Technology

How to Share your Outlook Calendar

How-To Geek - Fri, 01/11/2019 - 16:00

Sharing your Outlook calendar is easy, but how you do, it matters if you don’t want the people you share it with struggling to access it. Let’s take a look at how to share an Outlook calendar, whether the recipient is in the same organization as you or not.

Whether you share your Outlook calendar with someone inside your organization (that is, people with the same email domain as you) outside your organization, the process for sharing is similar. However, the way that the recipient accesses your shared calendar is a bit different, especially if the person outside your organization isn’t using Outlook. It’s still pretty simple though, and we’ll cover how it works so you can point people here if they’re struggling to access your shared calendar.

Sharing Your Calendar With a Colleague

If you want to share a calendar with someone who works for the same organization, the process is quite simple. Open the calendar in Outlook and then click Home > Share Calendar > Calendar.

If you’re using Outlook for more than one account, make sure you select the calendar for the account you want to share.

The “Calendar Properties” window will open on the “Permissions” tab, showing you who currently has access to your calendar. By default, Outlook is set up so that anyone in your organization will be able to see when you’re busy, but nothing else. Your IT people may have changed this in several different ways, so we’ll focus on sharing your calendar with an individual in your organization.

To share your calendar with someone, click the “Add” button.

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Categories: IT General, Technology

The Best Foam Mattress Toppers For Your Uncomfortable Bed

How-To Geek - Fri, 01/11/2019 - 15:00

Everybody’s gotta use a mattress. But sometimes, you end up with the most terrible, painful, evil mattress. Why not soften it up with a foam mattress topper?

Now, if your bed is so bad that you related to that evil joke on a spiritual level, maybe you need to skip our look at toppers and jump right into getting a brand new budget-friendly foam mattress. If you just need to freshen up the one you have, however, let’s dig in.

RELATED: The Best Inexpensive Foam Mattresses

Foam mattress toppers can come in different thicknesses and densities, but they all aim to make your bed more comfortable by adding some cushion and support. When you’re sick of your uncomfortable mattress, you can save a lot of money by buying a topper instead of a brand new mattress. A topper can even extend the life of your mattress by diffusing bodyweight, a nice bonus that anybody can appreciate.

But it can be difficult to find the mattress topper that’s right for you. Some mattress toppers are incredibly soft and thick, to the point that your entire body can sink deep into their foamy goodness. But if you like to sleep on a surface that’s a bit more supportive, then you’ll want to find a mattress topper that’s on the thin side, or one that’s made with layers of different densities.

Luckily, we’ve done some of the work for you. Here are our favorite mattress toppers, from super-plush to super-supportive. We’ve listed the queen-size price for these mattress toppers, but almost all of them are available in other sizes—you’ll, naturally, pay a bit more for a king size and a good bit less for a twin.

Sleep Innovations 4-Inch Gel Topper With Quilt Cover ($152)

If you have a really terrible mattress, then you may want to get a super deep mattress topper. The Sleep Innovations 4-inch topper is deep enough to completely transform your mattress. And it’s made of a gel memory foam that conforms to the shape of your body, and sucks away your excess body heat. No more waking up in sweats!

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Categories: IT General, Technology

How to Keep Your Camera Lenses Clean

How-To Geek - Fri, 01/11/2019 - 15:00

I’ve stressed time and time again here on How-To Geek: the lens is as important, if not more important, than the camera to which it’s attached. If your photos are blurry because there are smudges on your lens, there’s nothing you can do to fix it in post. Even cleaning up dust spots is a pain. With that in mind, let’s look at how to keep your camera lenses clean.

Keep the Lens Cap On

If you’re not using your camera, keep the lens cap on. If your lens is off your camera, make sure both lens caps are on. It’s really that simple: keeping the lens caps on your lenses means they’re not exposed to all the dust particles in the air and you can handle them without fear of your grubby fingers leaving smudges.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should jealously protect your lenses, only removing the lens cap when you have the perfect shot lined up. Lenses are surprisingly durable—so long as you don’t practice your field goal technique with them—and, as we’ll see, easy to clean. If you’re wandering around a city taking a few photos, your camera should be on and the lens cap off. It’s just that while your camera is sitting at home or in your bag, you should leave the caps on.

