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It may sound preposterous, but some people are afraid smart thermostats are bad for heating and air conditioning systems. Here’s the good news: You don’t have much to worry about, but there are some important things to keep in mind.

A relatively recent post on Reddit recounted an HVAC technician’s warning about smart thermostats:

“He said he never recommends them and that their company is REGULARLY replacing systems that have failed or prematurely broken down due to the Nest overworking the computing systems/motherboards built in to most HVAC units—even brand new models.”

The technician isn’t completely full of it. If your smart thermostat isn’t wired up correctly, then it can cause problems for your HVAC system. However, his explanation is mostly filled with a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.)

Every thermostat has a handful of wires connected to it (either four or five) that lead back to the electrical control board of your HVAC system. Each wire is usually responsible for something specific, like one wire is for cooling, and another wire is for heating. Many systems have a “C wire” (or “common wire”), which is dedicated to providing electricity to the thermostat to power the screen and other electronic functions.

Older systems usually don’t have a C wire, though, because back then thermostats didn’t require electricity thanks to the fully mechanical operation of mercury-switched thermostats. But today, most modern thermostats have more bells and whistles, which require electricity to run. Thus, the purpose of the C wire.

A C wire isn’t necessarily required for smart thermostats, but it’s highly recommended. And if your thermostat’s wiring includes a C wire, you should connect it to your smart thermostat—most problems that arise due to the smart thermostat happen because there’s no C wire connected to it.

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1. Gary Larson
2. Charles Schultz
3. Bill Ward
4. Bill Watterson

Think you know the answer?

Microsoft’s OneDrive makes it easy to share and unshare files and folders. But what if you want to see everything you’ve shared, in one simple list? OneDrive can do that easily, and here’s how you get to it.

RELATED: How to Find All the Files You’ve Shared in OneDrive

Log into your account on the OneDrive site. You can also sign in to your Office 365 account and select OneDrive from the app launcher.

Note that OneDrive for Business will also show you things people have shared with you in a separate tab, but sadly that’s not an option in a personal OneDrive.

In the menu on the left-hand side, click “Shared.”

All of the files and folders you’ve shared will be displayed.

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Streaming games, as in streaming them to play and not just to watch, look like they’ll be the next big thing in the gaming market. Shadow offers a unique take on this service, and today they’ve announced an improved hardware component, the Shadow Ghost.

A little context: the Shadow service is similar to game streaming setups like PlayStation Now or GeForce Now. But instead of charging for a large library of games, Shadow lets you “rent” a remote, virtualized gaming PC with a GTX 1080 card equivalent, and fill it up with the PC games you already own. For $35 a month, you can access your remote PC and play your games on Windows, macOS, or Android.

But there’s no easy way to get any of those platforms to play nice with a TV. The Shadow Ghost is the solution. An evolution of the previous Shadow Box device and vaguely reminiscent of the Steam Link, the Ghost is designed to remove all of the compromises of streaming games that are possible at the moment. Its low-power, fanless hardware can nonetheless pump out 4K games at 60 frames per second, or 1080p at 144Hz for those fast-paced shooters and fighting games.

It has a 5GHz Wi-Fi connection (up to 400 megabits per second) but you’ll want to take advantage of the gigabit Ethernet port for the best connection. (Shadow recommends an internet connection with a minimum of 25 Mbps and a low ping.) In addition to the Ethernet port it’s also rocking USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, HDMI 2.0, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as Bluetooth 4.1, which should cover most controller and mouse/keyboard inputs.

The device itself is much smaller than a conventional game console, only 7.2 inches wide—about the size of an old CD player. Its curvaceous case looks neat, but might be a little tricky to fit in your entertainment center if you’re used to black boxes. The Shadow Ghost is on sale today from Shadow’s website for $140.

Samsung has a long-running relationship with McAfee. And while it’s bad enough that it bundles this nigh-useless junk on its computers, it’s “extending” this partnership to the S10 and all 2019 Smart TVs.

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Samsung throw McAfee on Galaxy smartphones, as it shipped the S8 with the antivirus app installed too. Then Samsung later brought it to previous Galaxy devices with an update, which is honestly just disgusting.

Make no mistake here: McAfee is paying Samsung a pile of cash to do this, which is a pretty common practice for all PC makers. It lets McAfee extend its presence, especially for less-savvy users who honestly don’t know that antivirus apps on Android are nearly useless. Just like with bundled antivirus software on computers, you simply don’t need it. (For Windows machines, Microsoft’s Windows Defender does a great job, and it’s integrated).

