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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.

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.

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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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’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.

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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.

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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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.

“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.”

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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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.

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

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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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.

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.

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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1. DeepThought
2. BackRub
3. DarkWeb
4. GopherPile

Think you know the answer?

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.

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.

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.

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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If you’re worried that you’ll scratch up the screen on your Apple Watch, you can easily buy and install a screen protector for it. But should you be worried about it in the first place?

I know a lot of people who have been in the market for an Apple Watch, but have backed out because they’re worried the screen would get scratched up fairly easily based on daily use—it’s easy for a watch to bump against various objects and scuff it up.

Depending on what model of Apple Watch you have, the display glass may be more durable than other models.

With the newer Series 4 Apple Watch (as well as some previous generations), the stainless steel model comes with display glass made out of sapphire crystal, which sounds more like marketing fluff, but it’s actually a really nice feature if you’re paranoid about scratching up the screen.

Sapphire crystal glass is made from the sapphire gemstone, which is the third-hardest material on earth behind diamond and moissanite, so it’s incredibly resistant to scratches. Or at least it should be.

JerryRigEverything, a YouTube channel dedicated to performing durability tests on consumer electronics, performed a scratch test on a Series 3 Apple Watch with a sapphire crystal screen and discovered that it wasn’t quite as scratch resistant as it could be, noting that the sapphire wasn’t as pure as the Tissot watch he was comparing it to, which also has sapphire crystal glass.

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Face ID is a great addition to iPhone and iPad, and it still feels like magic every time it works. But, just like Touch ID before it, you may need to prevent apps from using it. Here’s how to do that.

If you’ve permitted a third-party app to use Face ID as its authentication mechanism, that can be great for making it easier and quicker to sign into anything from your banking app to your shopping list. However, there may be times when you want to revoke that permission. Whatever the reason for your decision, preventing an app from using Face ID requires just a few taps.

To get started, open the Settings app and then tap “Face ID & Passcode.”

After entering your passcode to gain access, tap “Other Apps.”

Here, you will see a list of every app that has requested access to Face ID, as well as its current state. The toggle to the right of the app’s name denotes whether the app currently has Face ID access or not. Toggle any app for which you wish to revoke access.

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It’s dark and you need to be able to see. It’s fine—whip out your trusty Android phone and put the camera flash to work as a flashlight. Here’s how to do it.

Honestly, this couldn’t be simpler, as it’s merely a toggle away on pretty much all Android phones. First, pull down the notification shade. Then find the flashlight icon and tap it.

Left: Off; Right: On

Really, that’s it! If you can’t find the flashlight icon, you may need to tug the notification panel a second time to show the entire Quick Settings menu. At that point, you should see the flashlight.

Now that you’ve found the flashlight, however, let’s go ahead and eliminate that second tap by moving the flashlight icon to the top row of the Quick Settings panel.

To do that, tap the little pencil icon at the bottom of the expanded panel.

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The headphone jack is fast disappearing from high-end phones and even bigger devices like the new iPad Pro. So it’s time to head out and get a decent pair of USB-C headphones, right? Not so fast.

Unlike the accommodating analog port that’s been around for decades, getting audio out of a USB-C port alone requires a little digital finagling. And that’s a problem, because digital formats are more complex, and all too often incompatible.

While there are a few sets of headphones on the market with a USB-C port, they’re generally of pretty middling to poor quality, unlike some of the options available for Apple’s similar Lightning port. Between a poor selection and poor compatibility, they’re just not worth bothering with, at least until the market settles on a more reliable standard.

Your fancy new phone might come with a pair of USB-C headphones as a sort of apology for being incompatible with all the other ones you already have. If it does, hang on to them. Odds are that you’re not going to find a better pair any time soon.

While there are a handful of vendors of USB-C headphones on Amazon on the like, there are precious few options from reliable manufacturers… most of whom seem more interested in selling Lightning-equipped headphones, if they want to go for a non-analog option at all. Google sells a set of wired Pixel buds for its phones and Chromebook laptops, and they’re reasonable at $30. Ditto for HTC, OnePlus, and Xiaomi. But beyond that, your choices get progressively slimmer, especially if you don’t care for in-ear buds.

Razer sells a pair of USB-C “Hammerhead” buds, which are poorly-reviewed even if you do like the lime green color and gamer branding. JBL makes a set of buds called the Reflect Aware C, but they’re not even being sold anymore—and perhaps that’s for the best, since users say they had a nasty habit of simply dying. The best choice for a premium set of USB-C buds appears to be the Libratone Q Adapt, which sport hardware noise cancellation in multiple levels. But $120 is a lot to pay for a pair of wired headphones that only work with one of your gadgets.