Think When You Shoot

Dust and smudges are going to come from two sources: the outside environment and you. If you think a bit about where you’re shooting and how you handle your lenses, it’s much simpler to keep them clean.

Seaspray is notorious among landscape photographers for its ability to smudge a lens. A small droplet lands on the front element and, even if you wipe it away or the water evaporates, it leaves the salt behind. It’s a matter of a second to wipe it clean, you just need to think to do it.

If you’re working in a dusty, wet, or otherwise particle filled environment, ignore my advice above about lens caps and keep them on. Also, avoid pointing your lens directly into the wind/spray/whatever until you’re ready to start shooting.

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Categories: IT General, Technology

Our Favorite Products From CES 2019

How-To Geek - Fri, 01/11/2019 - 13:40

It’s a Herculean effort to see everything at CES. It’s an equal challenge to pick a favorite thing among the fantastic (and not so fantastic) things on the floor, but here are our personal favorites from CES 2019.

I sat down with each of our editors and writers at CES and—after our days in press briefings, meetings, and walking the infinite-feeling convention floors—asked them what their favorite CES find was with an emphasis on something that truly caught their eye. Below, paired with who we are and what we do, you’ll find what we loved.

Jason Fitzpatrick, Review Geek Editor: Doppel

You’re not really experiencing CES unless you’re running into everyone and their brother (and their sister and cousins too) with some sort of device that claims to calm you, soothe you, help you sleep. When I saw the Doppel folks and the information at their booth about how Doppel was a device designed to be worn on your wrist to both calm and energize you, well let me tell you: I only stuck out my wrist to try it out because I’m an easy going sort of guy that’s willing to try something new and not because I expected anything at all out of the experience.

Georgina, who also appeared to be the easygoing sort, strapped the Doppel on the inside of my wrist while explaining the entire concept: the tiny weighted motor inside flutters like a heartbeat with a familiar lub-dub beat and that humans just naturally respond to the rhythm. You can tune and customize the Doppel via a companion mobile app and it just happened to be that the Doppel I tried was about as finely tuned to my heartbeat at that moment as you could ask for. The effect was incredible.

When I stuck my wrist out to try it out I had a “maybe my wife will like this” take on it, but within a few moments, I was smiling at how soothing and pleasant the experience was. Prior to putting it on I felt like it probably wouldn’t have much effect (and might even be annoying) and now I’m planning on ordering one—I certainly didn’t want to give the demo model back. Of all the devices I came across in this category, the Doppel had the most immediate and impressive effect.

The Doppel is available now for $219, direct from the company.

Chris Hoffman, Features Editor: Luka, Picture Book Reading Robot

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Categories: IT General, Technology

Geek Trivia: Which Planet’s Days Are Longer Than Its Years?

How-To Geek - Fri, 01/11/2019 - 09:02

Which Planet’s Days Are Longer Than Its Years?
  1. Mercury
  2. Neptune
  3. Venus
  4. Jupiter

Think you know the answer?

Categories: IT General, Technology

Nite Ize Made a Toothless Zipper for its Vacuum-Sealed Travel Bags

How-To Geek - Fri, 01/11/2019 - 05:00

You can make a bag as water-resistant as you like, but liquids can still get through a conventional metal or plastic zipper. That’s the problem outdoor supplier Nite Ize set to solve with its new RunOff bags.

Nite Ize had to engineer a completely new approach to zippers, tossing out a century or two of convention to make a seal with sides that grip each other at every millimeter. When the “TRU Zip” head docks into the depression at the far end, the soft bag is absolutely airtight: putting a solid hundred pounds of force on the top didn’t produce so much as a squeak.

The company is aiming to attract general travelers, as the bags are ideal for keeping liquids from leaking out of shaving kits and makeup bags. They’re also good for on-the-fly waterproof inserts, handy for keeping a damp bathing suit from coating the inside of your backpack with moisture. Outdoor and camping enthusiasts, or anyone who gets unpredictably soaked, could find some uses too.

The RunOff bags aren’t without trade-offs: they take significantly more force than a regular bag to close, enough that small children or those with arthritis might not be able to close them fully. But with bags from the size of a wallet up to around eighteen inches square, you should be able to find one for plenty of applications. Prices range from $25-55 based on size, and they’ll hit retail shelves immediately.