But here’s where things are really starting to get out of hand: as of 2019, Samsung will include McAfee on its smart TVs. Straight from the PR:

McAfee extended its contract to have McAfee Security for TV technology pre-installed on all Samsung Smart TVs produced in 2019. Along with being the market leader in the Smart TV category worldwide, Samsung is also the first company to pre-install security on these devices, underscoring its commitment to building security in from the start. McAfee Security for TV scans the apps that run on Samsung smart TVs to identify and remove malware.

Samsung is “the first company to pre-install security on these devices” for good reason: you don’t need it. First off, Samsung’s Smart TVs run its own Tizen OS (which is based on Linux) for which malware is virtually non-existent. So, right out of the gate, it’s inherently a non-issue.

Secondly, the same rule applies to smart TVs that apply to Android, which is basically to be smart about what you install. If you don’t know what it is, then don’t install it. If it’s not from the TV’s official store, don’t install it. Don’t sideload random stuff. Just, you know, use common sense.

While there are documented cases of Android-based smart TVs getting infected with ransomware, installing apps from unofficial stores or websites is nearly always the culprit. So if you don’t do that, then you should be fine. And again, Samsung TVs don’t run Android—they run Tizen.

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Keeping tabs on your home while you’re away on vacation or at work is the perfect job for a WiFi cam, and if it’s 24/7 continuous recording that you’re after, you have some options—albeit limited—to choose from.

Perhaps the most popular option that is well-known for its 24/7 continuous recording capabilities is the Nest Cam. There are multiple models to choose from, but all of them have this feature.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to pay for a Nest Aware subscription, which starts at $5 per month. This will give you access to the 24/7 continuous recording, as well as other features like facial recognition (if you get the Nest Cam IQ), as well as Activity Zones and storage for video recordings. Further, you can download clips to save or share—a particularly handy feature if you need the video footage for a serious matter like a legal dispute.

The Nest Cam is one of our favorite Wi-Fi cams, thanks to ease of setup and use. It also has the usual specs you’d expect on a premium camera, like crisp 1080p video, night vision capabilities, and two-way talk.

A cheaper alternative to the Nest Cam is the Arlo Q from Netgear, which also can do 24/7 continuous recording, but you’ll still need to pay for that privilege (if you want more than a week worth of recording) which is slightly more expensive than the Nest Cam’s subscription.

Despite the lower up-front price, the Arlo Q can still record 1080p video, and has two-way talk and night vision functionality. But perhaps the best feature is the free seven-day storage for video recordings, which the Nest Cam doesn’t have.

If you want to extend the free storage there’s a premium—subscriptions start at $10 per month for storing 24/7 video for up to 14 days. So while you’ll pay less up front for the camera itself, you’ll be paying more in the long run for continuous recording, which is something to keep in mind. In addition, there’s no way to download the footage from the cloud.

If you’ve been waiting to buy an Xbox One S, now might be the best time to jump on it. Hopefully, you have some free time this year because Massgenie is offering a deal that’s too good to pass up.

Massgenie is offering an Xbox One S, the Minecraft Creators Bundle, and Red Dead Redemption 2 for just $220. If you bought all of these games on Amazon right now, you’d be paying more than $300.

Remember when the Xbox One was priced around $500? Yeah, this deal is so good that it’s almost frustrating. But if you’ve never heard of Massgenie, then there are a few things that you need to know.

Massgenie, like Massdrop, buys items in bulk and sells them at a steep discount. The stipulation here is that a certain number of people need to commit to buying the product, or else nobody gets it. For this Xbox One S deal, the “Power Deal” goal has already been met — enough people have paid for the product, so you just need to put down your money before the deal ends.

But Massgenie has a “first in first out” policy, so you want to put down your money sooner rather than later. Sometimes there isn’t enough inventory to honor every purchase, so people that are late to the game get a full refund instead of the Xbox One S. Hey, at least there’s no risk.

Gmail is already pretty great, but with the addition of a few carefully selected Google Chrome extension, you can get it to do so much more. Here are some of our favorites.

We typically don’t recommend using a lot of browser extensions because they can be a privacy nightmare. Still, it’s hard to resist extensions that can significantly improve things for you. We’ve checked out all these extensions ourselves, testing them, looking at their reputations among users, and favoring extensions that make their source code public when possible. Still, you should learn how to make sure Chrome extensions are safe before using them and use them sparingly.

