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In July 2020, it was rumored that Apple might add a periscope telephoto lens to a future iPhone. Periscope lenses have been around for a while, and they neatly sidestep the size problems traditional telephoto lenses have. Here’s how they work, and what this means for the future of the smartphone industry. In Photography, Size Matters The biggest limits with photography have always been physical, rather than technological. There are some laws of optics you just can’t engineer your way through....

One Ring to Rule Them All This approach, called the Wangiri Scam, relies upon your innate curiosity. Many people would instinctively return a missed call—even from a mysterious international number. And the repetitive nature of the scam (it’s not unusual to receive dozens of missed calls in a single day) adds to the intrigue and pressure. What happens if you cave? Your call is routed to an expensive premium rate number....

A big part of photography is coming up with creative ways to overcome the limits of the laws of physics. One of these techniques is focus stacking. Even wide angle lenses at narrow apertures—a combination which gives you the broadest possible depth of field—can’t have both the extreme foreground and extreme background in sharp focus. You can come close, but if, say, there’s a cool shell right in front of you, and something else of interest in the distance, one or both of them is going to be a little bit blurry....

What is Motion Smoothing, and How Does it Work? Every TV manufacturer calls their specific tech by a different name, for marketing reasons of course. Action Smoothing, TruMotion, Motionflow—these are all names for the same function: making your TV’s picture feel smoother. And that’s motion smoothing. It’s also known as the “soap opera effect” because low-budget soap operas used to have cheap video cameras that produced a higher frame rate, smoother-looking video....

Wireless HDMI is an Alternative to HDMI Cables HDMI cables have been the standard medium for transferring high definition video for more than a decade. But HDMI cables have some obvious drawbacks. A couple of unruly HDMI cables can turn your entertainment center into a rat’s nest, and they can restrict your cable box or game consoles to a single room. You’ve probably guessed this by now, but Wireless HDMI is a wireless high definition video solution that can solve some of the problems associated with HDMI cables....

The naming isn’t the only confusing part, either. USB cables that look similar on the outside are often very different on the inside. And a bad cable could fry your hardware. USB4’s Naming Is a Mess (Once Again) USB’s naming used to be simple. Remember USB 2.0 and USB 3.0? That was nice. Things became complicated with USB 3.1 and USB 3.2. Now USB4 is making it extra complicated—and yes, it’s called USB4....

Windows 10 will keep you safe and secure by applying updates automatically. Typically, users schedule “active hours,” so Windows 10 doesn’t install updates at inconvenient times. Will Windows 10 update if a PC is asleep? Technically, no. Windows 10 Wakes Your Sleeping PC to Update When your Windows 10 PC goes into sleep mode, it saves the current system state and stores that information into memory. The PC then goes into low-power mode, shutting mostly everything down save for the RAM sticks....

Update: ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley confirms the Sets feature is gone. That’s according to her internal sources at Microsoft. We were really looking forward to Sets, as we’ve always wanted tabs in the File Explorer as well as console windows like the Command Prompt, PowerShell, and even Linux Bash shells on Windows. Tabs in other applications like Notepad would be really cool, too. Sets offered native tabs any application could use....

Smart Hubs Tie Together Your Devices The first thing you should learn with smarthomes is that there is no single standard for communication between smarthome devices. Some smart devices use Z-Wave, some Zigbee, and others use either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. When you want a Z-Wave smart light to work with a Wi-Fi outlet, you need something to bridge the gap. Right now smart hubs are one way to fulfill that role....

Plus Facebook might roll Messenger back into the main mobile apps, Acer announced a slew of new stuff, future Android updates might come from Google Play, Falcon Heavy’s successful landing, and a lot more. Disney+ Details Revealed: Price, Release, and Catalog Yesterday, Disney revealed all (or at least) most of the details we’ve all been wondering about its upcoming streaming service. First, the important stuff: It’s going to cost $6....

You can now sign up for a Disney+ plan with ads for $7.99/mo, the same price as what the ad-free tier used to cost. This means that if you’re a current subscriber and you don’t want to pay more, and you don’t mind putting up with ads, you can pay the same amount you were paying before. If you don’t want to see ads, though, you’ll need to cough up an extra $3 for the $10....

What Makes These Phones Foldable? Sure, we had flip phones that were folding back in the ’90s and 2000s. But we’re in the age of smartphones now, and if you tried to fold your smartphone in half, you’d end up with a broken phone. That is unless your smartphone has a flexible OLED display, a polymer screen, specialized components, and a jointed case. Foldable phones are filled with a ton of revolutionary tech, but the most ground-breaking component that you’ll see is the famous, flexible OLED display....

If you need to give credit to multiple people who contributed to your PowerPoint presentation, you can add rolling credits to the final slide by using the scrolling text animation. Here’s how to do it in your next presentation. First, navigate to the final slide of your presentation and insert a blank text box. You can do so by clicking the “Text Box” icon in the “Text” group of the “Insert” tab....

The Files app was introduced to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 11 in 2017, and it brought much-needed file access to iOS. In typical Apple fashion, its real power is well hidden. Here’s how to turn Files into Finder for iOS. If you’ve ever ventured into the Files app, you’ve no doubt seen it in its most basic form. Before you add any additional sources of files—which Files calls “Locations”—things can look pretty sparse....

RELATED: The Best Websites for Finding, Downloading, Borrowing, Renting, and Purchasing eBooks What Happens When You Cancel the Subscription? When you cancel your subscription, you can continue to read your paid books until the end of your current billing cycle. After that, those books will be removed from your library. Also, if you activated the subscription with a gift or bundle, you won’t receive a refund for the unused months....

Unless you’re a character from The Simpsons, Slack’s default yellow skin tone for emojis probably doesn’t represent you. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to change the default emoji skin tone from yellow to something more appropriate for you. The method is the same for the desktop client and the web app, but slightly different for the Android, iPhone, and iPad apps. We’ll show you how to do both. Change Slack’s Default Emoji Skin Tone in the Desktop Client or Web App In any Slack channel, click on the smiley face icon in the text box to bring up the emoji panel....

How to Check RAM Amount Using Windows Settings One way to check your RAM amount is in System Settings. First, launch Settings by pressing Windows+i on your keyboard. When Settings opens, click “System” in the sidebar, then select “About.” On the System > About screen, expand the “Device Specifications” section at the top of the list by clicking it. Just below that, you’ll see how much RAM your PC has in the “Installed RAM” section....

If you need a table in your presentation, you can create it directly in PowerPoint. Alternatively, you can create the table in Word and copy and paste it over to your PowerPoint presentation. Here’s how to do it. Go ahead and open up both the Word document with our table to be copied and the PowerPoint into which you’ll paste it. Once you’re ready, find and select the table in the Word doc....

Microsoft Word comes with a powerful grammar checker, but many of its advanced grammar detection features are disabled by default. Grammarly is popular, but you don’t need it to add grammar checking to Word. Word itself contains a free alternative to Grammarly. The grammar checker is part of all modern versions of Microsoft Word, including Word for Office 365, Word 2019, and Word 2016. It’s getting better, too: Microsoft just announced a more powerful AI-based grammar checker will come to Office Insiders in June and will be available to everyone in fall 2019....

Constantly glancing at a clock on a wall or at your watch to keep up with the time can be distracting and possibly come off as rude during a presentation. Keep your eyes on the presentation and remain focused by inserting a clock in your presentation. Inserting a Clock in PowerPoint There are a couple of ways to go about doing this. The first is using a built-in PowerPoint function that allows you to unobtrusively show the time and date in the presentation....