Categories: IT General, Technology

The Sunflower Labs Bee is a Flying Robot Guard Dog

How-To Geek - Fri, 01/11/2019 - 03:56

2019 is the year in which Blade Runner takes place. We don’t have hyper-realistic Replicants that try to kill hard-boiled detectives yet. But admit it: when you read the words “flying robot guard dog,” it feels like the future.

Drone company Sunflower Labs was showing off just such a gadget at the massive CES trade show. The Bee is a drone that will deploy from your backyard and investigate anyone who gets too close to your literal safe space. The system relies on “sunflowers,” staves that go into your yard like the popular solar-powered nightlights, to detect motion around the house. When something’s amiss, the lights activate and the Bee pops up. It starts a reconnaissance mission, recording—and hopefully scaring away—potential intruders.

Sunflower’s floral theme is awfully friendly for a security product, but there’s no denying that the waterproof “Hive” base station for the drone looks like a dog house. For most of the time, it’s sitting inside, the charging contacts automatically connected thanks to the Bee’s rounded bottom. (It’s held upside down in the image at the top of the article.) When intruders are detected, the roof opens up and the drone deploys. It can return and land, once again charging, after the threat is gone.

The app-controlled system can be expanded with more sunflowers for bigger properties, and it includes detection of authorized people, vehicles, and even pets. Estimated time for deployment is 15 minutes, with another 30 to fully recharge. And anyone who actually wants to do harm might not be deterred by a bit of buzzing plastic, so integration with existing smarthome tech to give live video feeds and security alters will be a major part of the final product.

The Bee doesn’t have a stinger or any other kind of offensive ordinance—it’s for recording only. Even so, it’s hard not to see the dystopian elements in the concept, if not the application. Maybe it’s just as well that Sunflower Labs doesn’t have a price (probably very high) or a ship date (probably not anytime soon) for the system. We could use another year or two to get our android hunting outfits ready.

Categories: IT General, Technology

HP and NVIDIA Made the $5000, 65-inch Monitor Your $5000 Desktop Deserves

How-To Geek - Fri, 01/11/2019 - 02:00

The cheekily-named “BFGD” program—for “Big Format Gaming Display,” and nothing else—was announced at CES 2018, a full year ago. We expected these overpowered, gamer-friendly screens to hit shelves before the end of that year. The wait was worth it.

Technically, the HP Omen X Emperium 65 is only a “display,” not a TV—a distinction required in the US because it lacks a tuner for over-the-air TV programming. But what it lacks in rabbit ears it makes up in every other category. Looking at it purely as a TV, it’s a 65-inch, quantum-dot, 4K HDR screen, with a 120Hz refresh rate. Which is nice. But that won’t get people to fork over five grand for a don’t-call-it-a-TV.

What will? Let’s  break it down. First, since it’s technically a gigantic gaming monitor and not a conventional TV, it comes with G-SYNC. That’s NVIDIA’s anti-tearing frame-syncing system that slows down the refresh rate of the panel to match dips and valleys in a PC game’s performance. It’s enabled by an extra bit of NVIDIA hardware built into the screen. But it’s not the only extra bit, because there’s also a built-in SHIELD to handle the Omen’s smart TV functions. NVIDIA told us that this is the same Tegra X1-based system as the stand-alone SHIELD, which is far and away the best set-top box on the market. It will even get its frequent software updates directly from NVIDIA at the same time. The TV’s remote is a SHIELD remote, naturally.

Not enough? Understandable. How about the included sound bar? While even the most expensive TVs from the likes of Samsung and LG expect you to shell out for anything over the standard speakers, the Omen X Emperium comes with its beefy soundbar in the box. The bar features 120 watts of power from its included drivers and integrated subwoofer. It’s pretty stylish, too, sliding in under the TV’s stand legs, or attaching to the bottom if you’re mounting to a wall with the massive 400mmx400mm VESA mount. (Be sure not to miss the studs.)

Still not enough? Take a closer look at that back. In addition to being surprisingly attractive for a bunch of plastic you’ll never see—dig that Omen branding—it includes its own built-in bias light. The LED bar at the top of the rear panel splashes light onto your wall, reacting to the content of your movie or game and flashing the corresponding average of the colors in real-time. No need for stick-on LED strips, though if you’re not a fan, you can turn it off.

