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Your Smarthome Doesn’t Know Where You Are Smarthomes are great for automating lights, climate control, or your coffee maker on a schedule, but they don’t act according to your general behavior. That’s because smarthomes are all based on schedules and commands and, for the most part, lack presence detection. Your home doesn’t know your precise location; it’s not aware of what room you spent the most time in, and without that, it can’t do things for you....

Apple Leapfrogs Tile When the AirTag was announced, Tile controlled roughly 80% of the tracker market. Tile was the obvious company to buy from if you wanted to be reunited with a lost item as the market leader. As more people owned Tiles than other trackers, there was a higher chance of someone with the tracker’s app installed coming across your stuff. But with Apple incorporating AirTags into its Find My network, there are now hundreds of millions of iPhones around the world that can help you find your items....

Plus Android Q Beta 2 hits Pixel devices, Verizon flips the switch on its 5G Network in a couple of new cities, and Apple announces the Beats Powerbeats Pro to compete with its own AirPods. Wait, what? 540 Million Facebook User Records, Passwords, Comments, and More Leaked The biggest story to hit the scene over the last day was undoubtedly another Facebook leak. This time, sensitive data like passwords was part of the leak, but also Facebook IDs, comments, reactions, account names, and more....

To be clear, we aren’t trying to make half-baked predictions. We’re focusing on technological innovations that are in progress right now—things that should come to a universal and commercial maturity in the next five or ten years. We Need Gigabit Internet Speeds Internet in the United States is frustratingly slow. In fact, the internet all over the world is much slower than it should be, even though we’ve already developed super fast data transfer technology....

Want to see what date it will be after a certain number of months have passed? Using Microsoft Excel’s EDATE function, you can add (or subtract) months to a specific date in your spreadsheets. Here’s how to use it. RELATED: 13 Microsoft Excel Date and Time Functions You Should Know How the EDATE Function Works In Excel’s EDATE function, you specify the date (source date) to which you want to add months and the number of months to add....

The Fill Handle in Excel allows you to automatically fill in a list of data (numbers or text) in a row or column simply by dragging the handle. This can save you a lot of time when entering sequential data in large worksheets and make you more productive. Instead of manually entering numbers, times, or even days of the week over and over again, you can use the AutoFill features (the fill handle or the Fill command on the ribbon) to fill cells if your data follows a pattern or is based on data in other cells....

The Wayback Machine is an online service that frequently crawls websites, taking snapshots of sites at a particular point in time. Using the Wayback Machine, you can see what almost any site looked like throughout its lifespan. Websites change frequently, and so do laws governing these websites. Whether due to data loss, new censorships on content, or even just out of curiosity, the Wayback Machine allows you to see content that no longer exists on the web....

Visual Studio offers plenty of customization options, albeit somewhat buried in the menus. You can apply custom themes, edit your styling rules, and add custom fonts with ligatures designed for programming. Setting Up a Custom Theme Microsoft provides a few tools for this, but the most recent and easiest to use is the Visual Studio Color Theme Designer. There is also the Color Theme Editor for older versions. Download and install the designer, then create a new VSTheme project:...

The Notes app has built-in PDF support, so if you add a PDF to a note, it will appear just like an image. This means you can export an email as a PDF and add it to the Notes app. This can be especially handy if you’re planning a trip. You can export all your receipts and confirmations from the Mail app as PDFs, and then add them to the Notes app....

Final Cut Pro X is a huge step up from iMovie, which is the video editor most macOS users probably started out with. Final Cut Pro X functions similarly but packs in a whole lot more power while sticking to iMovie’s simple design. Final Cut Pro X offers a lot of advanced features missing from iMovie, including support for UHD 4K media, team collaboration, multicamera editing and syncing, and a lot more....

The autofocus in modern cameras is incredible but, if you don’t know how to use it properly, it can feel random and capricious. Here’s what you need to know about autofocus to get sharply focused photos with your DSLR or mirrorless camera. How Autofocus Works Autofocus is an essential part of modern cameras. They’re just not designed to be focused manually. There are somewhere between a dozen and a hundred or so dedicated autofocus sensors or points on the imaging sensors of modern DSLRs (things are a bit more complicated and software-reliant with mirrorless cameras, but the same principles hold)....

Chrome OS manages RAM differently than Windows or Mac computers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t optimize your workflow to make the most of your system’s potentially limited RAM. Here are some tips to help make your Chromebook’s RAM go further. RELATED: How Much RAM Does a Chromebook Really Need? How to Check the Available RAM on Your Chromebook You probably already know how much RAM your Chromebook has, but even if you don’t, there’s an easy way to find out....

Have your own website you want to link to in your Google Doc? Or maybe a reference to a knowledgable source? Make a hyperlink. You can add links to any chosen text in your documents, and we’ll show you how. RELATED: How to Add Links to Your Instagram Story Make a Hyperlink in Google Docs on Desktop On your Windows, Mac, Linux, or Chromebook computer, open a web browser and access the Google Docs site....

You can install the same printer more than once in Windows, and each has its own settings. For example, you could have one printer device that prints in color, and one that prints in black and white. This trick has been around for a long time. Windows XP made it easy, letting you copy and paste printer devices to create new ones. It takes a bit more work to install the secondary printers in Windows 10 and Windows 7, but it’s still possible....

Your Apple Watch taps you on your wrist to alert you when you get a notification. This is called haptic feedback. If you have trouble feeling the taps, you can increase the intensity of the haptic alerts. First, we’ll show you how to adjust the haptic feedback directly on your watch. Press the digital crown to access the Home screen. Tap the “Settings” app icon. On the “Settings” screen, tap “Sounds & Haptics”....

Gauge Your Family’s Feelings If you haven’t set up a smarthome yet, or if you have, but you’re considering adding more tech, you should start by checking in with your family. You might be gung-ho, but if your family is wary or intimidated, consider pausing your plans and finding out why. They may have legitimate concerns you haven’t considered and will want to address. Remember, if you want your family to take your smarthome plans seriously, you need to take their concerns just as seriously and work to address them....

Windows apps like Movies & TV and Windows Media Player allow the playback of certain types of video only. If you’re struggling to play unsupported video formats, you’ll need to use a third-party video player or codec or convert the file instead. If you’re unsure whether Windows supports your video file format, try it first. Open the Movies & TV app or the Windows Media Player and attempt to open the file....

If you browse with Mozilla Firefox, you can now set a default zoom level for all websites. And you can still set custom zoom levels for individual websites, too. This feature was added in Firefox 73, which was released Feb. 11, 2020. How to Set a Default Zoom Level for All Websites It’s easy to tell Firefox to zoom in or out automatically on all websites you visit. To get started, click the menu button in the top-right corner of the Firefox window, and then select “Options” (on a Mac, select “Preferences”)....

If you’re unfamiliar with Google Recorder, it’s an exclusive app for Pixel phones. The app has some powerful features hidden behind a simple interface. If it’s enabled, your recordings—along with the transcriptions—can be stored at recorder.google.com. Here’s a recording example I made. RELATED: The Google Pixel Recorder App Can Now Back Up Audio to the Cloud for Sharing To get started, open the Recorder app on your Google Pixel device....

What Media Can You Share Using macOS? macOS comes with everything you need to start sharing both audio and video media. In macOS Mojave and earlier, you only needed to share your “iTunes media library. Now, as of macOS Catalina, iTunes has been officially retired. This has led to some confusion about where the feature is now found, as Apple has shuffled the various iTunes features around. In addition to sharing music and video libraries, macOS also includes basic file sharing, printer sharing, internet connection sharing, and a handy screen sharing feature for getting tech support....