RELATED: The Best Chrome Extensions for Managing Tabs

FlowCrypt is an easy way to make sure any message you send from your Gmail account gets encrypted—even attachments!—using PGP encryption. FlowCrypt places a button on the UI that lets you compose a secure message when you click it. Once you and the recipient install FlowCrypt you can send encrypted messages to anyone on your contact list, whether they have FlowCrypt or not. If the recipient has FlowCrypt installed, messages are decrypted automatically when they’re opened on the other end. However, if they don’t have it installed, you have to create a one-time password which you should share not via email, for obvious reasons.

RELATED: Why No One Uses Encrypted Email Messages

Discoverly is like a private eye for Gmail. Anytime you receive an email from an unknown person, it scours the internet, revealing the person’s Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, and even LinkedIn to show you who they are. Discoverly connects all the information from these sites and outs it together for you to see the person’s mutual connections, work info and position, and it even displays their tweets.

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If you prefer to play your mobile games with a console advantage, let your fingers do the walking to Amazon. The site has the SteelSeries Stratus XL, one of the best controllers mobile around, available for just $30 today.

The Stratus XL offers all of the same primary buttons as the standard controller design for the Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch, plus hard-bound home and back buttons to make getting around the Android interface easier. Two full-sized thumbsticks and a classic D-pad are must-haves for console-style games like Fortnite. The controller supports Bluetooth connections, so it will also work with Windows laptops and desktops with the requisite adapter.

Today’s discount brings the price down from $40. A few things to note: the Stratus XL runs on AA batteries, so it’s not rechargeable (unless you’ve already invested in rechargeable batteries, of course). It’s “full size,” so it’s not going to fit in the pocket of even the largest jeans. And it’s not designed for Apple devices, so if you want a controller for your iPhone or iPad, you’ll have to go with the similar Nimbus design.

If you’ve been in need of an SD card or an SSD, now’s the time to buy one. Amazon is running a huge sale on memory and storage products. Most of the products on sale are from Sandisk, so you know that they’re reliable and durable.

All of the items in Amazon’s sale are at least 20 percent off, so there aren’t any bad deals in this sale. That being said, we have a few favorites:

• Sandisk 1 TB SSD – $99 $125
• Sandisk 400 GB Micro SD Card – $62 $95
• Sandisk 64 GB SD Card – $14 $34
• Sandisk External 2 TB SSD – $300 $700

Amazon will end this sale by the end of the day, so don’t wait too long to grab that Micro SD card or SSD. You’ll always remember that you got it for a good price as you traverse through years and reading and/or writing.

The main purpose of Wi-Fi cameras is to record video, but that’s not the only thing they can do. Modern Wi-Fi cams are sophisticated pieces of hardware and they can do a lot more than simply record video.

RELATED: What You Should Know Before Buying Wi-Fi Cameras

This also means that if you’re in the market for a Wi-Fi cam, there are a lot more features that you’ll want to know about a specific model other than its video quality. Here are features that some Wi-Fi cameras have other than just video recording.

Pretty much every Wi-Fi camera these days comes with a built-in microphone and speaker so you can use your smartphone and your Wi-Fi cam as walkie talkies of sorts.

The accompanying app on your phone lets you hit a button and start talking through the camera, and the person on the other end can talk back using the microphone on the camera itself. This is especially useful on video doorbells where you can talk to the person who came to your door (rather than actually opening and answering the door), especially if it’s someone who you’re not quite sure about.

Of course, if this intercom isn’t a feature that you’ll use, there’s usually a setting that lets you turn off the microphone and speaker on the camera, but this usually will also prevent video recordings from capturing audio.

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Artazum/Shutterstock

It’s easy to think of bathroom upgrades in terms of big-ticket items and total remodel jobs, but we’ve rounded up some great cheap upgrades you can enjoy right now for less than $20 each.

The bathroom gets a lot of use in a home but it’s all too easy to overlook it. One day it looks pretty put together and you’re happy with it, but before you know it the bath mat looks like it got beat up by a wood chipper and you’re wondering why you never get around to replacing all this busted up stuff. We’re here to help. We’ve rounded up our favorite cheap bathroom upgrades, all of which cost under $20, so you can enjoy a little bit of budget-friendly luxury and convenience in your bathroom.

I’ve had one of these Better Living dispensers in every shower in my house for years now and it’s, possibly, one of my favorite inexpensive bathroom upgrades. For just shy of twenty bucks you can get rid of three different bottles from your shower. It comes with waterproof labels (Shampoo, Conditioner, Body Wash, etc.), adhesive (you can use either the included two-sided mounting tape or the little tube of silicone caulk), and you can mount it flat to the shower wall or in the corner with ease.

Simplehuman products are really nice and, typically, really expensive. This petite 6-liter pedal trashcan offers the solid design and construction you’d expect from the company but you can grab it for only $15.

