31 December 2017

Twitter ended the year on a fascinating run


 It’s been pretty easy to point at Twitter and, with each quarterly moment when it discloses its financial guts, let out a long exasperated sigh. But then something interesting happened in the back half of 2017: it went on a rather spectacular run, and though ending on a bit of a slump, it looks like it could finish the year up more than 25 percent — which, by Twitter terms, is… Read More

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The food revolution may have just needed a cup of Blue Bottle


 Each massive exit in the tech ecosystem usually follows the same cycle: an upstart becomes a huge business, it goes public or sells for a huge sum of money, many of the best people that built it take off and then they use their newfound wealth to start companies. But in addition to tech, the venture community has its own pet project: coffee. Read More

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30 December 2017

Apple’s $29 iPhone battery replacements are available starting today


 Those $29 battery out-of-warranty replacements Apple promised are now available for impacted users with an iPhone 6 or later. The company was initially aiming for a late-January timeframe in the States when it first offered up the discount, following blowback against its admission that it had slowed down older model phones to maximize performance. “We expected to need more time to be… Read More

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The MakeUseOf’s Online Shopping Guide


Internet shopping requires knowing a lot more than just products. You need to know where to find reviews, how to shop safely, how to compare prices, and — above all else — how to get the best deals from your favorite sites, like Amazon, Walmart, and many other online retailers.This guide is available to download as a free PDF. Download The MakeUseOf’s Online Shopping Guide now. Feel free to copy and share this with your friends and family. We cover all that and more in the MakeUseOf guide to online shopping. 1. Introduction Why an e-book about shopping? Holiday e-commerce sales...

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Crunch Report | Apple Apologizes for Slowing Down iPhones


Apple apologizes for slowing down iPhones, humans spent $200 million on apps this Christmas and Google retires the Pixel C tablet. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
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Your Backbone Will Thank You: 6 Great Standing Desk Designs


Sitting can kill you or at least cause serious health issues. Unfortunately, many jobs require sitting at desks for several hours a day. While it’s tough to change what you do for a living, it’s pretty easy to switch your desk, and therefore your sitting and standing habits. An excellent means of remaining active at work is with a standing desk. Learn all about the best standing desks available, why you should use a standing desk, and what to consider when selecting one. Why Use a Standing Desk As a freelance writer working from home or a co-working space, I struggle with...

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How to Turn Your Amazon Fire TV Stick Into a Fire TV Box


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Your Amazon Fire TV Stick is a great device, isn’t it? Ideal for watching Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, or installing Kodi! Then there’s apps like Plex for streaming video from a PC to your TV. But this HDMI TV stick isn’t so good for other things. For instance, you’re limited only to wireless networking. Also, there is no way to connect a USB drive and view your own video files. Contrast this with the more expensive Amazon Fire TV, and you’ll see you’re missing more than just the 4K video streaming. Fortunately, there’s an answer. With a few cables you...

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Facebook has a 100-person engineering team that helps advertisers build tools and infrastructure


Facebook Solutions Engineering team Stories about Facebook’s advertising business tend to focus on the big numbers — its billions of users, millions of advertisers or its enormous lead over any competitor that’s not named Google. But Facebook says that one of its success stories in recent years involves a relatively small group of engineers — in fact, originally it was just one engineer, Vastal Mehta,… Read More
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Amazon did a lot of funky stuff this year and it’s paying off


 Holy hell, it’s been a year for Amazon. Jeff Bezos’ former-online-bookstore dumped $13.7 billion to buy a bunch of grocery stores, that speaker you talk to in your living room that Amazon makes is really popular and a bunch of server farms Amazon runs generate more than $10 billion in revenue annually. Read More

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Is Bitmoji a Threat to Your Privacy?


bitmoji-threat-privacy

Bitmoji was the number one most-downloaded app from Apple’s App Store in 2017. Millions of people have downloaded the app to create goofy, cute representations of themselves to share with friends and family. But what information does Bitmoji collect? Who does the company share that information with? And why does Bitmoji need full keyboard access? After asking a number of these privacy questions, I thought I’d dig into Snap, Inc.’s privacy policy to see if I could find the answer. Here’s what I found out. Bitmoji and Snapchat First of all, I wasn’t aware that Bitmoji and Snapchat were made...

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iFixit drops its iPhone battery replacement to $29, matching Apple’s apology price


 iFixit has never been particularly fond of Apple’s repair policies. The company’s gadgets regularly rack up poor repairability scores on the site. The site’s taking another jab at the tech giant today, dropping the price of its battery replacement kits to $29 — matching the cost of out-of-warranty battery replacements being offered up as consolation for its iPhone… Read More

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OKCupid’s rating sinks as users rebel over new ‘real name’ policy


 OKCupid’s users are angry – very, very angry. Just ahead of the new year, the company made a radical change to its policies, and now requires people to use real names instead of an OKCupid username, as before. The change eliminates one of the biggest differentiators between the dating app and rivals like Tinder and Bumble, which have users log in via Facebook in order to use their… Read More
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OKCupid’s rating sinks as users rebel over new ‘real name’ policy


 OKCupid’s users are angry – very, very angry. Just ahead of the new year, the company made a radical change to its policies, and now requires people to use real names instead of an OKCupid username, as before. The change eliminates one of the biggest differentiators between the dating app and rivals like Tinder and Bumble, which have users log in via Facebook in order to use their… Read More

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How to Quickly Find a Photo in Google Photos


find-google-photos

Most of us have a Google account, probably for something like Gmail or Google Calendar. But did you know that Google is also a great option for storing and searching all of your photos too? Google Photos offers free unlimited (compressed) storage for your photos, making them available across a multitude of devices. If you prefer high-quality, full-resolution images, Google Photos can do that too, but it eats away at your total Google account storage. Everyone gets 15GB for free, and you can pay $1.99/month for 100GB, or $9.99/month for 1TB. You can get the free Google Photos app for...

