periodically updates the game with new content for free, including brand new playable characters (known as “Heroes” in the Overwatch lexicon). If you want to try them out before everyone else, you can do so on what’s known at the PTR server....

RELATED: How to Set Up Alexa Routines to Control Multiple Smarthome Devices at Once Until now, you had to say the wake word first (“Alexa”, unless you changed it) for each command you give. This can feel unnatural if you often give multiple commands in a row. You can set up a routine to have multiple tasks occur all at once with a single voice command, but that’s really only good for things that you perform regularly....

Wi-Fi networks interfere with each other. Older Wi-Fi standards are even worse about this, so your old Wi-Fi hardware isn’t just hurting your network — it’s interfering with your neighbors, too. All that interference is bad for everyone’s network, even yours. Unless you live out in the country with no one else around, this is something you need to think about. Wi-Fi Channel Interference RELATED: How to Find the Best Wi-Fi Channel for Your Router on Any Operating System...

Remember the 90s? Computers were slow, and connected over dialup, but we loved them anyway. If you ever feel nostalgic for that era you can revisit it online, right now, without leaving your web browser. There are several sites out there that re-create classic software in your browser, and a bunch more that let you emulate it. Here’s where to find them, and what to expect. Microsoft Paint, Recreated In Your Browser Hey, remember that time the media thought Microsoft Paint was going to disappear?...

Snapchat is rolling out features at an incredible rate. Some of them are nice tweaks, like adding voice filters. Others, like Snap Map, are honestly pretty dangerous. Let’s look at what the new Snap Map is, what’s wrong with it, and most importantly, how to disable it. What Is Snap Map? Snap Map is a new feature in Snapchat that shares your location with your friends. Unlike most location-based features, however, Snap Map doesn’t give a general location, it shows exactly where you are....

Frequent crashes, slow performance, and not being able to find the tab you’re looking for—we’ve all been there. Here are some of the best Firefox extensions for helping you manage tab overload. Generally, we don’t recommend using any extensions you don’t have to—they can be a privacy nightmare. But until makers of browsers build in some better tab management solutions, we tab hoarders have to rely on extensions to keep us sane....

First, you need to prioritize how well the lock works in terms of safety. It should never unlock when you try to lock it and vice versa. So, go for a quality lock that works as intended every time, including strength and durability. You want a lock that won’t break easily since locks are designed to prevent unwanted guests from entering your home. The most common way of installing a smart lock is by replacing your front door’s deadbolt....

There’s no need to break out a computer for a quick edit on a video you just shot—with the proper tools, you can do a lot right from your phone. Here are the best video editors for Android. The Most Full Featured Editor: KineMaster (Free, Subscription) Look, you’re never going to be able to replace a full video editor on your computer with one on your phone, but KineMaster makes a good case for it....

The Microsoft Store is the main app store on Windows 10 and 11, and it received an overhaul last year in time for the first version of Windows 11. Now even more improvements are on the way. Microsoft is now rolling out Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25131, aimed at people who want to test the latest improvements to Windows before they are bug-free. The build has a few new features for the Microsoft Store that are worth getting excited about, especially as more apps start to arrive on the Store....

Any creative work you do is covered by copyright. This means that if you write something, take a photo, record a song, paint a picture, or do anything that creates intellectual property, you get certain legal protections. The biggest protection is that other people aren’t able just to take your work and use it how they please. This is why services like Facebook have such complicated (and scary) Terms of Service....

Twitter is an oddball. The very things that make it great—everyone’s in one big public water cooler, you can reach out to anyone just by @mentioning them, accounts can be anonymous—are what lead to its abuse and spam problems. It’s hard for Twitter to crack down too hard without changing the very nature of the site. To this end, they’ve introduced ways for people to take more control over who and what they see....

Crypto Basics Before we get into the differences between tokens and coins, you may need a quick refresher on what cryptocurrencies are. They are digital currencies that people can exchange with goods and services, similar to regular currencies like dollars and Euros. If you want to learn more about cryptocurrency, you can read our cryptocurrency explainer. Unlike traditional money, cryptocurrencies aren’t managed by government institutions. All transactions involving particular cryptocurrencies get logged onto a centralized blockchain, a ledger that facilitates movements between secure addresses....

RELATED: Is Snapchat Really Deleting My Snaps? What Are Streaks on Snapchat? A Snapstreak is basically the number of days you and your friend have exchanged Snaps on Snapchat. When you send and receive a Snap from a friend for three consecutive days, you start a Snapstreak. A Snapchat streak is indicated by the fire emoji next to your friend’s name on Snapchat’s “Chat” tab. This emoji indicates that you and your friend have a streak....

You’re browsing the applications running using Activity Monitor when you notice something you don’t recognize: nsurlstoraged. What is this, you might be wondering, and why is it using network and CPU resources? First, don’t panic: this is part of macOS. 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, configd, mdnsresponder, UserEventAgent, and many others....

It Can Control Your Smarthome Devices Outside of kitchen stuff, controlling your smarthome devices is probably the best use for the Dash Wand. It’s like having a little voice remote that you can take with you around the house, especially if you don’t have Echos spread out everywhere. You can use it to control lights, thermostats, outlets, switches, and more, and you use it just like you would your Echo by giving Alexa a command to turn on and off a device in your house....

DirectX is part of the Windows operating system. So why does it seem like every PC game you install from Steam, Origin, or elsewhere installs its own copy of DirectX? What Is DirectX? DirectX is part of Microsoft Windows. It’s a group of APIs (application programming interfaces) developers can use for 3D graphics, video, multimedia, sound, and gamepad features on Windows. Many games on Windows use DirectX’s Direct3D for graphics....

There’s a good chance you’ll see a “COVID-19 Exposure Notifications Are Available” pop-up on your iPhone sometime soon—if you haven’t already seen it. Apple and Google launched this feature last year, so why are you being prompted now? Some Local Governments Are Slower Than Others If you’re wondering why you’re seeing this message now, it’s because the contact-tracing feature is dependent on apps from your local health authority that take advantage of it....

eSports, the colloquial and irritating name for organized tournaments featuring multiplayer PC and console games, are all the rage these days…among geeks. But because of their decidedly geeky roots, there seems to be a limited appeal for general audiences: you’re unlikely to tune into the DOTA International if you’ve never played a round of the game itself. Blizzard is hoping to make the appeal of eSports much broader, and its methods for doing so are interesting…and not because they’re particularly new....