Why use a pedal can and a small one at that? Pedal cans are great for bathrooms because they contain odors, keep pets out, and conceal the contents of the trash can until it’s time to empty it. Not only are smaller cans like this little one great for bathrooms with limited spaces but the size also encourages you to empty the bin more so you don’t end up with a giant compressed block of makeup wipes and discarded tissues funking up your bathroom.

The TubShroom falls soundly into the category of things that look stupid and can’t possibly work but absolutely do work and the only stupid part is how you feel when you realize you should have bought the $13 little rubber plug years ago.

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Apps on your iPhone can track your location, but you have to give them access first. Here’s how to check which apps can monitor your GPS location and revoke their access.

As important as privacy is, letting some apps track our location makes them much more useful—and sometimes it’s essential. It’s unreasonable to expect Google Maps to work as it should without Google knowing your location, but does that note-taking app need to know where you are? Maybe, maybe not.

Where you stand on these things is a personal decision, and it’s not one we’re here to argue. We’re here to show how to take control of which apps know your location, and when they’re allowed to track it.

It’s also important to remember that some apps need your location data to do their job. Revoking access to your location can stop some important features from working. Keep that in mind when checking which apps can and cannot access your data.

RELATED: Why Do So Many Apps Ask For Your Location, and Which Ones Really Need It?

To see a list of apps that have requested access to your location data, open the Settings app and tap “Privacy.”

Next, tap “Location Services.”

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Hadrian/Shutterstock 

New tech products are usually expensive, semi-useless, and buggy. When describing the feeling of first-generation tech, a certain phrase comes to mind. No, it isn’t “buyers remorse,” it’s “early adopter pain.”

Early adopter pain is difficult to describe, but it’s necessary for technological and social progress. It’s like the pain that comes after a long run mixed with the rush of gambling. And like gambling, early adopter pain is expensive.

But what makes someone an early adopter, and how is early adopter pain necessary for progress?

A simple Google search for “early adopters” shows that, as a concept, early adopters are very important to businesses. In fact, they’re practically the deciding factor for a product’s success. According to Everett Rogers, professor of communication studies at the University of New Mexico, there are five stages to technology adoption that form a marketing bell curve. In his book Diffusions of Innovations, Rogers describes how early adopters are practically the first and most crucial stage of a product’s life-cycle, even though early adopters make up a very small market share.

According to Rogers’ 5 stages to technology adoption, innovators are the absolute first investors in a new product, even though they make up the smallest market share. These innovators tend to have a lot of financial resources, so they can drop a lot of money on new products, even if they’re half-baked or doomed to fail. But innovators don’t have a lot of influence on the public; they’re just the rich people that invest in new ideas at the drop of a hat.

Early adopters are the second phase of Rogers’ adoption curve, and they’re the people in whom we’re most interested. According to Rogers, early adopters tend to be young, trendy, and well-to-do. Early adopters (in the field of tech) are usually journalists or YouTubers that have a lot of influence over average consumers, and they’re often the first place where consumers find new information.

As you can imagine, early adopters need to be critical of new products to maintain credibility. If your favorite nerdy YouTuber started waving around some stupid new product and claimed that it’s the future of technology, you’d hopefully hold less trust in their opinions. As a result, manufacturers tend to cater to early adopters by making new products look luxurious, vocalizing the product’s potential, or by adapting to early adopter opinions at the beginning of a product’s life-cycle.

Once a product reaches Early Majority or Late Majority, it’s considered successful. These categories indicate that average consumers have started to adopt the product and that it’s probably permeated through most of society. When a product starts to reach early or late majority adoption, manufacturers start to market it as “easy to use” or “universal.” Desktop computers are a good example of this. Once average people started buying desktops, businesses started developing tools like the computer mouse and clean GUI’s to make things more appealing.

Laggards are the last people to adopt a product, and they represent a small market share. People that are out of date or elderly usually fall in this category, and businesses (smartphone manufacturers, for example) usually aim products toward laggards as an afterthought.

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1. Glass Dust
2. White Paint
3. Elmer's Glue
4. Polyurethane Spray

Think you know the answer?

Inserting a hyperlink in a PowerPoint presentation is great for quick access to external resources relevant to your content. However, the underline that comes with it may distract the audience from the message of the slide. Here’s how to remove it.

While PowerPoint doesn’t have a specific option for removing the underline from hyperlink text, there’s a very simple workaround. What we’re going to do is remove the link from the text, place an invisible shape over that text, and then add the link to that shape.

Go ahead and open your presentation, move to the slide that contains the underlined hyperlink text, and locate that text.