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5 Best Free Online HTML Editors to Test Your Code


test-html-online

HTML runs the modern world. True, if you ask anybody what it takes to be a web developer, they’ll tell you all about JavaScript web frameworks, Python web frameworks, web programming practices, etc. Yet underneath all of that, HTML is what holds it all together. There is no web without HTML, and you need to know how to edit it if you want to do any kind of web work. But setting up a robust HTML editing workflow in Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code may be overkill if you aren’t working on a full-blown project. For times when you...

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Pinterest adds former CBS Corp. CFO Fred Reynolds to its board


 Pinterest announced today it’s adding former CBS and PepsiCo exec Fred Reynolds to its board of directors. Reynolds’ background includes global financial and strategic planning as well as business analysis, the company notes. He will also serve as Pinterest’s Audit Committee Chair. Prior to joining Pinterest’s board, Reynolds spent 15 years at CBS and… Read More
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29 December 2017

5 Things You Must Do After Installing Windows 10


after-installing-windows10

Windows 10 is a behemoth. Even after you’ve gone through the tedious process of preparing your system to install Windows 10 and sitting through the long installation procedure, you still have more work to do: setting up the operating system how you like it. Here are some of the bare minimum things you’ll want to do after installing a clean slate of Windows 10. If you want to skip some steps, that’s your call, but we recommend all of the following for the best experience possible. 1. Update Windows 10 I know, there are so many reasons to hate Windows...

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Here Are The Best Deals Available On Amazon Right Now


Today, you can save on Kindle books, a complete groomer, Amazon devices, Bluetooth headphones, and much more. Kindle Books On Sale My Not So Perfect Life: A Novel My Not So Perfect Life: A Novel Buy Now At Amazon Right now, Amazon has all kinds of popular Kindle books on sale starting at $1.99. This whole page is filled with best-selling books, so there’s a lot of good stuff to choose from. Darker: Fifty Shades Darker as Told by Christian (Fifty Shades of Grey Series) Darker: Fifty Shades Darker as Told by Christian (Fifty Shades of Grey Series) Buy Now...

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9 Tips for Typing Faster on Your Android Phone


type-faster-android

Typing on a touchscreen device is nowhere near as convenient as typing on a hardware keyboard. Tapping away on a slab of glass gives you no feedback and isn’t anyone’s idea of fun. While there’s no absolute solution to this problem, there are a lot of shortcuts and tips you can learn that can help you type faster on your Android smartphone. And since you spend a fair amount of time typing on your Android device, learning such tricks can help you save time dramatically. Make the Most of Gboard Gboard, previously known as Google Keyboard, has quickly emerged as...

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How to Move Your User Folders in Windows 10


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Want to tweak the location of your Windows user folders? Here’s how! A fresh installation of Windows produces various different user folders that are meant to hold things like files downloaded from the internet and organize content like music and photographs. However, you might want to customize things to your own liking. Whether you’re looking to move these folders to an external drive, or just place them in a different location on your PC, it’s not difficult to change things up. That being said, it’s worth taking stock of how you perform this procedure, as certain methods can have some...

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A cyclist is using a Google Assistant-controlled electric bike wheel to ride cross country to CES


 This is one way to put your new electric bicycle wheel through its paces ahead of launch. But more importantly, it’s a pretty solid publicity stunt, funded by Google — a company that likes making a grand entrance. It’s all part of what’s shaping up to be a pretty big push for Google Assistant at the year’s biggest consumer electronics show. Read More
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How to Clear Your Safari Browsing History and Data


clear-safari-cookies

A large amount of our time is spent online, and your browser remembers all the websites you’ve visited and logged in to. Your browser stores data to make it easier and quicker to go back to websites you visit often. Browsing data reveals your browsing habits, and can be accessed by sites you visit. If you’re concerned about your privacy, you can manage and delete your browsing history and other browsing data, like cookies, cache, and AutoFill information. We’ve discussed clearing browsing history in different browsers on Windows. Today, we’ll cover how to manage your browsing history and other browsing...

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Consumers dropped $200 million on apps on Christmas, up 12 percent from last year


 Consumers spent $196 million on apps, in-app purchases and subscriptions on Christmas Day 2017 across the App Store and Google Play, according to new data from Sensor Tower. The report, while excluding Android revenue in China, represents a 12.3 percent increase over last year’s spending of approximately $174 million. That speaks to a still-growing market for apps and games as well as… Read More

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How to Customize Your Mouse in Windows 10


customize-mouse-windows10

You use your cursor to navigate everywhere on your computer, but do you know how much you can customize it? It’s simple to change everything from its speed, look and function, so we’re going to show you how. There’s so much you do in Windows 10 to adjust your mouse, but some of the settings are tucked away. We’ll go through everything in turn so that you can perfect your mouse and have it moving and looking exactly how you want. If you have your own mouse customization tips to share, let us know in the comments below. Basic Mouse...

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How to Do Basic Data Analysis in Excel


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Most of the time when you run statistics, you want to use statistical software (or a free tool like R). These tools are built to do calculations like t-tests, chi-square tests, correlations, and so on. Excel isn’t meant for data analysis. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Unfortunately, Excel’s statistical functions aren’t always intuitive. And they usually give you esoteric results. So instead of using stats functions, we’re going to use the go-to Excel statistics add-in: the Data Analysis Toolpak. The Toolpak, despite its rather unfortunate spelling, includes a wide range of useful statistics functionality. Let’s see what...

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