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If you have an iPhone X or newer, there’s a neat feature called Animoji (short for animated emoji) that can take your emoji game up a notch. Here’s how to use it. Animoji uses the phone’s front-facing camera to track your facial expressions and then translates those into various characters on the screen to make them come alive. You can pick between different creatures like a cat, dog, chicken, dinosaur, or unicorn, or create your own “Memoji” that looks just like you....

One of PowerPoint’s charms is its ability to play music during the presentation. Adding music to your presentation is simple, but using a song from your iTunes library requires a few extra steps. Here’s how to use iTunes music in PowerPoint. Converting iTunes’ AAC Files to MP3 When you purchase a song from the iTunes store, it arrives in your library as a 256 kbps AAC file. There’s no argument that this file format isn’t popular....

Microsoft Word’s Learning Tools, a feature exclusively available to Office 365 subscribers, aim to help improve reading comprehension and overall fluency. Here’s an overview of what’s available in Word’s Learning Tools. What’s Available in Word’s Learning Tools? Word’s Learning Tools provides several different educational features that aim to improve focus, reading speed, pronunciation, and fluency. They don’t support all languages, though. Text spacing doesn’t work in languages with complex or connected scripts, and the read-aloud function doesn’t support register transfer languages....

Without some layer of protection, your kids are exposed to all kinds of risks and dangers online. Even using the basic security features offered on your router, you probably aren’t doing as much as you could, which is where Windows parental controls come into play. Microsoft began offering parental control with Windows Vista and has gradually improved them with each new version. Windows 7’s parental controls are pretty basic, but they’re effective and much better than having nothing at all....

Binaries and Paths When you try to run a program or command from the terminal window, the shell (usually, Bash on modern distributions) has to find that command and launch it. Some commands, such as cd, history, and pwd, are built into the shell, so Bash doesn’t have to work too hard to find these. But how does Bash locate other commands, programs, and external stand-alone binaries? Well, Bash uses the path, which is actually a collection of paths, each of which points to a directory....

Before we get started, it should be mentioned that mirroring your screen might not be the best method to share content on a TV. Many video and photo apps allow you to “cast” to a Chromecast-enabled device. This will be a much nicer experience than mirroring your screen. For all of those other situations, mirroring your screen is a handy trick to know. There are a few things that you’ll need:...

I spent days using Cortana instead of Alexa or Google Assistant and the experience left me feeling as rough around the edges as Cortana is. Unfortunately, Microsoft has fallen so far behind that the only reasonable solution is to give up. Satya says Goodbye to Cortana Speakers Recently, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, has said he no longer sees Cortana as a competitor to Alexa or Google Assistant. According to MSPoweruser, he stated:...

PlayStation Plus Essential: No Change Prior to the March 2022 announcement, Sony’s PlayStation Plus was a single tier that provided access to Sony’s online gaming services as well as two monthly downloadable games, discounts on store items, and cloud storage for backing up and transferring your cloud games. The price for this service was $9.99 per month or $59.99 yearly. The Essential tier of Sony’s revised PlayStation Plus service provides the same benefits as the old PlayStation Plus service at the same price....

RELATED: 7 Recipes to Pair with Classic Christmas Movies Arthur Christmas Play Video Aardman, the animation studio behind the Wallace and Gromit movies, brings its charming, homespun style to the holidays with Arthur Christmas. Unlike most other Aardman productions, Arthur Christmas is computer-animated rather than stop-motion, but it retains the studio’s distinctive warmth and attention to detail. The title character is the younger son of Santa Claus, who dreams of taking over the family business....

The internet has spoiled us with choices. The question is not where to find great content, but which of the many services work best for you. Streaming free music is no exception, so here are some of our favorite sites. Spotify Spotify is one of the world’s most popular music streaming services. It has a radio-like experience with some on-demand features. Free users can stream ad-supported music while paying users can stream on demand, get offline access, and listen to ad-free music....

A Hot Take Is a Controversial Opinion A hot take is an opinion that’s unpopular to the point of controversy. In fact, many hot takes are published, posted, or said out loud just because of their controversial flavor. On the internet (and occasionally in real life), intentional hot takes are preceded by an acknowledgment that the take is, in fact, hot. As an example, you or a friend might post “hot take: dogs should be illegal....

When you use your camera in some automatic modes like Program—or one of the semi-manual modes like Aperture Priority or Shutter Speed Priority—you don’t give up total control over everything: you can still control the exposure using exposure compensation. Here’s how that works. What Your Camera’s Light Meter Sees When your camera calculates what exposure settings to use, it makes one big assumption: that when you average everything out, what’s in front of it is pretty much gray....

What is KaiOS? KaiOS is an operating system designed for phones with keypads and keyboards. You can think of it as a middle ground between Android/iOS and old-school flip phones (not the folding screen type) that can’t do much at all. KaiOS is a smart-ish operating system. On a technical level, KaiOS was originally built on Firefox OS, which was an open-source Linux distribution. The KaiOS company hasn’t worked with Mozilla since 2016, and the OS is now web-based....

More Watch Faces With every watchOS update, Apple adds a handful of new Watch faces and watchOS 9 is no exception. You’ll find these on the Face Gallery tab in the Watch app for iPhone, or you can set them up in the usual manner on your Watch itself. This year there’s a redesigned Astronomy face that includes real-time cloud coverage, a new analog face called Metropolitan with customizable numerals and four corners for Complications, and a Lunar face that uses Chinese, Hebrew, or Islamic moon phase calendars....

Microsoft released Windows 10’s November 2019 Update, codenamed 19H2, on November 12. Also known as Windows 10 version 1909, this is the smallest, quickest Windows 10 Update yet. It’s practically just a service pack. To install the update, head to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update. Click “Check for Updates.” You’ll see a message saying the update is available. Click “Download and install now” to get it....

If you’ve ever tried to take video on your phone while walking, you know keeping the image still is tricky. There’s some neat technology designed to reduce that shaky-cam effect, and there are two different approaches to implementing it. Optical image stabilization comes from the world of still photography, using complex hardware mechanisms inside a lens to keep the image still and enable a sharp capture. It’s been around for a long time, but has been adapted for video and recently miniaturized for smartphones....

Modern digital cameras all write the photos and videos you take to removable storage cards, but which ones do you need? Let’s look at which SD cards—and CompactFlash, CFast, or XQD cards—are right for you. Which Format Should You Buy? The most important thing is to make sure you buy the right format card for your camera. There are four main form factors of card your camera could need:...

MacOS’s Activity Monitor will give you a list of all the apps you’re running, which is useful for closing down CPU-hungry processes. But it also throws in a bunch of system process, some of which may not be safe to quit. Here’s how to tell the difference. Who Are All These Users? First, you should look at who owns the process. Processes in macOS (and any other Unix-like operating system, including Linux) have owners, tying each process to the user account that started the process....

If you’ve had your phone for more than a few days, you’ve probably noticed that occasionally it gets hot when you’re using it. This is (almost always) normal. Here’s why it happens. Inside your phone is a processor very similar to the one in a computer. And like with a computer, when your phone’s processor works it generates heat. The harder it works, the more heat it generates. This is just a side effect of all the crazy atomic electrical stuff going on inside it....

You’ve probably seen a lot of messages about apps using your location in the background on your iPhone over the past few months. It’s not just you—it’s a change designed to expose just how much location data you’re sharing with apps. This change is working to boost privacy: Since iOS 13’s launch, marketers are collecting 68% less background location data. That’s what Location Sciences, a location-based advertising company, told Fast Company near the end of January 2020....