Right-click the text and select “Remove Link” from the list of options.

Next, head over to the “Insert” tab and click the “Shapes” button.

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The Nintendo Switch has a built-in kickstand, but it’s a little… bad. Thankfully, Target is selling an adjustable metal stand for just $10.

If your brave soul has tried to use the Nintendo Switch’s built-in kickstand, then you know just how wonky it can be. It tilts the screen at an unpleasant angle, and it doesn’t seem to provide a lot of support for the $300 console.

But PowerA’s adjustable kickstands manage to solve this problem. They’re made from a strong metal with rubber grips, so your Switch stays nice and safe. These kickstands are also compact and can be folded up for on-the-go gaming. Right now, Target is selling them for just $10—that’s a neat $5 discount. It even has Mario on i

Like all good deals, this one won’t last long. If you’re in need of a high-quality kickstand for your Nintendo Switch, then now’s the time to take the plunge.

A music service is only as good as the places you can use it. And smart speakers live by the music they can provide. With that in mind, Apple and Google are teaming up to bring your music Home.

It wasn’t long ago that Apple Music arrived on Amazon Echo speakers, and music subscription services are best when you can use them on all your devices. But Google Home devices have been without an Apple Music option; you’d have to settle for Spotify, Pandora, or Deezer if you wanted to use something other than Google’s music offerings. But that’s going to change sometime soon.

While Apple and Google haven’t formally announced a collaboration, an eagle-eyed reader at MacRumors spotted that the iOS Google Home app listed Apple Music as an option. Take a look at the Android app, and you’ll see the option there as well.

If you tap on the Apple Music option, the app prompts you to link your account. But tapping on the Link Account option does nothing yet, so this is a work in progress. Hopefully, Google and Apple turn this on soon. Until then, you’ll have to settle for Apple Music on your Echo or, if you spent extra, your Homepod.

via MacRumors

iMessage is one of the biggest lock-ins for owners of iPhones and iPads, and Apple knows it. That’s because it’s pretty great, but there are features you may not be using to their fullest. Tapbacks are one–here’s how to use them.

In fact, you may have never heard of a Tapback, partly because Apple hasn’t done a great job of surfacing the feature. It’s almost invisible to anyone who doesn’t know where to find it, and that’s not conducive to organic feature discovery.

That’s a real shame, too, because much like similar features that allow the “liking” of messages and such on social networks, you can use a Tapback to offer a quick response to a message without having to type one our, or even send a message at all. If all you want to do is send one of six quick responses, a Tapback is right up your street.

Those six responses include a heart, a thumbs-up, a thumbs-down, a pair of exclamation marks, a questions mark, and a “HaHa” for when something amuses you.

So now that you know what the options are, and what a Tapback is, here’s how to use them.

To use a Tapback, open the Messages app and locate the message that you want to reply to. Once located, tap and hold the blue bubble itself.

You will now see a new bubble appear with the six options we just mentioned. Tap the one you want to use, and iMessage sends it to the sender of the original message. Rather than appearing as a new message in the thread, it will instead appear on one corner of the message to which the Tapback is related.

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We’re big fans of portable, USB-driven monitors here at Review Geek: they make it easy to bring the productivity-boosting power of a multi-screen setup on the road. At Mobile World Congress, Lenovo has introduced a new one that’s worth a look.

The ThinkVision M14—“ThinkVision” being the brand attached to the more button-down ThinkPad line—is a USB-C powered, 14-inch, 1080p design that will come with a price of €229 (about $260). It’s equipped with a USB-C port on both sides, allowing the user to easily plug it into a laptop or tablet to the left or right, the better to make use of small workspaces.

There’s another neat trick if you’re all-in on USB-C: while the screen can run entirely off the battery in your laptop or tablet, it can also deliver power. So if your laptop uses a USB-C power port, you can pack just the screen’s power adapter and it will deliver power to the laptop while receiving video over the same USB-C cable. It’s not clear whether the open USB-C port can be used as a pass-through hub, but that would be nice.

This thing is built to travel. At just 600 grams (1.3 pounds) and less than a centimeter thick when folded up with its protective cover, it should be able to squeeze into most laptop bags without weighing you down on long treks through the airport or conference hall. The 300-nit matte screen is also made with the idea of using it in a variety of challenging lighting conditions, and the unique kickstand base can easily shift from 10 to 90 degrees to match the tilt of your primary screen.

The ThinkVisionM14 will arrive in June for at least some markets. The $260 package includes a cover/case, the aforementioned power adapter, and a riser for the base if you want a little extra height.

Source: Lenovo