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One of the questions I get asked most often about my landscapes is “What settings did you use?” Beginner photographers often feel that there is some magic combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO that will make their photos amazing. While there’s a lot more to it than that, understanding what settings to use makes it easier to take photos that match your vision. Let’s dig in.

RELATED: How to Develop a Better Eye for Taking Good Photos

Landscape photography is incredibly accessible. All you need is a camera, any lens, and a landscape for your subject. Most landscape photographers favor a wide angle lens since it lets you better show the scale of the landscapes you’re photographing.

The good news is that the 18-55mm kit lens that comes with most DSLRs is, at the wide end, pretty firmly in the range of focal lengths that work really well. It’s equivalent to about 28mm on a full frame camera. If you get really into landscape photography, you can invest in a wider lens but, at least to start with, any standard lens will do.

With that said, you can even take landscape shots with long telephoto lenses. They will have a different look, but that doesn’t mean they’re not great shots.

When you’re taking landscapes, you are often working in the low light around dawn or dusk with narrow apertures. This means, as we’ll see in a moment, you can use a slower shutter speed than you can use handheld without getting blurry shots. Your first purchase if you get into landscape photography should be a good, stable tripod. It will open up a wide range of shots you otherwise wouldn’t be able to take.

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Wi-Fi 6 is the next-generation wireless standard that’s faster than 802.11ac. More than speed, it will provide better performance in congested areas, from stadiums to your own device-packed home. It’s coming in 2019.

Yes, Wi-Fi now has version numbers! Even those old confusing Wi-Fi standard names like “802.11ac” have been renamed to user-friendly names like “Wi-Fi 5.”

Here are the versions of Wi-Fi you’ll  be seeing:

• Wi-Fi 4 is 802.11n, released in 2009.
• Wi-Fi 5 is 802.11ac, released in 2014.
• Wi-Fi 6 is the new version, also known as 802.11ax. It’s scheduled for release in 2019.

The Wi-Fi Alliance also announced would like to see these numbers appear in software so you can tell which Wi-Fi network is newer and faster while connecting on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop. You may be seeing Wi-Fi numbers on your phone, tablet, or laptop soon.

Older versions of Wi-Fi aren’t widely in use and aren’t officially being branded. But, if they were, here’s what they’d be called:

• Wi-Fi 1 would have been 802.11b, released in 1999.
• Wi-Fi 2 would have been 802.11a, also released in 1999.
• Wi-Fi 3 would have been 802.11g, released in 2003.

As usual, the latest Wi-Fi standard offers faster data transfer speeds. If you’re using a Wi-Fi router with a single device, maximum potential speeds should be up to 40% higher with Wi-Fi 6 compared to Wi-Fi 5.

Wi-Fi 6 accomplishes this through more efficient data encoding, resulting in higher throughput. Mainly, more data is packed into the same radio waves. The chips that encode and decode these signals keep getting more powerful and can handle the extra work.

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1. Dedication of the Lincoln Memorial
2. Succession of Pope Benedict XV
3. Alexander Graham Bell's Funeral
4. The New Year

Think you know the answer?

Bulleted lists are standard fare in PowerPoint presentations, and sometimes you want to tweak those bullets to look just right. PowerPoint gives you a fair amount of control by letting you align and adjust the text after a bullet point. Here’s how.

First, open your PowerPoint presentation and go to the slide that contains the bulleted text. Highlight the text on the bullet you want to adjust.

On the “Home” tab, you’ll see four different alignment options—the same ones you use for aligning regular text.

From left to right, these options are:

• Align Left (Ctrl+L)
• Center (Ctrl+E)
• Align Right (Ctrl+R)
• Justify (Ctrl+J)

Hovering over each option with your mouse gives you the alignment type, respective shortcut key, and alignment description.

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Windows Updates need a lot of disk space, which is a problem on devices with small amounts of internal storage. Microsoft is fixing this by “reserving” some disk space for updates in the next version of Windows 10, codenamed 19H1.

Microsoft has been pushing cheap laptops with small hard drives for years now. But anyone who has ever used one has quickly run into a major issue: They usually don’t have enough storage left over to install major updates. This leaves them without important patches, security fixes, and new features. While you shouldn’t update to the latest version of Windows on the first day, you do want to eventually get there. So this is a serious problem.

Right now, the workaround is to either delete as many files and programs as possible or download the update to external storage. Neither answer is always easy, especially for a college student who has a cheap device, no USB drive, and a need to keep all their files and programs.

Microsoft is trying to address this with a method that is bound to be controversial. Starting in the next major release (and available to Insiders now), Microsoft will reserve at least 7 gigabytes of space on your hard drive.