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Categories: IT General, Technology

Razer Raises Eyebrows With the Raptor Monitor, Coming for Less Than You Think

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 23:28

Gaming brand Razer has a reputation for over-the-top lighting and equally outlandish prices. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear a representative at CES say that the company’s upcoming gaming monitor, a first for Razer, will be priced at around $700.

I was expecting the 27-inch panel, tuned for gaming and colored like a stealth jet with rainbow ground effects, to cost over $1000. But assuming that Razer holds on to its projected price when the “Raptor” launches sometime later this year, it will be competitive with most of its contemporaries that match its specs.

The 27-inch monitor uses ra—uh, paper-thin bezels on three sides, with only a slightly thicker bottom that’s still slimmer than most gaming monitors on the market. That’s not the only difference: Razer is using an IPS panel for the 2560×1440 display. That resolution is a popular choice for gamers (ideally juggling sharp visuals and GPU strain), but the panel type is not. IPS is more vibrant and accurate, but slower, so gamers ten to go for VA panels with sub-5ms input lag. Razer says it’s tuned the Raptor IPS panel to have just 1ms of response time, among the best on the market of any panel type, while keeping the widest possible color gamut for HDR and 400 nits of brightness. The refresh rate goes up to 144Hz.

And speaking of refresh rates, the monitor does include G-SYNC…sort of. Technically it’s adaptive sync, more commonly branded “FreeSync” with AMD’s Radeon cards, since it doesn’t include the expensive extra processing chip from NVIDIA to enable G-SYNC and its tear-reducing frame syncing tech. But here at CES NVIDIA announced a “G-SYNC Compatible program” that certifies a very select group of adaptive sync monitors for its standard. The Razer Raptor is the first monitor that will be built from the ground up to pass these tests and be G-SYNC compatible out of the box, no extra hardware required.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the monitor’s styling. The Chroma-compatible LED lights integrated into the base are actually the least interesting thing about it: Razer sells mousepads and coasters with the same feature. No, it’s the stand that caught our attention. A single line of aluminum sweeps up from the rectangular base to the back of the screen in an appealing display of minimalism.

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Categories: IT General, Technology

Dell’s XPS 13 Should Hold the Lead for Windows Ultraportables With 2019 Update

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 22:03

The Dell XPS 13 is generally (though not universally) regarded as one of the top Windows machines available, thanks to a sleek design and a great value. Dell’s gentle revision of the laptop continues into 2019, notably including the most requested change.

Dell lowered the curtain on the latest refresh at CES, drawing crowds with a headline feature: the camera is now exactly where you expect it to be. Previous iterations sought the thinnest screen bezels possible, and achieved this by sticking the webcam below the main panel. This inelegant design quirk was quickly christened the “nose cam” for its habit of peering directly into the user’s nostrils. Thanks to a redesigned module and a soldered ribbon cable instead of the usual plug, the pinhole 720p cam can now squeeze into the top bezel with only a tiny, and entirely agreeable, extra space added.

Elsewhere the changes for the XPS 13 are harder to spot. It’s still what I think of as a carbon fiber sandwich, with the patterned carbon visible on the keyboard deck and palmrest surrounded by machined aluminum on the lid and bottom. It still looks great in either white or black, and the base configuration ($900 this year) still starts with just 4GB of RAM. (And yes, we still recommend the RAM bump, even if you’re trying to keep the price down.) The only other sore spot is the speakers, which remain tiny grilles on the left and right edges, and akin to something you’d see on a cheap tablet. The fingerprint reader, if you opt for the upgrade, is now cleverly hidden in the power button.

Otherwise, it’s the same design all of you know and many of you love. The most expensive configurations include brilliant 13-inch 4K touchscreens, though naturally a conventional 1080p screen is available, which might be preferable for those who desire battery life over visual fidelity. Dell says the laptop can last for up to 21 hours on a charge, which seems optimistic at best. Strangely the online configurations max out at 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage at the moment. I/O includes three USB-C ports for power, data, and Thunderbolt video (no old-fashioned USB-A ports will fit), a headphone jack, and a MicroSD card reader.

