Telephoto lenses can be incredibly useful, but how is it different from other lenses, and when should you use it? What Is a Telephoto Lens? RELATED: What Is a “Normal” Camera Lens? A telephoto lens is a lens that appears to magnify distant objects. To do that, they need to have a focal length longer than that of a normal lens, or a lens that approximates the optical qualities of the human eye....
Maftask is a helper process for Mac Auto Fixer, a very common adware program. It claims to clean up your Mac from viruses but will insert ads into your browser and run itself on startup. This article is part of our ongoing series explaining various processes found in Activity Monitor, though this one is different from the rest as while kernel_task, hidd, and installd are normal system processes, maftask is malware, and should be removed....
Camera lenses are more important than the camera they’re attached to, at least in most situations. An entry level DSLR with a great lens will take great photos while a $10,000 professional camera with a terrible lens will take terrible pictures. Here’s why. Cameras Are Just Really Really Good A big reason cameras don’t matter so much anymore is that even entry-level models are excellent. Think how much the camera in your smartphone has improved over the last decade....
Today we’re thrilled to finally announce something we’ve been working on for a while: a new site to help us expand our coverage beyond simply tech and gadgets, into the things that matter for everyday life. For more than a decade, How-To Geek has been where you turn when you want experts to explain technology in terms that everybody can understand. Our articles have been read more than 1 billion times....
A simple, but great use for a Wi-Fi camera is to set it in front of a window to keep tabs on the outside of your house, but there are some things to be aware of when doing this. RELATED: What You Should Know Before Buying Wi-Fi Cameras Ideally, you’d want a security camera mounted somewhere on the outside of your home, but if you don’t have the know-how (or the money to pay a professional), you can usually get by with just placing the camera in a window and pointing it outside....
User Access Control (UAC) prompts in Windows 10 can be annoying, especially when you often run a program that requires Administrator permissions. Thankfully, there’s a way to create a shortcut that doesn’t prompt you for UAC. This trick works by setting up a scheduled task to run the target application in Administrator mode for you. You can then create a desktop shortcut that tells the task to run, which will bypass the UAC prompt the next time you click the shortcut....
Lenovo may be best known for its desktops and laptops, but this 4-inch smart clock may change that. Compatible with Google Assistant, the clock allows you to set up daily tasks so you’re never running behind. You can also interact with Google Assistant to run connected smart home devices or stream music through the 3W speakers. And if you’re leery about having a microphone-enabled device right by your bed, the Lenovo Smart Clock comes with a mute switch....
A supposed merge of Android and Chrome OS has been rumored for years—to the point where some people believe one will eventually replace the other. That’s not what’s really going to happen—but the two are joining forces. This started with the introduction of Android apps into Chrome OS, which was a massive leap forward for the platform—but it was also just the beginning of this “combining” of operating systems. Chrome OS as we have known it for years is changing dramatically....
It’s the biggest day of the year for tech announcements, with Apple’s regular September event where they unveil the new iPhones, and anything else. It’s already come and went, but here’s how to watch, and what you missed. Unlike last year, when the entire event was leaked ahead of time, this year we don’t know too much. There will be new iPhone models similar to the iPhone X, and a new Apple Watch with a bigger face, but a lot of other things are still up in the air....
The more you write, the bigger your file—but just how big can a Microsoft Word document be? The answer is, it depends. Text, video, and image content make all the difference when it comes to Word document size. The maximum file size of a Word document also depends on the file format. Newer versions of Word use the DOCX format, while older versions use DOC. RELATED: What Is a ....
There are a few things to consider when buying your first projector. Price range and the space you have are important, but you should also consider lamp technology. This will affect both the price and image quality of the projector. Most of the projectors you see on the market will be lamp projectors. The lamps typically last thousands of hours, meaning you can get years of use before you need to purchase a new lamp....
Using emoji is easy on your phone, and it can be just as easy on your Mac. Add an emoji viewer to your Mac’s menu bar for easy access to emoji, symbols, and more with just a couple of clicks. Macs support emoji just as well as iPhones and iPads do. You can open an emoji panel anywhere by pressing Control+Command+Space, but this larger emoji viewer makes your Mac’s complete catalog of emoji much more browsable....
How Automations Work on iPhone and iPad Apple introduced the Shortcuts app in iOS 12. Before that, the app was sold on the App Store as Workflow. You can ask Siri to initiate a shortcut (a predefined set of actions) or press a button on your iPhone or iPad to do it. Now, a shortcut can fire off automatically based on given parameters. It can even happen in the background and use certain external triggers, like NFC....
Why Isn’t My Mac Fully Charging? In June of 2020, Apple’s macOS Catalina 10.15.5 update introduced a new Battery Health Management feature for the Mac inspired by the Optimized Battery Charging feature on the iPhone, but implemented a bit differently. Apple introduced the new feature because it’s not good for a lithium-ion battery to be charged to 100% and to stay at 100% all the time. If you’re stuck at 80%, that means that the new energy-saving feature studied your usage pattern, only charged your battery up to 80%, and then waited....
In this guide we’ll take you through the steps to setup a folder on your Windows computer as an FTP repository, using a free program called FileZilla. FTP can be used to easily transfer a lot of files between computers; the FTP repository can be mapped to multiple computers across the Internet so that other people can access the directory right from Windows Explorer. To start, you’ll need to download FileZilla server, available here....
Surf with anonymity using the Tor browser. Here’s how to install Tor on a Linux desktop. Ubuntu users beware: The Tor project recommends not installing Tor from Ubuntu’s regular software repositories. What Is Tor? In casual speech, we use the terms “internet” and “web” interchangeably. But actually, the web and the internet are two very different things. If websites were premises—shops, factories, entertainment centers—the internet would be the roads and highways linking them together....
How to Use the Podcasts App on macOS Catalina You can think of the new Podcasts app as the Mac version of the existing iPhone and iPad app. It behaves similarly, although the interface lies somewhere between the old iTunes and iPad apps. If you’ve used the Podcasts app on your iPhone or iPad before, you’ll see all your subscribed podcasts and latest episodes when you open the app. You can also explore and subscribe to new podcasts, play or download them to listen offline, and more....
PowerShell and Command Prompt (CMD) have a lot of overlapping functionality, but what if you specifically need to open PowerShell from Command Prompt or a batch file? Here’s how you do it. How to Open PowerShell From Administrator CMD When you run any application from an elevated Command Prompt, that application also starts with administrative privileges. The same applies to batch files — if the script was run as administrator, then any applications started by the script will also be run as administrator....
Browser tabs seem to pile up easily, and it can be difficult to find the one you’re looking for as you get upwards of 15 tabs open. Luckily, Google Chrome has an experimental feature that changes all that. RELATED: Tab Overload: 10 Tips For Working With Lots of Browser Tabs Go ahead and fire up Chrome, then copy/paste the following into the Omnibox: chrome://flags/#omnibox-tab-switch-suggestions. Alternatively, can you type chrome://flags into the Omnibox, hit Enter, and then type “Tab Switch Suggestions” into the search field....
When you’re analyzing complex data sets in Google Sheets, you can take advantage of its built-in sorting feature to organize the data. You can sort by individual columns or, for more complex data, you can sort by multiple columns. To do this, you’ll need to open your Google Sheets spreadsheet and select the data set you wish to sort. You can do this manually by selecting the cells using your mouse, or by selecting one of the cells in your data set and pressing Ctrl+A on your keyboard....
