Digital boarding passes are great at the airport, letting you skip the long lines at the check-in and go straight through security. But, once you’ve added a boarding pass to Apple Wallet, it’s there forever—until you remove it. To remove boarding passes, launch the “Wallet” app on your iPhone. You can’t remove passes from the screen that appears when you double-press your iPhone’s home or side button. You have to use the Wallet app....
Hide the Selfie from All Albums The easiest way to hide a photo from the Selfies album is to move it to the Hidden album. The downside is the picture will be hidden from all albums, including the Recents album. To hide a photo, open the image in the Photos app and then tap on the “Share” button that looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it....
Google Home Records What You Say Your Google Home spends most of its time listening for its wake words, “Hey Google” or “OK Google.” The device then records everything you say after the wake word and sends it to Google’s servers for parsing. Google needs to store these recordings temporarily. But Google may be storing what you say forever. As the Washington Post points out, keeping the recordings forever used to be the default behavior, but it isn’t anymore....
Getting a new phone is rough. You essentially lose everything you had on the old phone, which can be a little be a bit of a shock for the first several days. While some things—like pictures, for example—automatically come with you through your Google account, other creature comforts, like your text messages, don’t automatically sync. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you can’t stand the sight of an empty SMS box, you can easily move all of your current messages to a new phone in just a few steps with an app called SMS Backup & Restore....
What Can You Do With an Extra Modifier Key? Perhaps the coolest thing to do is bind fully custom hotkeys. With the use of an app like BetterTouchTool, you can use an extra modifier key to add an empty slate of hotkeys to which you can attach actions. If you want to trigger a shell script or open a new email tab whenever you press Caps+B, you can do that....
How Sidecar Works Once you have macOS Catalina installed on your Mac, you can connect your iPad to your computer and use it as an external display. It works both in a wired and wireless mode. If you connect your iPad using a USB-C or Lightning cable, the connection is faster and more stable. But for most users, the wireless connection will work just as well. There’s no major lag as Apple uses its own Wi-Fi-based AirDrop-like peer-to-peer connection....
Why is 4K Netflix an Issue for Macs? The 4K content itself isn’t the problem; it’s an issue of compatibility, codecs, and DRM (Digital Rights Management). And it’s not just Macs—4K streaming is an issue in general. When you stream video on any platform, it has to be packaged into something your computer can understand. The exact method for this is called a video coding format, and the program that does the packing and unpacking is called a codec....
RELATED: How to Zoom In and Out on Part of a PowerPoint Presentation Use Magnifier to Zoom In Everywhere on Windows To zoom in on any screen on your PC, use Windows’ built-in Magnifier app. This app’s sole purpose is to help you take a closer look at your screen’s icons, menus, and other items. To use this method, first, launch the Magnifier app on your PC. You can do it by opening the “Start” menu, searching for “Magnifier”, and selecting the app in the search results....
Most web traffic online is now sent over an HTTPS connection, making it “secure.” In fact, Google now warns that unencrypted HTTP sites are “Not Secure.” So why is there still so much malware, phishing, and other dangerous activity online? “Secure” Sites Just Have a Secure Connection Chrome used to display the word “Secure” and a green padlock in the address bar when you were visiting a website using HTTPS....
Back in the day, anyone could jump on Facebook and do a phone number search to find who specific people. If you had your phone number on your Facebook account, then you’d pop up with that search. But back in April of last year, this feature was removed in an effort to keep private data private (though apparently searching phone numbers still works in Messenger). But now it’s been discovered that if you use your phone number for SMS-based 2FA Facebook is using this to help people find you....
It’s a difficult problem, and one with many layers. To access your files, you might need to pay a hefty ransom. And then there’s the issue of cryptocurrency, which is ransomware’s preferred method of payment. Unless you’re already a crypto investor, you might have no idea how to begin the process of getting a Bitcoin account—and the clock is ticking. And don’t forget—if you pay, there’s a decent chance you won’t be able to reclaim access to your files, anyway....
Games are expensive. Want to play the latest headline-grabbing entry from EA or Activision? Be prepared to shell out $60…or $100 for the real version with a name like “Ultimate Edition.” Maybe that’s why so many developers are extending their horizons into the free-to-play arena. Here are ten online multiplayer shooters you can play without spending a dime. Team Fortress 2: Windows, macOS, and Linux Valve’s commercial sequel to a beloved Quake mod has become synonymous with team-based first-person shooters....
Your dog is standing on its head, and you’re fumbling to unlock your phone and launch the camera app before you miss it. Luckily, there’s no need for unlocking—the Camera app is just a swipe away on the lock screen. Here’s how to get to it as fast as possible. The Secret Swipe To open the iPhone camera app as quickly as possible, you’ll first need to wake your iPhone....
We recommend you do this today and avoid the debate over whether you should pay the ransom. What You Need to Know About Ransomware Ransomware is a kind of malware designed to lock you out of your computer unless you pay a ransom. It usually encrypts your files to lock you out, and the ransom is typically in cryptocurrency. Ransomware usually targets corporate, enterprise, and government entities, but individuals can and do get pulled into the fray....
If you’ve ever watched a movie on a plane, you’ve probably seen a message like “This movie has been edited for content” pop up before it played. Ever wondered what it meant? Let’s find out. There’s No One Standard While lots of airlines display the “edited for content” warning before different movies, there’s no single standard that they have to meet. It also depends on the source of the movie....
“Exposing to the Right” or ETTR is the idea that you should deliberately overexpose your images—or shoot to the right of the histogram—because of the technical way that a digital image sensor records data. In post-processing, you then rebalance the image. Let’s dig in. Why ETTR Works When you take a digital photo, light falls on the sensor and creates an electric charge at each photosite. The more light that hits each photosite, the stronger the electric charge there (and the brighter the pixel in the final image)....
A file with the .wma file extension is a Windows Media Audio (WMA) file. Microsoft created the format to avoid the licensing issues associated with the MP3 format. RELATED: What Are the Differences Between MP3, FLAC, and Other Audio Formats? What Is a WMA File? Initially created in 1999, Microsoft designed WMA to combat MP3 and Apple’s AAC compression methods. Since then, WMA has expanded from its initial lossy format into a wide range of sub-formats including low-bandwidth voice audio to lossless multi-channel surround sound....
If a YouTube video is “made for kids,” it now has restricted features—even for adults. You can’t play “made for kids” videos in the miniplayer, save them to a playlist, or even like or dislike them in YouTube Music. Here’s why. COPPA Explained: Why Is YouTube Doing This? YouTube made this change because of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. COPPA is a law from 1998, but Google paid $170 million to the FTC to settle allegations it didn’t do enough to comply with COPPA in 2019....
Google’s new Pixel 3 phones have a “Titan M” security chip. Apple has something similar with its “Secure Enclave” on iPhones. Samsung’s Galaxy phones and other Android phones often use ARM’s TrustZone technology. Here’s how they help protect your phone. The Basics These chips are basically separate little computers inside your phone. They have different processors and memory, and they run their own tiny operating systems. Your phone’s regular operating system and the applications running on it can’t see inside the secure area....
If you use “OK Google” to invoke the Assistant on your phone, things are about to change. Google is removing the “Unlock with Voice Match” feature, so the Assistant is going to get a lot more secure. Currently, if you use the “Unlock with Voice Match” feature, you can completely unlock your phone with Google Assistant just by saying “OK Google.” While convenient, this is also a pretty big security risk—your voice isn’t exactly the best way to verify that you are, well, you....