Note that at the time of writing, the new model (9380) uses the same 8th-gen Intel Core processors as last year’s design. They’ll probably be replaced during Intel’s upcoming product cycle, without any other major changes to the body. XPS fans looking to upgrade may want to wait, or simply search for a deal on the 9370 design and trim their nose hairs before any important Skype calls. Ready to pull the trigger? Dell is taking orders for the 2019 machine now.

Categories: IT General, Technology

How to Share Links to Your Google Doc as a PDF

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 22:00

Using Google Docs is a great way to collaborate on and share documents. Sometimes, though, you want to provide somebody with a PDF instead of an editable document. Google Docs now lets you edit your sharing link to provide a PDF. Best of all, if you edit the original document, the PDF link automatically includes any changes you made. Here’s how it works.

Note: This process works for Google Docs and Google Sheets, but not Google Slides.

Go ahead and open up the document you want to share. Once you’re there, click the “Share” button at the top right of the screen.

In the Share With Others window, click the “Get shareable link” option at the top right.

You’ll receive a message letting you know that the link has bee copied to your clipboard. You’ll also notice the “Link Sharing” section has now appeared in the window.

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Categories: IT General, Technology

The Best Smart Locks for Your Amazon Echo

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 18:40

A smart lock for your front door is a great way to add some convenience to your daily routine, and if you want to be able to control it with your voice using your Echo, there are a couple of good options that work great with Alexa.

Keep in mind that there are different smart locks to choose from that come with different features, so the “best” one for you may be different than the “best” one for someone else. With that said, we’ll go over a few different locks that come with various features.

Kwikset Kevo ($229)

Whether or not you want a smart lock that works with Alexa, one of the best on the market is the Kwikset Kevo. It uses touch-to-open technology and it has a discreet style that doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

The touch-to-open feature is our favorite thing about the Kevo, as you simply tap on the lock’s body and it proceeds to either lock or unlock. To do this, it detects if your phone is nearby and uses that as authorization of sorts. It can even detect if you’re outside or inside your house so that no one tries to unlock your door while you’re home.

It’s one of the more expensive smart locks on the market, although you can usually find it on sale at a nice discount. But in order to use it with your Amazon Echo, you’ll need Kevo Plus, which is a one-time $99 purchase that comes with a gateway hub in order to connect it to your network. Otherwise, it simply works over Bluetooth with your phone.

Buy on Amazon Keep Your Existing Deadbolt: August Smart Lock ($149)

If you’re a fan of not replacing your existing deadbolt (either because you like the look of it or just don’t want to change out the keys), then your best bet is the August Smart Lock.

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Categories: IT General, Technology

How to Make a Website From Your Phone

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 17:24

Many people connected to the Internet only have a smartphone, with no personal computer. While some libraries and internet cafés offer free PC access, it’s easier when you have access to the tools you need at any time. If you’re looking to start a website, the services we’re going to talk about here have fully functional mobile web apps that allow you to build, publish, and edit your site completely from your phone.

The good part about doing it all online is that your work is saved with the service you use, so if you need to make more detailed changes at a public computer you can log into your account and continue working.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy’s website builder works straight from their website. They have many themes available—which you are free to edit every part of—and have previews for the mobile and desktop versions of the site. Don’t expect complete customization or an exceptional mobile experience, but it’s fairly easy to make your site look how you want with some tweaking.

You can edit each element to change the style, add new sections to each page, and set up multiple pages with a menubar at the top.

They even have a fairly basic blog solution for easily updating content, which can be put on a separate page.

WordPress

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Categories: IT General, Technology

How to Enable or Disable 3D Touch on an iPhone

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 16:00

Apple may be backing away from 3D Touch somewhat—it isn’t available on the iPhone XR at all—but we’re still big fans of the options it offers. If you’re not, you can disable 3D Touch altogether.

3D Touch arrived with the iPhone 6s, allowing people to push more firmly on some elements of the iOS interface to carry out actions or reveal additional options. It offers a right-click of sorts, giving iOS some extra depth. It also adds complexity, though, and Apple has never been good at making the features 3D Touch enables discoverable. If you have an iPhone 6s or newer, excluding the aforementioned iPhone XR, it’s possible you have 3D Touch enabled and have never used it.