The space won’t go completely wasted. Windows will store temporary files here when space isn’t needed for updates. Files created by apps and processes that would have taken space anyway will now go into this reserved storage. When it’s time to update, Windows will automatically delete all the files in reserved storage and use the space for downloading update files.

Microsoft says it isn’t using a virtual drive to make this happen. As Microsoft’s Craig Barkhouse explains in the TechNet comments:

Instead we designed an elegant solution that would require new support being added to NTFS. The idea is NTFS provides a mechanism for the servicing stack to specify how much space it needs reserved, say 7GB. Then NTFS reserves that 7GB for servicing usage only. What is the effect of that? Well the visible free space on C: drops by 7GB, which reduces how much space normal applications can use. Servicing can use those 7GB however.

How much space is reserved depends on what optional features and languages you have installed. The more features and languages on the system, the more space will be reserved so that those features can be properly updated as well. If you later uninstall a feature or language, the reserved space will shrink.

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At CES 2019, Lenovo has introduced two new smarthome products: the Smart Clock with Google Assistant and the Smart Tab with Alexa. The former is sort of a mini version of the company’s existing Smart Display, while the latter is a tablet and Echo Show in one.

The Smart Clock has a 4-inch display and is meant to be a bedside clock for your nightstand. You can use it to set alarms, play music, look at your calendar appointments for the day, and even use it with Google Assistant’s Routines feature, like creating routines for going to bed and waking up in the mornings. There’s even a USB-A port on the back to plug in and charge your smartphone, which is a nice added touch.

The Smart Clock works very similarly to other Google Assistant smart displays, like the Home Hub and Lenovo’s existing Smart Display. However, it’s not an identical experience by any means, since the Smart Clock is running Android Things. The good news, though, as that the user interface and various swiping actions and taps are still very similar and familiar to those who use a traditional smart display.

The Lenovo Smart Clock will retail for $79 and be available at some point in the spring this year.

As for the Smart Tab, it’s essentially an Android tablet that comes with Alexa, but it also has a dock that also has a built-in Bluetooth speaker. So you can use it as an Android tablet, then dock it and use it as an Echo Show.

There two different models of the Smart Tab that will be available, the M10 and the P10. Both are running Snapdragon 450 processors and have 10″ 1920×1200 displays. The M10 comes with either 2GB or 3GB of memory, 16GB or 32GB of storage, a 2MP front camera, and a 5MP rear camera starting at $199. Whereas the P10 can have up to 4GB of memory and 64GB of storage, 5MP front camera and an 8MP rear camera starting at $299.

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All-in-ones tend to come in two flavors: a budget machine for novice users or an all-out monster with style and flexibility. Lenovo has taken the latter option with its new Yoga A940, a top-of-the-line machine meant for artists and creators.

Announced at CES, the 27-inch machine includes a 4K touchscreen and a double-hinged display stand, which can move from a 90-degree vertical to a drawing-friendly 25-degree angle with a smooth sweep. The internal components, featuring Intel Core 8th-gen processors and up to 32GB of memory, plus a Radeon RX 560 GPU, are housed in a beefy base. But it’s the stuff around the guts that’s interesting. The top of the main assembly is a shelf for the included wireless keyboard when you’re ready to go full touch, and the smaller area on the side can recharge your Qi-enabled smartphone. Five Dolby Atmos speakers hide inside as well.

Take a look ’round the back and you’ll find four USB 3.0 ports, HDMI-in (for using the display with another machine), and Ethernet if you need something faster than Wi-Fi. On the side, accessible without reaching is another USB 3.0, USB-C, a headphone jack, and an SD card reader, handy for pro photographers who don’t often need MicroSD. Other nice touches include a work light on the bottom edge of the screen and a manual shutter over the webcam.

But it’s the included “Smart Dial” that will make artists do a double take. This gadget is analogous to Microsoft’s Surface Dial but comes with the package for free. It also displays some surprising ergonomic thought, docking into a dedicated USB port on either the right or left side for easy use in folded-down mode. (Southpaws thank you, Lenovo, for ambidextrous design.) Lenovo’s management software can assign different scrolling tools for different applications, like Adobe’s Creative Cloud, with a color-coded LED ring to let the user know which mode it’s in without checking the app.

All of this, plus a powered stylus, keyboard and mouse, and the usual array of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a three-month trial of Creative Cloud come in at $2350 when the Yoga A940 launches in March. The base specs, with 8GB of memory and a 128GB SSD or 1TB hard drive, are a bit disappointing…but this all-in-one has one more trick up its sleeve. The panel beneath the keyboard shelf can be removed, granting the user access to the memory and storage slots. Laptop-grade DDR4 RAM and SSDs can be replaced without further disassembly, keeping the warranty intact.

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