With the arrival of the iPhone XR, Apple introduced Haptic Touch, which takes some of the 3D Touch functionality and places it behind a tap-and-hold gesture. The two gestures—3D Touch and Haptic Touch—don’t enjoy feature parity in some important ways, however. Haptic touch doesn’t support “peek & pop” and Home screen-based shortcuts at all. If you’re an iPhone XR owner, the option to enable or disable Haptic Touch is in the same location as 3D Touch.

Here, we’re going to run through the steps you can take to check whether 3D Touch is enabled and more importantly, enable or disable it as you see fit. Let’s get started.

How to Enable or Disable 3D Touch

As is so often the case with many options within iOS, enabling or disabling 3D Touch is not a complicated affair, but before you set off spelunking through the Settings app, you do need to know where to look.

Once you have opened Settings, tap “General.”

Next, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, tap “Accessibility.”

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Categories: IT General, Technology

The Best Keyboards For Your Gaming PC

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 15:00

Building or buying a new gaming PC? Awesome. Just don’t forget to save a little room in your budget for your accessories. A comfy keyboard with fast, reliable switches is an important part of your setup, and we’ve found the best ones available.

Mechanical keyboards with Cherry switches are where it’s at for current keyboard designs, though we’ve included one with more conventional membrane keys (like you’ll find on most cheaper keyboards) for those who prefer them. Otherwise we also have choices for gamers who want something small, something sans wires, or something that won’t break the budget.

The Best Overall Gaming Keyboard: Ducky Shine 7 ($160)

“Ducky” isn’t a household name for PC accessories, but it’s well-known among the keyboard enthusiast community. And if you’re looking for a big, bombastic board to pair with your bodacious gaming PC, the Shine 7 is it. Coming with full 108-key layout and an gunmetal or black zinc alloy finish, it’s big and heavy enough to literally put a dent in your enemies.

The Shine 7 also offers some gaming-friendly features that set it above the rest of Ducky’s line, and justify its high price tag. High-quality PBT plastic on the interchangeable keycaps, a wide selection of key switches including Cherry MX Silent Red and MX “Speed” Silver, and even compatibility with the Razer Chroma software suite for the RGB LED lights are among them. Ducky’s software can program any keybind or macro you like, so this is a full-function gaming keyboard.

And while there’s no accounting for taste, I appreciate the more subtle styling on the metal case that doesn’t scream “I am a gamer who buys Mountain Dew by the keg.”

Buy Now The Best Non-Mechanical Gaming Keyboard: Cooler Master Masterkeys Lite L ($60)

So you’re not down with the whole mechanical craze, but you’d still like access to some neat lighting and programming for your PC games. It’s hard to find a decent gaming-focused keyboard with a conventional membrane build now, but Cooler Master is still making them. The Masterkeys Lite L is the best of the bunch, offering RGB lighting (in wide zones instead of individual keys) and full key and macro programming.

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Categories: IT General, Technology

How to Keep Your Photos Safe While You’re Out Shooting

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 15:00

As a photographer, there’s nothing worse than losing your hard shot photos, whether it’s from hard drive failure, theft, or anything else. With a good backup strategy, it’s easy to keep your photos safe at home, but what about when you’re still out shooting? What if you’re going off the grid and away from your laptop for a couple of days, or even a few weeks? Let’s take a look.

While you’re out on location, the most significant risks to your photos are theft, loss, and data loss. The solution to all three risks is mostly the same: make sure you never have just a single copy of your images on a single SD card or hard drive, or all your copies in a single location. There’s a bit more to it than that, so read on.

Use the Right Cards

To minimize the chance of data loss from a failing SD card—which can happen, although it’s super rare—before even heading out to shoot, make sure you’re using high-quality cards that are in good condition. We recommend SanDisk and Lexar cards and really, there’s no excuses for not using the best: a 32GB SanDisk Ultra SD card costs less than $10. Just be careful about buying fakes.

RELATED: What SD Card Do I Need for My Camera?

If your SD cards have been sitting in a drawer gathering dust for a while, it’s worth looking them over. Check that they’re not dented, scratched, or otherwise damaged. You should also format them before every shoot.

RELATED: How to Safely Format SD Cards For Your Camera

If You Have Dual Card Slots, Use Them

Dual card slots are a professional feature and, if your camera supports them, absolutely use them. Unless you’re shooting a lot of bursts, shoot RAW to both cards. This way, you automatically have a backup of every image you shoot. The odds of one card failing are tiny; the odds of two cards failing at the same time before you have a chance to back up your images somewhere else are essentially zero.

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Categories: IT General, Technology

The Problem With AI: Machines Are Learning Things, But Can’t Understand Them

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 13:40

Everyone’s talking about “AI” these days. But, whether you’re looking at Siri, Alexa, or just the autocorrect features found in your smartphone keyboard, we aren’t creating general purpose artificial intelligence. We’re creating programs that can perform specific, narrow tasks.

Computers Can’t “Think”

Whenever a company says it’s coming out with a new “AI” feature, it generally means that the company is using machine learning to build a neural network. “Machine learning” is a technique that lets a machine “learn” how to better perform on a specific task.

We’re not attacking machine learning here! Machine learning is a fantastic technology with a lot of powerful uses. But it’s not general-purpose artificial intelligence, and understanding the limitations of machine learning helps you understand why our current AI technology is so limited.

The “artificial intelligence” of sci-fi dreams is a computerized or robotic sort of brain that thinks about things and understands them as humans do. Such artificial intelligence would be an artificial general intelligence (AGI), which means it can think about multiple different things and apply that intelligence to multiple different domains. A related concept is “strong AI,” which would be a machine capable of experiencing human-like consciousness.

We don’t have that sort of AI yet. We aren’t anywhere close to it. A computer entity like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana doesn’t understand and think as we humans do. It doesn’t truly “understand” things at all.

The artificial intelligences we do have are trained to do a specific task very well, assuming humans can provide the data to help them learn. They learn to do something but still don’t understand it.

Computers Don’t Understand

Gmail has a new “Smart Reply” feature that suggests replies to emails. The Smart Reply feature identified “Sent from my iPhone” as a common response. It also wanted to suggest “I love you” as a response to many different types of emails, including work emails.

That’s because the computer doesn’t understand what these responses mean. It’s just learned that many people send these phrases in emails. It doesn’t know whether you want to say “I love you” to your boss or not.

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Categories: IT General, Technology

Geek Trivia: What Was Google’s Original Name?

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 09:02

What Was Google’s Original Name?
  1. DeepThought
  2. BackRub
  3. DarkWeb
  4. GopherPile

Think you know the answer?

Categories: IT General, Technology

Amazon Will Now Deliver Packages Inside of Your Garage

How-To Geek - Thu, 01/10/2019 - 01:55

Amazon Key, which initially started out as a service that would have Amazon delivery drivers place packages right inside of your house, has expanded to car delivery and now garage delivery with Amazon Key for Garage.

The company has teamed up with Chamberlain to offer customers with a MyQ-compatible garage door the opportunity to have packages delivered inside of their garages, acting as sort of a compromise for those who may not want packages left outside, but also don’t want delivery drivers access inside right from the front door.

The only requirement is that you have either a Chamberlain or LiftMaster garage door opener with MyQ capabilities, or add MyQ to an existing garage door opener using the MyQ Smart Garage Hub.

From there, the Amazon delivery driver can open your garage door themselves, place the package in your garage, and then close the garage door.

Of course, this will only be available to Prime members in existing markets where Amazon Key is available. Key for Garage will become available at some point in the second quarter of this year.

Categories: IT General, Technology

How to Control Margins in Google Docs

How-To Geek - Wed, 01/09/2019 - 22:00

Margins in a document are the white space that surrounds the text in your file. They appear at the top, bottom, left, and right sides. While the default margins are fine most of the time, sometimes you’ll need to change them. Here’s how.

How to Control Margins in Google Docs

Controlling margins in your document is a simple process that can you can do in a couple of ways: from the ruler or the menu bar.

Note: Changing the margins affects every page in the document. You are unable to change a single page’s margins separately from another.

Control Margins Using the Ruler

 

After you open your file, look at the rulers along the top and the left side of the document. The top ruler controls the left and right margins while the other one controls the top and bottom margins. The gray area on the ruler indicates the current margin.

The margin line is the line on the ruler between the margin and the usable area of the document. Click and drag the margin line to adjust the padding. The default is one inch or 2.54 cm, depending on what unit you’re using.

Note that the top margin line is hiding behind the blue line and arrow. These are the indentation indicators which let you control, you guessed it, the indentations of your document’s paragraphs.

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Categories: IT General, Technology
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